The Meddlesome Priest :

Part 2 Wages of War: Slavery Slavery is  the cancer  that has already destroyed America. Slavery, like abortion, poverty and avarice diminishes human dignity so fundamentally as to kill it just as any incurable cancer kills a healthy body. In psychological ways, slavery is worse than abortion. At least the unborn are never aware they were murdered to satisfy the whim of their mother, the result of a rape, or an act of incest. A slave, on the other hand, is mentally murdered every moment of every day in bondage. Slavery is one of the wages of war. And even if the slave is liberated from chains physically, the mental chains remain till death. This legacy of resentment, bitterness and hate for their masters is the legacy of the slave class. It can never be erased or forgotten. Asking the freed slave to show mercy, forgiveness, reconciliation and acceptance to the slave-holder approaches the limits of human virtue. Yet many former slaves have done just that. Many more...

Abortion, Slavery, Poverty, Avarice A New Four-Part Series Leading to 2020 A Year Without War Part One: Abortion “ Hey, Give Me Back My Sperm ! ” Abortion makes everyone squeamish. Everything about it is creepy and weird. To abort means to; terminate, end, halt, stop, ax, arrest, cancel, scrap, call off, rescind, revoke, scrub, kill. The opposite means to keep and continue . Even when abortion has nothing to do with the almost-born, it connotes fear, and impending doom as in an aborted take-off or landing of a plane. It’s unpleasant now to even hear the word. It has become the ‘A’-word of contemporary morality. In its place are euphemistic phrases such as; protecting a woman’s reproductive health and choice.  But there are deeper levels of horror. At the epicenter of the current debate over aborting human fetuses is the very meaning ‘human’.  Like so many other social morality debates, there are sharply divided camps over this nomenclature. The pr...

"The Face of War" by Daniel Ursino, acrylic on canvas Are we so recently from our turd fights in the trees that we cannot forsake war for just one year in 2020? This question prompted the four previous posts in this series; 2020 A Year Without War .  These views are my own about this project, and they do not necessarily reflect the views of anyone else associated with the global project 2020 A Year Without War . Nevertheless, over 118,000-page reads for all four in the series indicate these views have some traction. Thank you for reading and commenting. The last post on ‘War and Acceptance in 2020’ should have been the most difficult to write as most of us have a problem with enduring the unendurable to the point of accepting the unacceptable. Once it rattled around in my brain for a week, the post wrote itself. So too with this one i.e. War and Peace in 2020. What is clearly seen is clearly expressed. Writing this series has made it abundantly clear how we wil...

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. --- Aristotle Dialogue is the reciprocity of acceptance, and it begins with the 'selfie'. Climbing any high mountain is most arduous at the very last step. Why? It's something psychologists call ‘approach-avoidance’ that often prevents us from taking that last step to secure our long-cherished goal. Fear of both failure and/or success stunts many victories. Reaching the panicle of A Year Without War in 2020 requires that last step we most want to avoid; acceptance. This fourth in the five-part series was supposed to be the hardest to write. Instead, it wrote itself. As demonstrated in the previous three posts, forgiveness requires mercy , and reconciliation requires forgiveness, so too acceptance requires reconciliation to arrive at peace for one year in 2020. But acceptance seems a step too far. It seems to demand more than what we are able. The price seems too...

--- Dachau Memorial Sculpture 1968 It starts in the family and spreads to all humanity. After Mercy and Forgiveness , Reconciliation is the next necessary step to 2020 A Year Without War . Part religious sacrament, part family legacy, part civic virtue, reconciliation is our conscious choice to actively  “…forgive those who trespass against us” . But it can’t merely be a mental attitude. Actions are required to restore peace and harmony between divided peoples. The ‘Prodigal Son’ parable is the most famous religious context where father and son are reconciled over the objection of other relatives. Famously depicted in art, sculpture even parks, numerous acts of reconciliation have guided human history away from feuding families to warring nations. Here are just a few over the centuries c.1510   -   Il Figlio Prodigo   / The Prodigal Son , Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (Netherlands). By Hieronymus Bosch [c1450-1516].   ...