NEWFANE-There are countless commentaries on Pope Francis's life and work, most of them celebrating the opus of a remarkable man.
What made him so loved by the world, even beyond the Catholic church, was his humanity. He seemed to internalize the Christian understanding of the complexities of the human condition. He embodied unconditional love. He sought understanding among competing groups, religions, political forces, and he countered the entrenched national conceit that corrupts civilization.
Pope Francis was a breath of fresh air for the church. Perhaps because he was not entrenched in the close political intrigues of Rome, and instead came from what could be seen as the far reaches, beyond the conspiracies of power politics.
He had a deeper connection with ordinary people, especially poor people. He had profound empathy for their struggles and hopes, and he realized that the church could be a center of redemption and healing where hardly any had existed before in quite the same way.
Robert Fritz (robertfritz.com) works as an author, composer, filmmaker, and management consultant. NEWFANE-This election is, as has been said, the most important in our lifetime. The reason is simple and clear. Our system of government is on the line. The old-time Republican Party no longer exists. When it did,
Let's step back for a moment. Imagine we are social scientists or anthropologists as we take an objective look at the United States. What would we see? We'd notice that the so-called "great experiment" in democracy has produced some bizarre phenomena. On the one hand, life in the U.S.
The Florida Board of Education has set a new standard of how history will be taught in Florida schools. This comes after a long assault on the parts of history that tell the truth about the United States' dark past of slavery. The board's new account is that African-Americans "learned skills for their own personal benefit." This implies that slavery was not that bad after all, and it may have even been good for those who were enslaved. It is...
Let's begin with what the Age of Enlightenment was. It was a time when objective thought, science and math, reason and structure, and evidence-based conclusions were a radical departure from the previous world of the tyranny of belief systems as the sole authority in one's life. The hope was that humanity had a reset, a more productive path toward understanding the world and creating a better civilization. And for a while, the premise seemed to make good on its promise.
In an ironic way, as horrible as it was, the Fourth of July shooting was the perfect illustration of the United States of America in 2022. This is the America we live in. This is the one that has been created by decades of inaction around weapons of war available to the sickest minds among us. The America we may fantasize about is gone. Maybe it was never there, but once it was closer to that idyllic image than what...
While the majority of Americans - over 90 percent, including most gun owners - want actual gun control so we don't have what now is called a “mass casualty event,” we are frozen in place by the gun lobby, and, it must be said, by most Republicans. Greg Abbott, governor of Texas, is going to talk about how sad he is about the massacre that took place on Tuesday in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where, at this point,
His leadership has been breathtaking. So has the courage and true patriotism of the Ukrainian people. Make no mistake: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's life is on the line. Russian President Vladimir Putin is threatened by him, and now, with the world moved by his heroism, with the contrast of the democrat versus the despot, David versus Goliath, Putin is put to shame and is more motivated than ever to get rid of him. Putin has trained assassins searching for Zelenskyy,