Author: John W Gillis

Ruminations

More Hope, Less Stress: Better Living

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Today was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. I’ve been fittingly pensive and reflective lately, almost to the point of feeling haunted. This is a time of year that used to fill me with energy, but these days seems more likely to leave me thinking about lost opportunities. I became starkly aware last night, while driving downtown to teach my CCD class, of how short a fuse I was on, and how much stress I was feeling. That’s not a good thing for me, and I quickly had to coax myself back off the ledge. Thinking about how to go about lowering my stress ...

Bible Study Tools

Pradis Bites the Dust

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Not exactly a big surprise coming out of Zondervan today, as they have announced plans to drop their Pradis Bible Study software. Not a big loss to the industry either, I dare say, as Pradis was pretty narrowly focused on Zondervan resources (most of which were exclusively available in Pradis format), and always struck me as more geared toward promoting the interests of Zondervan than that of the Christian community. That’s OK – no law against that – but don’t look for any tears to be shed in this poor corner of the world. Frankly...

Politics & Economics

Slander as Political Fashion

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Boy, am I growing weary of the political environment. What George W Bush did for for international relations with his “with us or against us” rhetoric, Barack Obama is doing to the political climate within the country with his treatment of political dissent. Of course, nations actually do operate in an environment of mutual belligerence, which is forever flaring up as actual warfare in some corner or another, whereas nations are supposed to operate, internally, with a civility stemming from civitas, but why split hairs? Perhaps it’s unfair to blame Obama...

Church

The Kennedy Funeral & the Faces of Scandal

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There’s sure been a lot of chatter over the past week or so about the Ted Kennedy funeral, and Cardinal O’Malley’s participation in it. This is hardly surprising, given how divisive a character Kennedy was. Cardinal O’Malley, in what strikes me as a surprising move in several respects, has gone public with an explanation of his decision, in response to extensive criticism that undoubtedly ranged in impetus from befuddlement to anger. I appreciate his attempt at explaining himself – as I appreciate the difficulty of this whole problematic affair – but the...

Signs of the Times

It’s for the Sake of the Children, of Course…

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Chalk up another victory for the asininity department… Someone much smarter than all the rest of us, as we all know, determined some time back that it was possible for babies to be injured in car accidents. This, of course, was simply unacceptable, and called for a solution. As fate would have it, someone much smarter than the rest of us was actually selling just such a solution – the baby car seat. After many hours of posturing, prevarication, and, quite possibly, plunder, “important safety laws” were passed – which have increasingly constricted people’...

Ruminations

Technology In the Shadow of Nuclear Fission

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Just prior to the arrival of our two young guests from the Chernobyl area in June, I was reading Pedro Arrupe’s memoir of the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945. The nuclear disaster at Chernobyl has certain obvious things in common with the devastation of Hiroshima, even if the purpose of the human endeavor manifested in each case remain radically different. Both the accidental explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor and the intentional exploding of the first atomic bomb in the skies over Hiroshima were products of the modern technological inno...

Critical Issues

Body/Soul Dualism, the Commodification of Man, and the Contradiction of Death

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As a rule, I like Jeff Jacoby’s columns, and even agree with him as often as not, but every now and then he comes out with something I find downright unconscionable. His July 5th Boston Globe op-ed promoting the marketing of human organs is an unfortunate example of the latter. With the recent liver transplant of celebrity tech guru Steve Jobs having again roiled the waters of the debate over the “fairness” of our current organ donation system, Jacoby has added his voice to the rising tide of liberal, utilitarian opinion promising free market “solutions”...

Books

The Ordering of Knowledge

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One of the benefits of my recent living space changes has been the opportunity to revisit my library cataloguing scheme. For years, I used Dewey Decimal Classification coding to organize my books. The Dewey system has the advantage of having had the majority of books already catalogued within the system – and most of the newer volumes include a Dewey number assignment within the Library of Congress cataloguing information after the title page, meaning that not only would I not need to go through the process of categorizing and assigning lookup numbers to...

Church

Catholic Education & Sotomayor

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I don’t agree very often with what Michael Paulson says over at the Articles of Faith blog at Boston.com – he doesn’t even ask the right questions, as a rule – but I had to concur with something he said the other day about President Obama’s address introducing Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee for Justice Souter’s Supreme Court seat: he said he was struck by “the language he used to describe the role of Catholic schools in offering children a path out of poverty.” Here is the quote from the President’s remarks: “But Sonia’s mom bought the only set of ...

Critical Issues

Tiller and the Reaper, Part 2

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Still thinking tonight about the assassination of George Tiller; a few things have surprised me. I lead a busy life, and don’t spend a lot of time perusing news sources and other media outlets, so my sample size is rather small, but it seems from my limited perspective that the press coverage has been strangely muted. There is no serious debating that the journalistic class almost purely represents the cultural elite that embraces abortion, and I really thought they would be harping all over this. I suppose it’s early yet, and it could still become a cau...