[Religion News Service, November 14, 1995]
Pick a page, any page, in your daily paper and you're likely to find one of two things. Either there's a horrific story of violence and evil, or there's a politician or pundit decrying such and telling us America is going to hell in a handbasket. All around us we hear the predictions of catastrophe. What we don't hear is what to do about it.
[Religion News Service, November 28, 1995]
Is everybody happy? I'm not sure. On the Saturday before Thanksgiving, Christiana Mall in Christiana, Delaware was crowded and bristling with festive decor, but the people waiting around the base of the fountain looked dazed and glum. The fountain was dry, so its circular field of brownish rocks sat idle,
[World, March 12, 1994]
It was ”almost providential."
This is a cautious man speaking. Governor Bob Casey is not given to effusive pronouncements. His lengthy form is folded behind the ornate desk, but his long arms sometimes escape to chop the air in emphasis. White hair and black eyebrows lend him an intense appearance, but his manner is plain-spoken and unaffected, and always marked by caution.
[World, April 23, 1994]
The American Association of University Women, which last year issued a report equating boy-girl schoolyard teasing with sexual harassment, is now concerned about how schools damage little girls' fragile self-esteem. The problem is that they don't have enough role models.
Wait a minute, you say. The last time you visited a school, at least half the teachers looked to be female.
[World, August 27, 1994] 1969—Gary Mathewes arrives at the Wood-stock festival with his streetwise, drug-dealing Greenwich Village girlfriend. “I don't remember buying a ticket, or anyone asking for a ticket,” he says. “I don't remember much, except spending a lot of time lying on the ground.”
1994—Father Gregory Mathewes-Green stands at an altar covered with gold brocade. “Holy things are for the holy,” he intones. “One is holy,” the people sing back, “One is Lord, Jesus Christ.”
Twenty-five years after Woodstock, twenty years after he insisted on a vegetarian spread at his wedding reception,
[World, September 17, 1994]
Tom Clancy is the novelist for patriots, and Pat Buchanan is one of his biggest fans. But one of Buchanan’s recent columns, devoted to praising Clancy’s work, had a line that pulled me up short: “[His characters] put duty, honor, country above all else. And in a Clancy novel there is no moral equivalence: The U.S.A. is the greatest force for good on the planet.”
I write this as the U.N. International Conference on Population and Development begins in Cairo. The U.S.A. is there, parading as the greatest force for abortion, birth control, and eugenic population management on the planet. Our immense wealth and power make us a force hard to withstand.
[Christianity Today, May 18, 1998]
Twenty-four years ago this month I learned something specific. The specificity of what I learned is what makes it, to many, offensive.
Twenty-four years ago a hitchiking jaunt around Europe brought me one afternoon to a church in Dublin.
[World, October 1, 1994]
Sexist treatment is blatant on Broadway. Street hawkers hand women, not men, fliers advertising nail salons (with puzzling semi-English names like ”Tanning Nail“). Men, on the other hand, get fliers advertising the ”World's Hottest Dancers." The latter fliers suggest that a woman who hopes to attract men by investing in her fingernails has chosen one of the least likely sites of interest.
At the corner of 42nd street a slight, city-pale man is handing out pamphlets freely, without regard to gender.
[NPR, “All Things Considered,” July 8, 1996]
When my daughter came home from college she announced she wants to paint something else on her car. It's already covered with daisies. Now she wants to add cartoon depictions of the Beatles, Yellow-Submarine style, on the doors. The tape rack inside is filled with Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and the Doors. “Everybody I like is dead,” she says. Her brother David is a couple of years younger. His golden hair flows over his shoulders, and he's attempting by sheer force of willpower to generate a moustache and goatee. Wire-rim glasses complete the look. The other day I found him bent over his guitar, picking out the chords to Bob Dylan's “Like a Rolling Stone.”
[Christianity Today, July 13, 1998] Pundits and commentators, who normally consider themselves more open-minded than the plodding masses, have been rocked by a discovery in the last six months: when it comes to a president's indiscretions, most people just don't care. “But you're supposed to be outraged,”
