The Meddlesome Priest :

With over 11,000 page reads per week, many have asked where my blog name came from.  So, here’s how I got ordained THE MEDDLESOME PRIEST by Charlton Heston during the political SCREEN ACTORS GUILD STAR-WARS of the early 1980’s. Rollicking good fun! This is part of the ‘back story’ to the published version in Dr. David F. Prindle’s book: The Politics of Glamour , (   University of Wisconsin Press; 1 edition (October 15, 1988) Canadian geese were landing in Charlton Heston's pool. Through the dining room patio glass doors, I could see them, flapping and squawking as they splashed down. Some of their ungraceful landings were comical considering they did this for a living. Everyone else in the room seemed oblivious. Must be a daily   occurrence up there on the top of Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills I thought. Chattering among themselves, Jimmy Stewart finally broke the hub-bub and asked me, in his best   Mr. Smith Goes to Washington   w...

   Phi·los·o·phy:    fəˈläsəfē/ from the Greek:  philo ("love") and sophia ("wisdom"). noun:   " Philosophy is the most fundamental inquiry into the nature of knowledge, reality, truth, goodness and beauty."                --- Mark McIntire "Rather the goal—especially at the undergraduate level—should be to help students recognize that philosophy matters. Not just because it will improve their LSAT scores (which it will), but because philosophy has the potential to change the very fabric of who they are as human beings." --- Lee McIntyre       Philosophers have been rolling eidetic incendiaries into citadels since Socrates drank hemlock. He did so freely, by the way. If Plato is to be believed, his jailer left the door to his cell wide open. Guess his judges took pause over his final words at trial; "   If you think that by killing men you can prevent some o...

“A Christian who does not take the dimension of martyrdom seriously in life does not understand the road that Jesus has indicated,” the Pope said May 11, according to Vatican Radio's translation. ---Catholic News Agency, May 11, 2015 A friend and colleague, Matthew Bixby ( blogging @ WhyThink.net ) sent me an article posing the question: Can the Vatican evolve before it dissolves?  As promised on The Meddlesome Priest Face Book page, here’s my answer. Like some jolly Liberty ship captain in the mid-Atlantic of 1942 trying to avoid U-Boat torpedoes, Pope Francis careens left then right at the first sign of a theological periscope. For nearly two thousand years, the Vatican was a ship on a straight course. The Pope was its unquestioned helmsman and the College of Cardinals provided resolute navigation. This was made possible because there existed an indubitable synergy between Aristotelian philosophy and Catholic theology. Scratch any theology and you'll find a...

“To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical."     --- Thomas Jefferson Why, in the year 2015, is it still legal, in some states, to compel American workers to furnish funds for political campaigns that violate their individual conscience? To this day, only 25 states protect American workers from forced labor union dues to support politics the worker does not support. These 25 states are called 'Right-to-Work States’. The other 25 states are called 'Compulsory Union States’, accent on the word compulsory. That means you cannot get or keep your job unless you join the labor union that holds an exclusive right to negotiate your contract for wages and working conditions. From 1948 until 1988, as a result of the Taft-Hartley Act, individual labor union members in compulsory union states had no way to protect their union dues from winding up supporting politics they despised. The Act ...