A C. T U. A L. L Y

We visited the Treasury of the Cattedrale of Palermo (above) the other day.   (Full disclosure:   I left the Catholic faith at age nine, immediately after making my First Holy Communion. )   As always when visiting a Catholic church, I was dumbstruck by the enormous accumulation of wealth on display.   Beautiful though it may be, I can’t help but see this array of obscene ostentation and conspicuous consumption as a glaring contradiction in the Catholic Church, an institution which purports to be devoted to the eleemosynary teachings of Christ: Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. – Luke 6:20 How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. – Luke 19:23–27 Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have t...

MAY DAY, MAY DAY!!!   We have a nut case in the White House who is a danger to society.  And we have dolts in the Base who are providing him asylum.  Here's the latest about, and from, the nuts and the dolts. David Brooks, conservative columnist for The New York Times , about the nut case : Trump is an unprecedented threat to democratic institutions. Over the past few years, I’ve thought the progressive fears of incipient American fascism were vastly overblown. But, especially over the past month, Trump has worked overtime to validate those fears and to raise the horrifying specter of what he’ll be like if he is given a second term and is vindicated, unhinged and unwell. In their book “ How Democracies Die, ” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that authoritarians undermine democracy in several ways. They reject the democratic rules of the game, the unwritten norms we rely upon to make the political system work. They deny the legitimacy of their p...