Legal Commentary

The World Is Not All About Me?

Posted on March 13, 2011
An acquaintence e-mailed to ask me whether recent posts about former lovers indicated that I'm "fixin' to get ready to die." The correspondent's a Texan, in case you didn't understand that fact from her use of the phrase "fixin' to." She wondered whether I was trying to put my spiritual...

On Ash Wednesday, I Will Not Fear

Posted on March 09, 2011
Thomas Merton's Prayer: MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will...

And My Heart Melts Like The Snow

Posted on March 05, 2011
The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost. ---G.K. Chesterton She was a magnificent physical specimen. Five feet nine inches tall. With three-inch heels, standing tall, she looked me straight in the eye. Muscular, yet not thick. Jet black hair and eyes set off against...

A Road Not Taken

Posted on February 23, 2011
Ten years ago, an old girlfriend tracked me down through a legal services directory. "Old girlfriend" is a bit of a deflection. She was a red-headed Hispanic spitfire and the love of my life prior to the love of my life. We ended badly, as intense love affairs sometimes do...

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Could I Hold You?

Posted on February 21, 2011
Despair --Anthony Hecht Sadness. The moist gray shawls of drifting sea-fog, Salting scrub pine, drenching the cranberry bogs, Erasing all but foreground, making a ghost Of anyone who walks softly away; And the faint, penitent psalmody of the ocean. Gloom...

The Final Form Of Love

Posted on February 13, 2011
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime, Therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; Therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone...

It's Not Hard To Fall, When You Float Like A Cannonball

Posted on January 30, 2011
From a four year-old sermon by my former parish priest, Father Timothy Heines: The statement, ?Yes, I forgive you? can be either a genuine desire to restore a wounded relationship, or it can be used as a power play. We see this a great deal in sick romantic relationships when...

Taking Me Back

Posted on January 27, 2011
Yeah, I know: the dusters, the freakin' hair! This live performance is so tight that it might as well have been one man playing all the instruments. And the lead guitarist's solo that commences at the 3:54 mark and carries the song to its flawless conclusion contains not one false...

There Will Come A Day

Posted on January 25, 2011
Put Out My Eyes --Rainer Maria Rilke Put out my eyes, and I can see you still, Slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet; And without any feet can go to you; And tongueless, I can conjure you at will. Break off my arms, I shall take...

Life Lived Humbly, In The Round

Posted on January 18, 2011
"Most men seem to live in a space of two dimensions," complained Theodore Roosevelt, who tended to live his life "in the round." The hash that the main stream and "heterodox" media, and our political class, have made of "the lessons of Tuscon" give proof to his complaint...

My Father's Eyes

Posted on November 25, 2010
My father died 35 years ago this month, a little less than two weeks before his fifty-first birthday. 65 years ago, in the spring of 1945, he was a hospital corpsman in the US Seventh Fleet, assigned to Military Governance Group G-6 of the U.S. Navy, which was part of...

To Have Lived Light

Posted on November 09, 2010
The one genuinely dangerous and immoral way of drinking wine is to drink it as a medicine. And for this reason, If a man drinks wine in order to obtain pleasure, he is trying to obtain something exceptional, something he does not expect every hour of the day, something which,...

All Rivers Run Full To The Sea

Posted on November 08, 2010
"Nothing is random, nor will anything ever be, whether a long string of perfectly blue days that begin and end in golden dimness, the most seemingly chaotic political acts, the rise of a great city, the crystalline structure of a gem that has never seen the light, the distributions of...

Yours, Mine and Ours

Posted on November 02, 2010
Never one to tread where the timid dare not dip their toes, I usually shy away from controversial topics. I find that the prospect of offending some hothouse flower's refined sensibilities so horrifying that I almost always opt to take a middle course, steering between the rocky shoals of "hot...

Under Cover Believer

Posted on October 28, 2010
In a 1995 interview with Viktor Frankl, published in the journal First Things a couple of years before Frankl's death, former National Review Literary Editor Matthew Scully asked Frankl about his own spiritual convictions. In his many books and other works (including Man's Search For Meaning, Man's Search for Ultimate...

Counting The Beats

Posted on October 12, 2010
Counting the Beats ---Robert Graves You, love, and I, (He whispers) you and I, And if no more than only you and I What care you or I? Counting the beats, Counting the slow heart beats, The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats, Wakeful they lie...

The Pull of the Moon

Posted on October 12, 2010
Moon dips his finger Into Ocean's frigid deep, Sends waves surging home. Alison Krauss and Union Station - If I Didn't Know Any Better

And The Really Weird Thing: They Were All First Cousins

Posted on September 30, 2010
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) - Defense attorney Leslie Ballin called it the "jury pool from hell." The group of prospective jurors was summoned to listen to a case of Tennessee trailer park violence. Right after jury selection began last week, one man got up and left, announcing, "I'm on morphine and...

Actualization

Posted on September 29, 2010
We interrupt our petty sniping and mock-angry blasts at various targets of opportunity to bring you this brief public service announcement: "Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another...

The Moon Reflects The Light Everlasting

Posted on September 28, 2010
HARVEST MOON: 1916 Moon, slow rising, over the trembling sea-rim, Moon of the lifted tides and their folded burden, Look, look down. And gather the blinded oceans. Moon of compassion. Come, white Silence, over the one sea pathway: Pour with hallowing hands on the surge and outcry, Silver flame; and...

A Thought Transfixed Me

Posted on September 21, 2010
"This" could refer to any of the many tragedies we suffer in the course of an existence lived here on Earth, although not meant for here on Earth. On her "old" blog (before she hit the big time), E.M. Zanotti reflected on certain self-evident truths "in times like this": Often,...

The Law Is A Jealous Mistress

Posted on September 14, 2010
One thing about having a professional career that's not a complete bust: the profession is a time vampire. Doctors, lawyers and accountants all understand how what they do for a living sucks minutes out of their lives that they can never recover. You'd better be doing it well and you'd...

Most Wounds Are Self-Inflicted

Posted on September 12, 2010
Sometimes the sky's too bright, Or has too many clouds or birds, And far away's too sharp a sun To nourish thinking of him. Why is my hand too blunt To cut in front of me My horrid images for me, Of over-fruitful smiles, The weightless touching of the lip...

A House Built Upon A Rock; A People Built Upon A House, One By One

Posted on September 10, 2010
I was in the Bodleian Library one night, doing a translation from the West Saxon Gospels for my Old English class. The assigned passage was from the Sermon on the Mount. It came hard, every line sending me back to the grammar or the glossary, until the last six verses,...

The Will To Happiness

Posted on September 07, 2010
G.K. Chesterton's famous response to the question "What's wrong with the world?" of "I am" might lead one to conclude that he was a pessimist. Nothing could be further from the truth. Chesterton was great believer in both mankind and in the joy of living life among men and women...

A Signpost For Free Travellers

Posted on September 06, 2010
I once read an article by an astronomer who believed that scientific (or, perhaps, mathematical) determinism is the only valid means of explaining everything and who sneered at believers in a spiritual existence outside the material world. I recall being both annoyed and exasperated by the clueless condescension of those...

The Treadmill To Nowhere

Posted on September 06, 2010
The following is an excerpt from a homily given for Christmas mass four years ago by Father Timothy Heines(which I saved) when he was a parish priest. Prior to his bishop deciding to make him an academic, he saved my soul (or, more accurately, gave me a fighting chance of...

All I Want To Know Right Now Is What Do You Believe In

Posted on September 05, 2010
I hate to tell you this, but I?m very, very happy And I know that?s not what you?d expect from me at all I?m not the kind to smile and bow out gracefully I always wanted to take it to the wall But I found somebody with a heart as...

The Horror of the "Frankly Religious Element"

Posted on September 04, 2010
Some essays not only don't decrease in power as they age, they increase. Frank Furedi, a self-described "secular humanist who is instinctively uncomfortable with zealot-like moralism," had a concern that he expressed in an essay I saved from several years ago and occasionally re-read, a concern that was a bit...

Bridges

Posted on August 24, 2010
I was tempted to post my thoughts about how disgusting both sides of the great debate over the mosque/community center near/two blocks from Ground Zero have been, but, then, where would one begin and where would one stop? The intellectual dishonesty on both sides of the issue has been astounding...

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