Sunday/Strait and Narrow

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of an eye, the more light you shed upon it, the more it contracts.--Oliver Wendell Holmes



Went to the Ekstrom birthday party, a neighborhood affair that was invaded by a marching band. Funny. I tried to film and send it but couldn't.
Mom is preparing to go to Wheeling for three days this week to pull her project together.
Ned went to a bachelor party in Atlantic City where he lost some money. 
Liz goes to Ottawa for the week tomorrow. 

"There are an estimated 27 million men, women, and children in the world who are enslaved — physically confined or restrained and forced to work, or controlled through violence, or in some way treated as property.

Therefore, there are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade [11 million total, and about 450,000, or about 4% of the total, who were brought to the United States]. The modern commerce in humans rivals illegal drug trafficking in its global reach—and in the destruction of lives." (Nat. Geo.)

A U.S. judge on Friday ordered a woman accused of hacking Capital One and at least 30 other organizations to remain in custody pending trial because she is a flight risk and poses a physical danger to herself and others.Police in Mountain View, California, said she also threatened to shoot up an undisclosed company in May, while she was living with a convicted felon who had a stockpile of pistols, rifles and ammunition.

Lawyers for Thompson, a transgender woman, denied that she is violent and said she should be released to a halfway house where she would have better access to mental health care. Citing a doctor, they say her safety is at risk in the male facility.

There is a lot of pressure on campus to ban meat as a factor in global warming. American consumption of beef has fallen by a third since the 1970s without regulatory moves to restrict beef, and Americans could still eat 1.5 burgers a week without any further agricultural expansion.

It is easy to take symbolic positions but harder to legislate politically against livelihoods, as Hilary found in her parroting anti-coal positions.

                             Strait and Narrow                             

Today's gospel asks the question, How many will be saved? Christ has a pessimistic answer. Life has an easy path; Christ says heaven is reached only "through the narrow gate." Meaning effort. So a good life requires thought and effort. The "Straight and narrow" is a biblical phrase misread: It is actually "strait and narrow," meaning "confined." And, to a sailor, risky.

Holy Sonnet VII

At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.

John Donne