Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
President Obama at the 2011 Easter Prayer Breakfast
To all the faith leaders and the distinguished guests that are here today, welcome to our second annual -- I’m going to make it annual, why not? (Laughter and applause.) Our second Easter Prayer Breakfast. The Easter Egg Roll, that’s well established. (Laughter.) The Prayer Breakfast we started last year, in part because it gave me a good excuse to bring together people who have been such extraordinary influences in my life and such great friends. And it gives me a chance to meet and make some new friends here in the White House.
I wanted to host this breakfast for a simple reason -– because as busy as we are, as many tasks as pile up, during this season, we are reminded that there’s something about the resurrection -- something about the resurrection of our savior, Jesus Christ, that puts everything else in perspective.
We all live in the hustle and bustle of our work. And everybody in this room has weighty responsibilities, from leading churches and denominations, to helping to administer important government programs, to shaping our culture in various ways. And I admit that my plate has been full as well. (Laughter.) The inbox keeps on accumulating. (Laughter.)
Monday, April 25, 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Monday, March 21, 2011
Plato | Benefactors of One Another
You have again forgotten, my friend, I said, the intention of the legislator, who did not aim at making any one class in the State happy above the rest; the happiness was to be in the whole State, and he held the citizens together by persuasion and necessity, making them benefactors of the State, and therefore benefactors of one another; to this end he created them, not to please themselves, but to be his instruments in binding up the State.
— Plato, The Republic, Book VII
Friday, March 11, 2011
Newt Gingrich's Confession | A Rewrite by Lawrence O'Donnell
This, I think, is the kind of thing the young man in the post called Unlinked is reacting to...
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Unlinked | Will American Millennials Reboot Marriage and Parenting?
This week, the Pew Research Center reported on the attitudes of 18-29 year-old Americans toward parenting and marriage. In a nutshell, the study found that being good parents is more important to a majority of these Americans than having a successful marriage. You can read the report for yourself.
Not in the report is what I thought I caught … whispered between the lines … floating on the wind...
Not in the report is what I thought I caught … whispered between the lines … floating on the wind...
I wrote it down as I heard it, but maybe it was only in my mind….
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
"Do as You Would Be Done By" | One More from Professor Lewis
I have said that we should never get a Christian society unless most of us became Christian individuals. That does not mean, of course, that we can put off doing anything about society until some imaginary date in the far future. It means that we must begin both jobs at once—(1) the job of seeing how ‘Do as you would be done by’ can be applied in detail to modern society, and (2) the job of becoming the sort of people who really would apply it if we saw how.
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco, 2001 edition, p. 88
Friday, March 04, 2011
C.S. Lewis | ...the same old game under the new system
What is the good of drawing up, on paper, rules for social behaviour, if we know that, in fact, our greed, cowardice, ill temper, and self-conceit are going to prevent us from keeping them? I do not mean for a moment that we ought not to think, and think hard, about improvements in our social and economic system. What I do mean is that all that thinking will be mere moonshine unless we realise that nothing but the courage and unselfishness of individuals is ever going to make any system work properly. It is easy enough to remove the particular kinds of graft or bullying that go on under the present system: but as long as men are twisters or bullies they will find some new way of carrying on the old game under the new system. You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco, 2001 edition, p. 73
This is not the least of our problems just now ... substituting — perhaps mistaking — agreement or compliance for goodness; and excusing bad behavior ... illegal, immoral, cruel, dehumanizing behavior ... because the perpetrators are on the side we call good. As the saying goes: God is not mocked; we reap what we sow.
So … sow fair and equitable dealing, maybe?
To that, add this: Of citizens surveyed by Pew in 25 nations, more people in the U.S. — more than half — see their fellow citizens as morally bad.
It's one thing to look at our neighbors and see badness; it's another, far worse thing to believe they are irredeemably bad.
Getting over *that* is gonna take some work.
source
Friday, February 25, 2011
Follow the Money: What's a Teacher's Worth?
OK, First:
In the same time frame as the screen above, the average salary in Wisconsin for:
Gaming Managers was $65,760
Securities, Commodities and Financial Services Sales Agents was $72,550
Art Directors was $72,840
Fashion Designers was $77,780
Broadcast News Analysts was $79,610
Public Relations Managers was $84,900
Athletes and Sports Competitors was $97,250
Marketing Managers was $103,150I don't begrudge the salary of anyone doing honorable work — certainly not teachers. On average, I don't think practitioners in any of these categories add more value to Wisconsin's (or the U.S.) economy than teachers.
Second: Aren't some of the people moaning about teacher salaries today the same ones who steadfastly argued two years ago that $250,000 a year is barely a living wage? You know who you are; pick a side.
Monday, February 14, 2011
E.B. White | 1952 | This is Bad
We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. This is bad. I think the most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witchhunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a communist.
—E.B. White, April 27, 1952, Letters of E.B. White, p 328
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