It isn’t as if it is entirely news to me… but a recent round of being edited for publication has really rubbed in how attached I am to the sound of my own ‘voice’. I’ve been working with Philip Endean, SJ, editor of The Way, to get an article ready for the latest issue and …
Category Archives: Thoughts
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) is a strange and nasty and underestimated illness. I’ve been suffering with it for the last five years or so. The US Centre for Disease Control has just produced a detailed web site on the subject. What is CFS? Doesn’t everybody get tired out? The CDC says this: As the name …
Presidents in Their Own Words
Chirag Mehta has taken the written words of US Presidents and plotted a tag cloud of the results. Very interesting. You can watch the rhetoric shift year by year. Thanks to Andrew Vande Moere (who also has links to similar projects).
Beauty?
There’s a striking short video at the Campaign for Real Beauty website. It critiques the ideal and manipulation of female beauty in advertising while also managing to be an advertisement for Dove beauty products that manipulates images of female beauty. But it’s worth a look–do you feel enlightened or hoodwinked? Thanks to Brandon
‘Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching’
That’s the title the London Review of Books gives Terry Eagleton’s savaging of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. It’s a guilty pleasure to read something as well-written (pleasure) and scathing (there’s the guilt). He begins: Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and …
Sweetgrass and Grace
Sweetgrass is used by certain Native American tribes as a kind of incense. Dried and braided, lit and snuffed, it smoulders with a sweet smoke that is used in ‘smudging’, blessing a person and making a space for prayer. I had the good fortune to worship on the reservation several times when I was in …
Darwin Online
Thanks to the University of Cambridge the complete works of Charles Darwin are now available online and very popular, amassing 150,000 hits in 11 days. You can see facsimiles of his Beagle notebooks. It makes me very happy to see how bad his handwriting was… The Independent today printed some extracts and got Richard Dawkins …
Time Weighing Heavy on Your Hands?
Simpsons’ fan? You could spend many a happy hour … er moment … with the map of Springfield
Roses and Fragility
There was a spell in my prayer a good while ago when Jesus gave me roses. I was drawn over and over to an image of a red rose and my spiritual director helped me stay with that simple experience and trust it. She suggested I let Jesus buy me one. So I did. And …
Oops
I’ve been trying out a download tracking plugin. Most of the time it has worked fine but intermittently there have been scrambled downloads. My apologies to anyone served gibberish. I’ve reverted to plain untracked downloads for now.