The Meddlesome Priest :

Reality: Baptizing a Dead Baby February 11, 2015 Vespers was just about over. Sweat ran down my cassock and surplice in rhythmic drops while black-veiled widows droned responses to my vesicles.  Ave Maria gratia plena... on and on. Only a dozen or so can create a concrete cutting sound grinding your brain. The sweet scent of burning bee's wax candles offering up their gray smoke combined with the widow's chanting left me distinctly light-headed. " Just another night at church service",   I thought. All that changed in an instant with a loud thump as the two big wooden doors of  Iglesia Católica. Santa María de Guadalupe (Tempoal de Sánchez, Veracruz) flew open at the back. Tempoal, the name of the town,  means 'place of the toads' in Wastek. Lightly armed men began making their way toward the altar where I stood, clerically robed and officiating at the service. Such a sight is a daily event in this lit...

Today's blog podcast from September 28, 2010: "Divergent Muslim Minds"   with Dr. Manoutchehr Eskandari-Qajar, Chair of Political Science/Economics, Director of Global Studies and Director of Middle East Studies at SBCC In 2013 Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.  Making his second appearance MINDS THAT MATTER, Dr. Eskandari  sorts out the mindsets behind today's headlines from the Muslim Brotherhood to the shifting US policy in the Middle East. Have a listen @ this link: Professor Manou Eskandari Qajar: SBCC Chair Political Science Department

Nuance:   1775-85;     <  French:   shade,   hue,   equivalent   to   nu   ( er )  to   shade   (literally, to   cloud  <  Vulgar   Latin   *nūbāre,   derivative   of   *nūba,   for   Latin   nūbēs cloud)  +  -ance  >    Nuance is the stink left by the literary fart of postmodernism. (How's that for an unnuanced dysphemism?) Making subtle distinctions in complex ideas is delightful and even necessary in art and literature. But for apprehending reality, truth, goodness and beauty nuance is cancerous to philosophy, morality, law, politics, and science. Unfortunately in these latter categories nuance has become a cloak for incoherence, error, exaggeration, contradiction, fallacy and stupidity disguised as 'progressive' thinking. Nuanced stupidity should not be confused with mere ignorance. Nuanced thinkers are typically both in...

    Today's blog podcast: New NETFLIX release     THE SEARCH FOR MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER   Producer-Director Fraser C. Heston November 24, 2010 Between 2010 and 2014  MINDS THAT MATTER  broadcast over 152 radio interviews on AM 1290 Santa Barbara with Writers, Artists, College Presidents, Middle East Scholars, Honors Students, Non-Profit Foundation Leaders, and World Visionaries in Virtual Reality, Politics, Art and Science It was my pleasure to host all of these shows and add to my life of ideas. I'd like to share these interviews with you here on my blog,  The Meddlesome Priest. 

    Google 'ideas of absolute beauty' and the most depressing array of images pop up. Most of them are images of scantily clad women. Going much deeper into the search produces images of naked men starting with  Michelangelo's  David. The modern world or at least the modern digital world seems incapable of imagining ideas of absolute beauty. It's depressing because whole generations that derive their 'knowledge' solely from the internet are ignorant of the very idea that connects Reality, Truth, and Goodness.  It's called Absolute Beauty. Here's how.    For the past 48 years, term after term, I've been the lucky recipient of student papers on the subject of human abortion. Comparing the popular perception of human abortion at the beginning of my academic career with what it is today can be traced through those student term papers over the years. In 1966, when I began to teach philosophy at Westfield State College (now a University), the beauty of ...

    MINDS THAT MATTER TOP 50 SHOWS: THE VIRTUAL STATE AND THE FALL OF EMPIRES author  Mychilo Cline  with Vanessa Patterson, Dr. Paul Bishop, Dean Doug Hersh, and co-host  Neil Kreisel Neil Kriese l Listen and Enjoy! https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/79076060/082813minds.mp3 --- Cordially Professor Mark McIntire

phobia (n):  "irrational fear, horror, aversion," 1786, perhaps on model of similar use in French, abstracted from compounds in  -phobia , from Greek  -phobia , from  phobos  "fear, panic fear, terror, outward show of fear; object of fear or terror," originally "flight" (still the only sense in Homer)      J ust because I don't like onions doesn't mean I have an onion-phobia. I just don't like onions. I don't like anything about them; their taste, texture or the fact that, to me, they overpower the flavor of all they contact. Though I just don't like onions it would be silly to say I was afraid of the onion, no? Same with rap music. Do I have rap-phobia because I just don't like rap music? Am I unjustly discriminating against the onion or rap music because I don't care for either? Apparently, according to one modern reasoning mistake the answer is 'yes'. I'm a mean, nasty and psychologically disturbed individu...