We are pleased to present below all posts archived in 'December 1998'. If you still can't find what you are looking for, try using the search box.
When Pablo Picasso was a young child, a huge fire broke out in the city where his family lived. A night of chaos followed with people rushing about the streets shouting, commotion and anarchy everywhere. Later, as an adult, Picasso recalled that night and described how, through all the commotion, he sat snug inside a harness-vest on his father's chest, watching everything around him, all the turmoil, from a secure, protected space.
Read the rest of entry »
Some years ago, I was visiting a Benedictine monastery in Belgium when an episode occurred that still haunts me. What happened? Well, you need to picture a scene to get the full impact: It was April, but still cold and the chapel where we had just celebrated the Eucharist and the cafeteria to which we had retired for coffee lacked both for heat and light. There were about a hundred of us present, monks and seminarians mostly, along with a few lay people.
A couple of years ago, David Tracy, a leading Catholic intellectual, wrote a particularly insightful essay which he entitled, On Naming the Present. In it, he tried to name the present moment by pointing out three major reactions. The first of these, he calls modernity. This version of things sees what is happening today as simply more of the same, namely, more of what has been happening already for a long time. Rationality and technology are the ultimate values.