Joni Mitchell issued the single "Big Yellow Taxi" in 1970. Her focus was on nature and our not so humble reshaping of our environment to suit our whims. The entire refrain in the song is "Don't it always seem to go that you don't what you got til it's gone. Paved Paradise, put up a parking lot."

The title of this reflection is, in part, inspired by what Wikipedia refers to as "a feat of smooth and ruthless efficiency", the historic "double play" action of infield basemen of the 1906-1910 Chicago Cubs that also inspired a short poem, entitled "Baseball's Sad Lexicon," also known as "Tinker to Evers to Chance", by Franklin P. Adams 1 .

It may have already dawned on you that Tony Fauci is (or at least, was) worshipped by millions of American TV viewers. He sounded so reasonable and so authoritative, who could be blamed for falling under his spell?

He's not the only member of this "human pantheon", yet his pronouncements have been more public.

  In the beginning, there were tribes.
  Very quickly, there evolved super-tribes, which came to be called kingdoms.
  But, kingdoms were too small to defend themselves against powerful kingdoms,...

Very few in history have been assured of their final destiny in heaven. These words spoken by Jesus to his 72 commissioned disciples (which can be found in the Gospel of Luke) are such an assurance. St. Paul reflected on this in his letter to the Romans…

President Trump came along at a time in our history when we were going down an ideological rabbit hole. He’s given us time to think about where that hole leads to. It remains to be seen whether we can recognize our collective folly in time. Of course, it didn't help that the mainstream media largely blinded half the country to the differences.

Human civilization is very different, today, from what it was thousands of years ago. Technology has given totalitarian governments awesome powers.

In the beginning...

These simple words from Genesis 1:1 alert us to the transcendent significance of what is to follow. Yet we don't begin to grasp how important this account of God's relationship to the world/the universe until we find these words...

26: Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth."

A political cartoon by Steve Kelly (see Steve Kelly at Creator's Syndicate) on October 19 (to be posted on Halloween) brilliantly captured our current political climate. I'll leave it to my readers to puzzle out its full significance...

I find it extraordinary that, after years of debate, millions of voters still don't know what an assault rifle is. I don't understand why they never bothered to look up the definition, even though there are perfectly good definitions readily available, for example, on the Internet. See, for example, the excellent article on Wikipedia.