• St. Fiacre of the Oregano (and Parsley and Nasturtiums)

    Auto-generated description: A stone statue of a bearded monk holding a rabbit and shovel stands amidst lush greenery and plants.
  • I’m sorry; what?


  • Easter in Brooklyn

    St. John’s Park Slope: wonderful! Alleluia! The Lord is risen!


  • Beauty now begins the final movement

    Malcolm Guite:

    The Anointing at Bethany

    Come close with Mary, Martha, Lazarus  
    So close the candles flare with their soft breath  
    And kindle heart and soul to flame within us  
    Lit by these mysteries of life and death.  
    For beauty now begins the final movement  
    In quietness and intimate encounter  
    The alabaster jar of precious ointment  
    Is broken open for the world’s true lover,  
    
    The whole room richly fills to feast the senses
    With all the yearning such a fragrance brings, 
    The heart is mourning but the spirit dances, 
    Here at the very centre of all things, 
    Here at the meeting place of love and loss 
    We all foresee, and see beyond the cross.
    

  • Tariff Talk

    To the extent they can reasonably figure it out*, I’d like to see sellers include a separate line item on invoices that shows the portion of the price attributable to tariffs. Knowledge is powerful.

    *They can acknowledge it’s an estimate.


  • These Days, “Conservatives” Aren’t.
    Jonah Goldberg:

    The market system is man-made, just as gardens are. But it is not the product of any individual will. It is a crowdsourced network of institutions, constructed over generations of trial and error, learned best practices, and the accumulation of common law and legislation alike. …

    It is only when someone tears down or batters these Chestertonian fences all around us that we discover those fences are there for a reason. … That’s where we are now. One man is singlehandedly taking a plow to the garden because he is confident that he knows better than, almost literally, everyone. And his defenders have few, if any, serious arguments in his defense beyond “trust him.”


  • Moonshot

    nighttime image of the moon through silhouetted tree branches

  • Ya Think So, Dave?


  • RIP, the Great Clem Burke

    He was the driving drummer who powered Blondie in the ’70s. Just appreciate his work here:


  • Fascism and the Rule of Law Can Run on Parallel Tracks

    As Fraenkel explained it, a lawless dictatorship does not arise simply by snuffing out the ordinary legal system of rules, procedures, and precedents. To the contrary, that system—which he called the “normative state”—remains in place while dictatorial power spreads across society. What happens, Fraenkel explained, is insidious. Rather than completely eliminating the normative state, the Nazi regime slowly created a parallel zone in which “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” reigned freely.
    . . .

    The trick was to find a way to keep the law going for Christian Germans who supported or at least tolerated the Nazis, while ruthlessly executing the führer’s directives against the state’s enemies, real and perceived. Capitalism could jog nicely alongside the brutal suppression of democracy, and even genocide.

    America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State


  • Willow Sculpture

    Laura Ellen Bacon

    A sinuous abstract sculpture fashioned from light-brown willow reeds woven together. A sinuous abstract sculpture fashioned from light-brown willow reeds woven together.
  • Anti-Trump Rally, Dallas - #HandsOff

    I made a sign that said, “Uphold the Rule of Law.”

    Auto-generated description: A large crowd is gathered for a protest, holding various signs and banners in an outdoor setting. Auto-generated description: A person is wearing a green sweater with a red button reading VOTING IS SACRED and holding a patterned fabric, with others in the background. Auto-generated description: A crowd of people is gathered outdoors, holding various signs and banners, indicating a protest or demonstration. Auto-generated description: A group of people are gathered in a protest, holding various signs, including one that humorously critiques Trump's cabinet. Auto-generated description: A group of people is gathered at a protest, holding various signs with messages. Auto-generated description: A group of people are holding protest signs on a city street. Auto-generated description: A crowd of people is holding up various protest signs, including one that says Cancel Elon not Elmo. Auto-generated description: A colorful umbrella is held by people observing a group of protesters with signs gathered near a building. Auto-generated description: A large group of people are gathered outdoors holding various signs and banners, possibly participating in a protest or rally. Auto-generated description: A group of people at a protest hold signs, including one that reads WORST SEQUEL EVER. Auto-generated description: A group of protestors are holding signs with political messages and American flags in a park. Auto-generated description: A crowd of people gathers outside with various signs, some of which express political messages, near Reunion Tower in Dallas, Texas, USA. Auto-generated description: People are gathered at a protest, with one person holding a sign that reads TRUMP & MUSK HANDS OFF followed by various societal elements like the U.S. Constitution and healthcare. Auto-generated description: People are gathered holding signs in a protest, with messages about stopping a coup and protecting various social services. Auto-generated description: Protesters hold up signs advocating for bodily autonomy and reproductive rights at a public demonstration. Auto-generated description: A crowd is gathered with protest signs in front of Dallas historic 'Old Red' Courthouse.
  • THFC’s Vision Thing

    Ange must go (regrettably). But, for pity’s sake, Levy, hire a manager still committed to attacking! (Preferably one who also improves a midfield that neither serves the forward players nor protects the defense, which has been Spurs' undoing this year, imo.) @frjon, thoughts? ⚽️


  • Speak Up

    Some view Cory Booker as a guy who pulls stunts, but I urge you to watch the end of his 25-hour Senate oration and be inspired and activated to resist the harm Trump & Co. are inflicting: Good trouble.

    One way to make a point is to join a “Hands Off” protest in your area this weekend.


  • Pecans Leaf Later

    budding pecan branches against a gray sky
  • Spring, springing

    blue sky and spring-green leaves just appearing on a treea redbud tree in blooma bed of yellow daffodils in bloom


  • Still, Possibly Not as Wrinkled as the Mature Auden

    Fragment of a human face aged over one million years discovered


  • ¿Verdad?

    No sé.


  • The Vocabulary of the Heart

    Six years after my dad died, three after my mom died, and this year, when my first two grandchildren are born, this resonates. Frederick Buechner, The Eyes of the Heart.

    Each time members of the tribe die, the self we were with them dies too, which is to say that the kind of words we spoke only to them, were only to them, and the kind they spoke only to us are spoken no longer. But if outwardly our language is thus impoverished, inwardly it is enriched because when members of the tribe die, the words they were are added to the vocabulary of the heart, where we have more than just ears for hearing them. And each time a member of the tribe is born, a new word comes into being, and nothing is ever the same again.


  • All Lined Up

    Tomatoes started from seed in the garage in January (under lights) went into the beds today. Fertilized, planted, staked, mulched, and watered. Twenty-one plants, six varieties. The game’s afoot, Watson!

    Tomato seedlings just planted and staked in raised beds in galvanized troughs.
  • Julie Davis (Austin, TX)
    Oil painting of a  cedar-covered limestone hillside in the Texas Hill Country
    Study - Hill Country in Summer


  • Ancient Times

    Frederick Buechner remembers the summer of 1948 from his The Eyes of the Heart: a Memoir of the Lost and Found:

    … he used to give far and away the most enchanted cocktail parties I had ever attended or have ever attended since, where he served endless martinis in frosted silver glasses and where, in the spring, petals from a flowering plum sometimes drifted in through his mullioned windows to lie on the floor like snow. Colleagues from the English department like R. P. Blackmur, Donald Stauffer, and John Berryman came from time to time, together with occasional undergraduates like myself, and there were also friends he had made in the town of Princeton including a handful of beautiful young women, one of whom I fell fathomlessly in love with and on the starlit summer night of my twenty-first birthday on the balcony of the St. Regis roof in New York proposed matrimony to because such was the world in those now almost unimaginable days there seemed no other thinkable way to consummate our relationship. She wore her hair in two short pigtails, wore ballet slippers on her feet, could squirt through a gap in her teeth with remarkable accuracy, and at the same time had the good sense to turn me down. How things would have turned out for both of us if she had decided otherwise I shudder to imagine, but if we had had children they would now be past fifty, and that is shuddersome enough.


  • Grateful

    I planted 200 of these suckers last November, and am so glad to see them coming up. God grew ‘em, not me. But I did participate in the project.

    bright yellow dafdodils Auto-generated description: A garden of vibrant yellow daffodils is blooming, surrounded by patches of soil and bordered by stone tiles.
  • Hang On, There

    WTF? Although non-citizens don’t enjoy full free-speech protections, they are entitled to due process.

    A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, confirmed Khalil’s arrest in a statement Sunday, describing it as being “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.”

    Khalil’s arrest is the first publicly known deportation effort under Trump’s promised crackdown on students who joined protests against the war in Gaza that swept college campuses last spring. The administration has claimed participants forfeited their rights to remain in the country by supporting Hamas. Time.com

    Not letting his wife (an American) or lawyer know where he is being held is especially chilling.


  • Let’s Talk About Sex

    “Anora” – a movie about a sex worker and her client – won a bunch of Oscars this year. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t comment on the movie. But it struck me that both the lead actress and the writer/director made a point to express solidarity with sex workers. What might they have been trying to convey? And what did they convey without trying? As with almost all human endeavors, I suspect there were a bunch of motivations, some of which contradict each other.

    First, they seem to have been holding up the truth that prostitutes are, indeed, real human beings, not types, and therefore are worthy of respect as humans. Excellent. Count me in.

    They may also have been endorsing the idea that prostitution should be freed from old, outworn stigmas that a repressive society traditionally associates with the oldest profession. Maybe they think women and men should be free to provide sex (safely) in exchange for money, especially if the money translates to power that’s traditionally inaccessible to sex workers. This notion views sex as a good or service tradeable for money (aka power), the same as any other commodity.

    Here, we part ways, because this misunderstands the right purpose of sex. My understanding that there even is a right purpose of sex necessarily arises from the notion that God, as the giver of the gift that is sex, attaches an intent to it. I hold that God’s intent for sex is to nurture intimacy between the lovers. Undoubtedly, God has additional intentions, such as the gift of children; but here I’m concerned with intimacy. Also, I quite understand that sex certainly can be used as a means to an end, and that’s a very old story (see, e.g., Lysistrata). But that’s not OK in my book. Also, it can be just plain fun. But, it’s meant to be fun that’s shared, ideally with someone you care about.

    It’s no accident that at its best, sex is something we do naked. Nakedness is a stripping away of pretense as a way to truly see and be seen by the one you love. Opening our bodies to each other is emphatically not intended as a tool to wield power or extract payment. Using sex for those purposes instrumentalizes sex and commodifies one’s self and one’s partner. It’s the antithesis of nurtured intimacy. (For the same reasons, I don’t like “using” as a verb in this context.)

    The “Sex-as-ATM” idea is a manifestation of what Alan Jacobs (@ayjay) calls “Metaphysical Capitalism,” which treats all creation and the entire human condition as elements of a vast market. (See, the discussion of Kant’s view of sex and marriage in this post.)

    What’s particularly poignant about viewing sex in this way is that it subverts the humane and tender motivation to understand prostitutes as human beings deserving of respect. I don’t know that many in the “pro-sex-worker” cohort see it, but the idea that our bodies and our intimacies are tradeable commodities is truly, sadly, deeply inhuman.


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