Looks like we’ve made it through another year. Launching this blog is my celebration.
Every menu item has at least one post so far, except Viewpoints. I plan to use Viewpoints to comment occasionally on events in the news and culture. If you have a suggestion for a topic for the inaugural post under Viewpoints, feel free to let me know, either in a Comment or by emailing me at kathh2015@gmail.com.
I wish for everyone a healthy and fulfilling new year.
Kath
Even though i have gradually shed my belief in a god, i remain intrigued by and sympathetic to the human impulse toward belief, particularly the longing for a personal god who sees each individual as uniquely valuable.
For this reason, i found myself in agreement with the following teaser sentence for a Deepak Chopra column about why god still matters:
“‘With the workaday world filled with suffering and frustrated ideals, there’s a huge incentive to look beyond the horizon to a God that will continue to evolve for the simple reason that humans never stop evolving,’ says Deepak Chopra.”
While some believers will take issue with an assertion of god evolving, the idea of looking to the horizon for something or someone which provides meaning beyond the mundane seems to resonate broadly. As scholar Karen Armstrong has shown (“A History of God”), conceptualizations of god evolve. As for Chopra’s column, that turned out to be the only sentence i could agree with. His seven brief paragraphs offer a breezy vacuity that nonetheless at least manages to illustrate the pitfalls he warns others of. Continue reading
When I started setting up this blog, I had lots of ideas for topics I might want to post about. Sometime later, when I hadn’t yet got around to posting anything, I was diagnosed with cancer.
I decided quickly that I wouldn’t post about it, and correctly anticipated that others would inquire as to whether I would. I’ve since then been crafting my answer to their next question, “Why not?”
The first thing that occurred to me is that it’s such an obvious choice of topic, which is reason enough itself to decline. Second, it’s just too tailormade for heart-tugging and sympathy-engendering, leading to many obvious responses from others as well. “There but for the grace of god go I,” and all that. Third, of course the topic is interesting to me in rather specific ways, but outside of the easy melodrama, it’s hard for me to believe it’s that interesting to others. And even if it were, I would like to think it’s not the most interesting thing about me. Continue reading
(W.H. Auden, “The More Loving One”)
One of my favorite compositions of all time. Sooo much going on here…
(You can find the lyrics here.)
(Pope Francis)
(KH)
This is what she dreamed…
In the middle of a bright day, she found herself walking along a pleasant path with lovely flowers and sturdy trees on either side. The day and the path seemed wide open, like they could go on forever. She had a wide berth within the path to stroll and sometimes skip happily in the sunshine, and to wander from one side of the path to the other to bend down and enjoy the flowers. It was a rather straight path, and she thought it interesting how when she focused on the far distance, the two sides of the wide path looked as though they would eventually converge.
Along the way, she would kneel to smell a particular flower along one edge of the path, and then glancing across, another would catch her eye on the opposite side, and she would skip over to look at it more closely and take in its fragrance. With many happy and leisurely steps she passed the time, continuing down the path, while occasionally traversing its width to enjoy the flowers.
During one such pause, it seemed to her that it took fewer steps to get to the other edge, but she thought little of it and continued her stroll, interrupted by brief investigations of the flowers. Continue reading
A Hansen Chronicle 