So, January 1st is fast approaching, as well as the end of 2022 and the dawning of 2023!  As in most years lately, almost everyone I know is eager to see the hind end of 2022 and welcome in all the hope and promises of a nominal "new year".  In 2021, of course, the year got a bullet in the head pretty quickly as, on the 6th of January, the world ( Read more... )

A lot of things in the Church get predicated on the thought, "This is the way things must have been..."  Which is incorrect, of course, because that statement relies upon assumptions, and we all know what happens when we assume...!

And yet, assume we do!

The issue here is the date of Christmas (and, by extension, Advent) - I grew up treating ( Read more... )

So, American GOP candidate Ben Carson has publicly stated, eighty-plus years too late, that if the Jews had been armed, the Holocaust wouldn't have happened.  Ah.  Yes, of course.  If the Jews, in all their enclaves throughout Europe, had been armed, been allowed to carry guns in their homes (when, of course, nobody else was allowed to do so), ( Read more... )

Everyone knows that a movie is a dramatization of *something*, whether it's the vision of a storyteller or a recreation of something that actually happened.  You simply can't recreate, instant for instant, movement for movement, word for word, what actually happened.  The closest you can get is, "Something like this happened."  Cue Saving Private ( Read more... )

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( My take )