While I try to orient my life around the church calendar, I sometimes lose track of lesser feasts and fasts as I am spun ’round in the whirlwind of secular life. The day I wrote this post a very secular habit — reading op-eds in The New York Times — reminded me that it was ...
Author’s note 1: This will be the last blog you will receive for a while as I am going to have some mechanical imperfections of my lower spine corrected surgically on October 1st. My sister, Gracie, recently had similar surgery and I got to watch some of her recovery from a ringside seat in New Orleans. ...
A friend of mine, Ruth Kiker, emailed me a few days ago about the “caravan” that President Trump is exploiting to whip up the emotions of his core supporters, a.k.a., his base. Ruth knew I had lived in Nicaragua decades ago and that I had majored in Latin American Studies and Economics at Tulane. ...
Dear Subscribers and Occasional Visitors, My last post entitled Class Warfare I was published about a week ago and should have been rapidly followed by Class Warfare II. But I have not, for various pretty good reasons, had the time to write it. We are now on the cusp of Holy Week and I must ...
My mother, Anne Springs Close, turns 92 tomorrow, and she remains, as she has been throughout my life, a source of inspiration and challenge. Her greatest gift to her children (though I hasten to say that I speak only for myself) may be an inability to accept things as they are. This gift is both ...
Before I begin exploring the major contribution of McDonald’s Corp. to income inequality in our country, let me mention some things that have crossed my mind recently. If you haven’t read the book Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean, you should. The author is a history professor at Duke University; her book is a history ...
