SerPolUS_IDES

I realized then that I am pretty good at treating clinical misery with drugs and therapy, but that bringing about happiness is a stretch. Perhaps happiness is a bit like self-esteem: You have to work for both. So far as I know, you can't get an infusion of either one from a therapist.

Excommunication of Phoenix nun, & ejection of St. Joseph's Hospital, for allowing an abortion to save a mother's life; prohibitions of tubal ligations in Texas & Oregon.

Ensuring the continuation of slavery was, overwhelmingly, the chief cause of Southern states' secession and the Civil War.

"Religion was supposed to die of asphyxiation in the wake of modernity, but the opposite has proven to be the case. So the options aren't religion or no religion; the options are good religion or bad religion. I'm voting for the former, meaning a critical understanding of power in religious traditions."

See esp. recycling options

see esepciallty "get a better deal from your cable provider" & "saving files & photos on cloud"

'"Contamination" ... is an evocative term. When people speak for an ideal of cultural purity, sustaining the authentic culture of the Asante or the American family farm, I find myself drawn to contamination as the name for a counterideal. [The Roman playwright] Terence [whose plays acquired that label to describe his conflation of Greek plays into a single Roman comedy] had a notably firm grasp on the range of human variety: "So many men, so many opinions" was a line of his. And it's in his comedy "The Self-Tormentor" that you'll find what may be the golden rule of cosmopolitanism - Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto; "I am human: nothing human is alien to me." The context is illuminating. A busybody farmer named Chremes is told by his neighbor to mind his own affairs; the homo sum credo is Chremes's breezy rejoinder. It isn't meant to be an ordinance from on high; it's just the case for gossip. Then again, gossip - the fascination people have for the small doings of other people - has been a powerful force for conversation among cultures. 'The ideal of contamination has few exponents more eloquent than Salman Rushdie, who has insisted that the novel that occasioned his fatwa "celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world." No doubt there can be an easy and spurious utopianism of "mixture," as there is of "purity" or "authenticity." And yet the larger human truth is on the side of contamination - that endless process of imitation and revision. 'A tenable global ethics has to temper a respect for difference with a respect for the freedom of actual human beings to make their own choices. That's why cosmopolitans don't insist that everyone become cosmopolitan. They know they don't hav

While religious and secular perspectives on forgiveness are not necessarily consistent with each other, however, they agree in their attempt to address the painful fact of the pervasiveness of moral wrong in human life. They also agree on this: few of us are altogether innocent of the need for forgiveness. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fish: "The words both 'True Grit' films, & Portis's novel, share are these: 'You must pay for everything in this world. There is nothing free with the exception of God's grace.' But free can mean (1) distributed freely, given to anyone and everyone; OR (2) given only to those whom God chooses for reasons that remain mysterious. The novel says, 'You cannot earn that grace or deserve it." FS: Jesus' story of "The Prodigal/Lost Son" suggests a 3rd notion: grace is freely given to all humans, who may not recognize its presence. Human values differ from God's in judging which person or outcome is ultimately "good" or "bad." Grace is an unearned gift. But to believe it is dispensed capriciously is more a characteristic of Greco-Roman cosmology.