My first best friend, Tim Leonard, a boy wedged in the middle of a pack of ten siblings, grew up a Catholic in a big, rambling house that teemed with life and always felt more crowded than any scene in a Bruegel painting. My parents, then youthful and aspirational white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs!), moved in across the street.

I was born with at least two-nobody counted; there were almost certainly more-silver spoons in my mouth. The Leonard kids had to share the spoon, which was not made of silver but of some other dubious ore.

Mrs. Leonard and Carolyn Poplett…

In the Donald’s world, we’re all useful idiots. ~ Anonymous

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (HRC) deplorables remark from way back in 2016 is-even more obviously today-the most deplorable blunder that ever shot out of her mouth.

As utterances go, it was the most like “the shot heard round the world”, the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand which triggered a sequence of events that led to World War I. …

What happens to our political convictions if ever we start to question the distinction between pro-life and pro-choice and recognize it for what it is: a false-dichotomy? What if a person can simultaneously be both pro-life and pro-choice without logical or spiritual contradiction?

I ask this question with extreme personal interest because I am both pro-life and pro-choice. Yet, the nature of today’s political cant, this keen, bizarre necessity to polarize everything, has completely boxed me out and consigned me to the worst possible category: for I am neither good or evil. As far as our polarizing obsessions go, I…

The way I was brought up there was always a taboo against any kid perceived as selfish. I’m not sure what other options existed or if the idea of enlightened self-interest had already shot across the horizon in an arced, meteoric trajectory, flamed out, and reduced itself to half molten rock.

Even when it wasn’t spelled out, everyone knew, a selfish kid was going to hell. It might take sixty years or more of walking to and fro upon this earth for his fate to unfold but he was going to hell sure as shootin’.

It had every bit the…

When you get the chance, treat yourself to Bo-Diddley’s heart-thumping rock ‘n roll rendition of the Willy Dixon song, You Can’t Judge a Book by The Cover. Enjoy Willy’s lyrics.

George Eliot originated the expression in her 1860 novel, The Mill on the Floss.

I don’t know where or when or how I got it into my head that another lyrical mind, Oscar Wilde, contradicted the original expression “you can’t judge a book by its cover” by saying “you can judge a book by its cover”.

So far, copious searches on the Internet have yet to bail me out. It…

To the confusion of a few of my friends, whom other friends of mine might crassly dub “libtards”, I took my adult-age daughter to a shooting range a couple of times earlier this year. It’s not like I keep up on my NRA membership dues. It’s not that I want her to be a gun-toter. It’s only that I want her to make choices for herself. And if she enjoyed it, maybe we would bond by taking self-defense or concealed carry courses together. …

Authenticity is the absence of any difference between persona, the way we project ourselves, and our internal state of mind. It has to do with not just how we project ourselves but in how much our projections are reflected back to us from others. When that is achieved, you have a perfect example of success.

On the surface, authenticity seems to place a person at a far distance from the ten personality disorders identified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)¹.

In any event, authenticity seems like a worthy pursuit²:

In his work Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle emphasized…

At least, that’s what Adam did in a moment which we could reasonably call without melodrama the birth of consciousness and self-awareness. It was a brief instant thereafter when God said to Adam (in the greatest rhetorical question of all time)

Who told you you were naked?

A question that begs another rhetorical question.

Who, indeed?

Right away we see that in the very beginning, the very first story in the very first book of Scripture, the Book of Genesis, has Adam — and all of us by proxy — start to look inward, study ourselves and wonder what “makes…