Sitemap - 2024 - Blithe Spirit Weekly

Multiculturalism. Dinesh D'Souza. Saul Bellow. Bishop Bartolomeo Las Casas. Mario Vargas Llosa. Carlos Fuentes. Claude Levi-Strauss.

Attending mass if you can'take it any more. Advice in how to make it through with a minimum of distractions. And why are we at mass in the first place?

Deconstructionism. Sophistry. Language games. Cognitive atheism. Chaos in the domain of values. Revolution in the text. Telling some people to shut up.

Cultural studies. Textual analysis. Liza Minnelli. Structuralist. Poststructuralist. Postmodernist. Postcolonialist. Inductive method. Theoretical abyss. Aphorism. Aztecs. Clever dudes.

History under fire . . . Tenured Radicals . . . Tom Sawyer trickery . . . Clarity a sign of weakness . . . Socrates knew . . . Obscurity rules . . . Apply grand theory . . . Allan Bloom . . .

Eccentric Irish . . . De Vries doing Faulkner . . . Max Beerbohm doing Arnold Bennett . . . Robert Benchley chasing an ant . . . Another anti-lawyers crack . . . Meaning of "anon" . . .

Read a lot, think a lot, maybe. Harold Bloom on the Western canon. Our favorite pace-setter Shakespeare. Another, T.S. Eliot. Henry V, Sherlock Holmes, Game's afoot.

Blues in the night . . . Sullivan's partner . . . Beware the internet, the man said . . . Empson's Ambiguity . . . Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s mantra, Dr. Cooper's sage advice . . .

Sister William got called a what? Indian giver? Irish history? Ex-slave, ex-master, hope for us all. History be damned. We can't know, y'know . . .

Talking heads. Nine yards? Cement mixer. The Oregon Trail. Dog for dinner. East meets west.

Epictetus and Cleanthes. Henry IV couldn't sleep. When things are not alike. Getting picky. When words fail us. Lost in translation. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on Bill Clinton.

Japanese timing. B-ball dreams. Subjects and predicates. Catch-22. Storm troopers. Jazz Bowman. Joseph Epstein. Edward Shils. Disinterested?

William Butler Yeats. Ezra Pound. James Joyce. Henry James. General Motors. Microsoft. Bill Murray. Seamus Heaney in German. Mickey Owen. Battle of the Bulge. Ingrid Bergman. Jackie Robinson.

Revise revise revise. The Waugh-Mitford exchange. Death's sting. A meditation on same.

Swinburne and bad start to a good day. The cop who got his man. What did Zeno say? Henry James, reporter. Tristram Shandy. Stephen King. God bless Keats!

Whence come our problems, eh? Yvor Winters knows? Sentimental we. It's a crime? Barnabe Googe vs. Sir Philip Sidney. Forget Ralph Waldo. Narcissus.

The lady of our house is writing a book, her second, of the Wingate/Swift family history. Here's a passage to serve as a clue to what's to come, which obviously goes with today, THANKSGIVING DAY!

How Fr. Weinandy decided to write his letter of complaint to Pope Francis

Catholicism lite and confusing, 07/29/2013. Chicago archbishop and U.S. EPA in this “fight” together: Take that, climate change! 07/27/2015

12/5/68: "Cardinal Cody and the mass dance" Chicago Daily News. Coverage of coverage

Byron dying, Malcolm X, Sir Philip Sidney, Crapper's toilet, Alexander Pope, Catullus, Cicero the (very good) lawyer, Horace the recycler -- an unlikely crew

In 2009: Young poets, listen up. Two men at mass. Dying for even-handed coverage. At the breakfast table. Boring biases. Deep thinking.

Horace a cool fellow. Caesar came and saw and what? Coleridge on Gibbon: Humph! For Montaigne: First Latin, then French. Brassiere told top hat what?

When early Lutherans in 1616 got liturgical marching orders and were told to get rid of altars etc. . . .

Attending mass if you can'take it anymore. Advice in how to make it through with a minimum of distractions. And why are we at mass in the first place?

Horace, Swift, Juvenal, satire as Gilbert Highet saw it. Gulliver who? Sophocles and Racine. Socrates dissed. Seneca mocked an emperor, paved way for dissenting Christians.

Yet more literary comments. "Once more unto the breach." Falstaff's friends. Satire for laughs. Gilbert, Highet, Arnold Bennett, Max Beerbohm. Robert Benchley. Horace. Swift. Shakespeare!

More observations of a literary bent. Gilbert & Sullivan. Reading books. Seven Types of Ambiguity. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Meditation. The villain television. Harold Bloom. T.S. Eliot. Waste Land.

Some observations of a literary bent. Deconstruction and finding politics not pleasure. George Eliot. The importance of translation. The Psalms. Defending capitalism. Andrew Carnegie.

Loyola Academy, province exams 1960. Vocational quandaries. Pete Fox, iron lung, wit and wisdom.

Oak Park politics continued. Venerable Village Manager Association paid the price of past unpopular decisions. How went its successor New Leadership Party? Aftermath of defeat of longstanding winners.

January of ‘09, Socialist Alert: Don’t look now, but your Oak Park neighbor may be a socialist. Pass it on. Plus a series of electoral upheavels. Turmoil.

Paul to the Ephesians yesterday reminds us of Satan, him who roams the world seeking the ruin of souls . . .

Teaching the mother tongue at Loyola Academy 1959-60. Teaching how to write. The paperback option. Bleeding on a composition. Hashing it out with students.

Political Animals in Oak Park, 2004-05. Barack a lib? Tax assessor admits too much. Phil Rock an “icon?" The Republican poll-watcher, what's that? And Greens matter too, you know.

Loyola Academy, late 50's: Works of mercy. "Racial justice" to the forefront. Jesuit made to wait. Forays into black neighborhoods. Awful revelation. A worse: the egregious Catholic scandal.

Holy Oak Park! Church-goers in 2004. Evangelical gay-bashing? New Catholic pastor and the swearing-in. Pro-life upheld? Not? If you’re Irish and you’re Catholic, then what?

Teaching career interupted. On to theology. Crash! Near fatal accident, not of the auto kind, but the career kind, leading this young Jesuit to a chapel discussion with God.

Eating out in Oak Park (IL), per 2009 Short History. How like you your bagel? Avoiding a wine war. Rambling folk in the warming room. Young man dead.

Saving Loyola Academy, more of the teaching life as a Jesuit, 1959. Mike English in the driver's seat. He brings his team. It's "for the church."

Oak Park, 2009. Wise mailman. People of Caribou. Unwise mailman. Cyclist ahead, watch out. Plus: Pity the poor shopper.

From the West Side to Wilmette, Loyola Academy and a different kind of student.

Street scenes Oak Park, 2005. Birds die. Frank Lloyd Wright houses? . . .

Teaching at Ignatius 1957-58 school year. Learning while you work, Mal's quick kick, quick slap to lippy kid, cherry bomb in the library, "Bud Bowman," sophomore reads a book . . .

St. Ignatius High teaching in the '50s, colorful, historical, in which the writer calls on ancestors. Seeing no evil in some matters . . .

Being a Jesuit in the '50s -- teaching at St. Ignatius on the West Side of Chicago . . .

Irony of dockworkers strike

Israel Must Destroy Iran's Nuclear Program with or without US

J.D. Vance makes a hash out of Gomer Pyle, err Tim Walz

Oak Park the beautiful in 2005 -- squirrels and sleepers, panhandlers, encounter in Osco lot . . .

Priest a no-show, worshiper makes best of it, meditating away

Fantasy politics: Aborting abortion in 2025 as predicted in the 2005 best-seller "Short History of Oak Park . . . "

Conversation, dated 2007, here relayed to preserve it from disappearance into void where old conversations go . . .

When the prayer to Michael the Archangel got a priest in trouble.

Hope sprang yesterday in late October 15 years ago -- an oldie but goodie from the files of Blithe Spirit the blog . . .

Guilty as charged... Breathes there an Oak Parker with soul so dead, who never to himself has said, “I love diversity”?

When growth perked up: Life on the east end...

The Mud Hole, Aunt Enid and my dying grandmother, Harry Truman, FDR, Stevenson Playground, and the demolition of buildings for the sake of progress . . .

Cardinal C. of Chicago makes news this week. Prayed for good things at Democrat convention, was careful to fit in and not upset his audience . . .

Church is "the house of prayer" from which "preaching may be left out" but never "the house of preaching" from which "prayer may be left out" . . .

How the 1960s reformers treated the liturgy like mechanics putting car parts together, says Peter Kwasniewski

Cardinal C., chief shepherd of RC's in Cook and Lake (IL) counties, makes a good point this week . . .

75 years ago, the worshiper began his Jesuit life, described in part in these opening paragraphs . . .

Mind wanders during mass? You need something to keep you on track? Have you tried Psalms?

At mass, crying rooms for chatters? The worshiper reported and commented decades ago.

What the worshiper thought, saw and heard 20-some years ago at mass in the church of his choice, Roman Catholic as it happens . . .

Halfway through the last year of the 20th century the worshiper mused about what happened to the mass in the previous 30 years and put it in writing . . .

In his 1977 autobiography, Cardinal Ratzinger, future Pope Benedict XVI, bemoaned the mass of Paul VI, blaming it for the "ecclesial crisis" of post-Vatican 2 years

Chicago’s Cardinal Cupich urges empathy

Why Catholics flock to old-style masses. A 1993 account in Chi Trib, Part Two . . .

Why Catholics flock to old-style masses. A 1993 account in Chi Trib about what drew them to it in the face of church opposition.

When Catholics vote. Cardinal Cupich has an issue with certain unidentified campaigners.

The Oak Park Oak Leaves ran an eloquent letter from a well known villager on l’affaire Buchanan . . .

Standing, kneeling for Communion, take your pick. On tongue or in hand. Reverence, anyone? Glad-handing usher, what would Jesus do? What Benedict said . . .

Cardinal Cupich gets a fellow thinking with his newspaper announcement of Eucharist Revival doings, including a special June 30 Mass at Holy Name Cathedral . . .

Asked what sparked my interest in downloading Michael P Foley's paper, "The Whence and Whither of the Kiss of Peace in the Roman Rite" . . .

Prayer to God asking for the priest so there can be mass . . .

Let us now have a peak at the mass of today with attention to its Scripture readings . . .

It's April 25, St. Mark’s Day, Alleluia.

How many times did Catholic leaders have nothing to say when Sun-Times asked about the abuser priest with a long history of ministry . . .

SAINTS JOHN AND PAUL (362 A.D.) Martyrs and what they can tell us about going along to getting along . . .

Liturgical language that works. The Case for Latin. What Catholics pray for during Mass: Should they watch their language?

Do Romans (Catholics) believe in the Real Presence or don’t they? That is the question . . .

Battle is o’er, hell’s armies flee, sang British Catholics in the ’30s and ’40s

God's in the tabernacle, all's right with the world -- If you want it to be

Adam in the underworld on the day we call Holy Saturday -- a tale of unremitting sorrow attuned to a great awakening . . .

The Good Friday non-Mass brings us down, down to the very depths of God knows what, to where down looks up to us . . .

Holy Thursday, Last Supper, final days of the honest-to-God savior of the world

Another word to the wise from the Latin Mass blog. The Wednesday before betrayal.

TUESDAY OF HOLY WEEK traditionally speaking . . .

Man at Mass, adventures in the pew

Keep those confessionals humming, if you please, before and during mass if necessary, so that all can be absolved and go to communion . . .

Let the people read at mass. Volunteers, step up, the lectern is yours, your fellow Catholics await you . . .

Receiving holy communion at mass. It’s special. Everybody does it. Almost everybody.

Upcoming primary has an attention-grabber for city of Chicago voters, a binding referendum, meaning we the people make something an ordinance, in this case a soak-the-rich taxation increase . . .

The great Chicago-area slot machine wars of the late 1940s pitted slot owners against various local law-enforcement agencies and those agencies against each other . . .

Pope as Peronist sends trial balloons, plays media like violin, helped in all of it by his protege from Argentina, the new head dogma protector, serving also as voluble front man . . .