Wendell Berry, Traveling at Home, with wood engravings by John DePol, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989. Wendell Berry’s Traveling at Home is a wonderful book to read in these times when we have been kept close to home and have walked our neighborhood streets more than we normally would. Berry’s title is oxymoronic in its way, but I think many may understand it better than we would have a couple of years ago. Rather than traveling to see the…
The vandalism and destruction of the Eden Park Capitoline Wolf on June 17th is both disheartening and troubling. The Capitoline Wolf is not simply a monument, a statue to a war hero, president or otherwise famous person. The original Capitoline Wolf statue is a work of art that resides in the Capitoline Museum in Rome. Cincinnati’s faithful replica of this statue, publicly displayed in Eden Park, is also a work of art, and albeit a copy, a meaningful copy of…
Who does not love an evening walk in the late spring and early summer? The birds in the trees, a cool breeze against one’s face. If you are fortunate to be with a loved one, you may be talking over your day or even your dreams, perhaps enjoying the silence together. Or maybe you are a solitary walker lost in the reveries of the night. Many of us in this time of pandemic have rediscovered the invigorating joys of an…
My third day ever of teaching was on September 11, 2001. I was teaching Latin to fifth through eighth grade students at Plato Academy in Niles, Illinois just outside Chicago. I only taught twice a week; my first day had been the previous Tuesday, the day after Labor Day. Given my lack of teaching experience, it was going to be a tough day no matter what else happened. But as we know, all hell broke loose that day. None of…
Easter 2020 I’m not certain the first time I heard a John Prine song, but I’m pretty sure the first time I listened to a John Prine song was in my father’s car in the parking lot of an evangelical church in the Poconos. My father started attending there after my mother died. I wasn’t Christian at the time, but I was curious and wanted to be supportive. I don’t recall too much about the service aside from taking communion,…
On a good day Thucydides is an inscrutable read in the Greek. Despite this, or maybe because of it, the Histories of Thucydides are monument of ancient historiography. Many consider Thucydides (ca.460-395 B.C.E.) the first political scientist because of his perceptive analysis of political behavior and its motivations. Although Thucydides was deeply indebted to Homer and Herodotus, especially the latter, his eight books on the Peloponnesian War represent the West’s best first efforts at writing history from a scientific, objective…
I had the good fortune of hearing Professor George E. Tinker, Native American theologian, speak on the matter of violence and war in the United States. Though it has been decades since I heard him, I remember vividly his analysis of our relationship with violence as an addiction. He said that getting over an addiction takes as long as the addiction existed. That idea has always stuck with me, and I believe it is a useful paradigm for us when…
Birthday of Frederick Douglass English enjoys an abundance of language for many things, largely the result of our inheritance from both Latin and Germanic languages. Thus, we can speak of both justice and righteousness. Sometimes proponents exhort us to use words from one source or the other – see for example George Orwell “Politics and the English Language” (1946). I prefer to relish the diversity and depth of English. What a joy that we can choose between melancholy and ennui…
This last Saturday Christians celebrated the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle. Like many people over the centuries, perhaps Caravaggio most compellingly, I find it a fascinating thing to observe – Saul the persecutor of Christians becoming Paul the Apostle to the Gentiles. It raises an interesting question for me: Who am I? And equally: Who are you? Identity Sometimes when we ask, we’re just looking for a name – Paul, Khalil, Acacia, Tia. Very often, we…
MLK Day 2020 Why liberation? Because unless we are free, we cannot flourish and cannot come to the fullness of our virtues. Without freedom our virtues are not fully our own; they are contingent and can be controlled by another. An act of generosity can be undone; an act of love can be outlawed or prevented; justice can be thwarted; wisdom can be limited. Freedom is the first virtue upon which the others, acts of our free will, depend. Liberation…