Sitemap - 2022 - Blithe Spirit Weekly

How to teach kids of all colors. Require memorization, reading, writing, says this superannuated English teacher (leaving 3rd "r" for others to prescribe). Also, Annie, get your gun . . .

OPRF high school has to go, some said, and they had a plan! "Wannabe reformers" castigated. Dog dumplings for dinner. Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce. Masonic ritual from old, never-was Egypt . . .

High school matters matter . . . How to spend a quarter-million . . . PONTOON at the barricades, others "In denial" . . . guerilla warfare . . .

Old scores forgotten in a German kitchen, Taking the fun out of reading, Root plus canal = what? Barney Ross . . .

His daughter for a horse, Greek philosopher's fascination with pseudo-Egyptian origins, dynamite teachers who abide no nonsense, Mailer's white Negro?

1996, Black matters matter, school matters, what to do, what to do? Praising and complaining.

School principal talks nonsense, Mrs. V. talks bureaucrat-ese, the Evanston High experience, the Hemingway lesson, the Lefkowitz book, Afrocentrism . . .

5/1/1996 Blithe Spirit revisited: Churchgoing, the handshake of peace, the Christian myth, Mary Lefkowitz taking on the Afrocentrists in advance of critical race theorizing . . .

BLITHE SPIRIT 5/1/96: Murals at the pueblo . . . A poem about poems . . . Telling it to the Journal . . . Mrs. V. and her two-cents worth . . . She's entitled . . .

In the year 2000 of the era of fewer priests and lower Mass attendance -- roping off back pews, mystery dissolving, belief on the chopping block . . .

Church Reporter: Sinful sermons

Church Reporter: In search of the perfect Mass

Church Reporter: Tips for writing better sermons

Join my chat

Church Reporter: “Sermons are too long, too personal, disorganized”

How to write: old style . . .

Oak Park IL progressives at it in the '90s, fussing about with beaucoup de newspaper support, 4/24/96

BLITHE SPIRIT Oak Park IL April 17, 1996 -- Cool it, girl . . . Puffing up the district . . . Homer dissed by Horace . . . Et tu, Sun-Times . . .

BLITHE SPIRIT Weekly Commentary Jim Bowman, Editor & Publisher Oak Park IL April 10, 1996, PART TWO!

BLITHE SPIRIT Weekly Commentary Jim Bowman, Editor & Publisher Oak Park IL April 10, 1996

Dominus Vobiscum: Jansenists, strictest of the strict, promoted Vatican 2-style changes in liturgy . . .

BLITHE SPIRIT 4/3/96, Color-blind, religion-blind, politics-blind . . .

It was a dark and stormy day in Oak Park, Illinois . . .

BLITHE SPIRIT March 27, 1996, affirmative-action surgeon for your next brain operation?

Jesuits in training, 1952-54: Debating Joe McCarthy, walks in the woods, getting along . . .

Dominus Vobiscum: The man who could not pray discussed prayer and meditation in an online essay a few years back.

BLITHE SPIRIT A Weekly Commentary, March 20, 1996 -- the schools, the schools, can't live with 'em . . . without 'em . . .

Dominus Vobiscum: 19th Century Rediscoveries: The Mass as Experience Not a lecture, not even a prayer meeting.

The bishop who lost his way: Tuscany in the 1780s

Free speech in the 90s, More Honky Talk . . .

Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground

Free speech in the 'nineties, in Oak Park IL

The Man Who Could Not Pray, a believer and his journeys in the way of prayer

Chicago's Uptown neighborhood 40 years ago

Youth: a tale of the '40s told by an 11-year-old, signifying nothing . . .

PUTTING IT IN WRITING, Play-acting, "George Washington Slept Here"

DEAN’S LIST -- Taking secular learning seriously and wrestling with language: The literary life.

Squamous cell news . . .

BOOK TIME! . . . The books they [were] a comin’ . …

Latin, Greek and all that as a Jesuit trainee 70 years ago . . .

“Sermons are too long, too personal, disorganized”

Immersed in Jesuit ways 70 years ago

Parish hears it from pastor via bulletin about too much talking in church . . .

Thick-lensed glasses, pudgy with a look of softness, idiosyncratic, hard taskmaster -- Jesuits in training 70 years ago

Days of yore -- Being a boy in Oak Park decades past . . .

Read a book or watch TV -- Vonnegut, Harold Bloom, T.S. Eliot

Triple play: From Gilbert to Sullivan to the digital monster to Seven Kinds of Ambiguity

Sunday in the park with Jim: Of dogs and walkers . . .

From God to books: Next step in Jesuit training 70 years ago.

Are You Open to Old Ideas?A randomly gathered consideration of the tried and true . . .

A look at Gissing, Ruskin, Stephenson, and finally, Richardson

I took notes over the years, and here's one about when God spoke to a friend . . .

ALLELUIA TIME for Jesuit novices 72 years ago. Christ is risen . . .

WHIPS AND NAILS Jesuit novices of 72 years ago got to Palm Sunday in their Long Retreat meditations and then came a second break day, 17 or 18 days into the retreat. Now the Third Week . . .

Short history of a worshiper's dealing with the post-Vatican 2 mass, in which complaints abounded

CHANGING LIVES We Jesuit novices of 72 years ago were gearing up for a life-changing decision . . .

End of first "week" with sin, death, hell, and a little bit of heaven tossed in at the end.

Jesuits in training 72 years ago, the long retreat

Short homily for the day

9-10-22 Morning Meditation

9-9-22 Morning meditation etc.

Sermon to be remembered amidst the hurly-burly

Jesuit novices 72 years ago: scrubbing pots, washing dishes, a month in Lake County

The house we lived in. A further look at being a Jesuit novice 72 years ago.

Canon lawyer to Houston, where the bishop resides: Please reconsider your excommunication of Father Treco

The Jesuit Novice of 72 years ago: a personal account

On joining the Jesuits 72 years ago

Professing the faith in time of Pius X vs. doing so in time of Paul VI and his successors

Memorabilia, commentary

My friend Jake reads the newspapers, tales of the ’90s . . .

From the long-ago box: a Courage conference at Chicago's Mundelein seminary in 2010. A man recounts his "spiritual journey" from "practicing homosexual to practicing Catholic". . .

Sifting through the evidence in the Fr. Treco excommunication case: What did he say and why did his bishop call it heretical/schismatical?

Fr. Treco in the dock, Bishop Lopes declares his verdict . . .

The excommunicated preacher, weeks before the bell tolled for his time as pastor . . .

The day the hammer fell on the parish of the priest who preached a "schismatic" sermon in a Minneapolis suburb . . .

Preacher of Nov 25 homily, not yet excommunicated, meets his accusers

Winding up the heretical and/or schismatic sermon in Minnesota that got the attention of the bishop in Houston . . .

Yet more of the fiery sermon and the bishop who excommunicated its preacher.

Excommunication of a priest on basis of 37-minute sermon, Part 2 — Looking for the guilty parts . . .

Listen, if you will, to the 37-minute sermon that cost the preacher his pulpit and his life as a priest . . .