Simone Weil

Reparations: To have a child born with the hereditary right to expropriate another's goods or efforts is a virtual definition of royalty.--me


Pizza at the McGraws and watched the series where the Astros began to look as advertised. Merideth is chipper, holding up very well.

Today's gospel is the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. It is familiar but worth an extra thought. The two prayerful people are extremes, at both ends of a spectrum where most people would not be. Christ paints a portrait where the audience can not identify with either.

Europe’s birthrate is among the lowest in the world. At 1.59 per year, the European Union’s current births are too low to sustain its survival. But while native birthrates have declined, Europe’s overall population continues to grow due to mass immigration. Importing assistance.

Reuters and Newsweek are reporting that the Islamic State’s self-styled Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been killed in a United States Special Ops overnight raid Saturday involving helicopters, warplanes and a ground clash on the Turkey-Syria border while fleeing Syria’s northwestern Idlib Governorate.

No longer a team defined by the play of quarterback Tom Brady, New England is fielding one of the most dominant defenses in NFL history. The 48 total points allowed by New England heading into Week 8 are the lowest since the AFL-NFL merger and the second-lowest on record, trailing only the Otto Graham-led 1946 Cleveland Browns. The Patriots’ score differential of 175 points is the best all-time through seven games. Surprisingly, they are below average at pressuring the opposing quarterback. 

The Church of Scientology, its members, and companies controlled by its members have spent $103 million over the past three years buying retail property in downtown Clearwater, Fla., according to the Tampa Bay Times. Times investigative reporters pored over 1,000 deeds and business records, and interviewed more than 90 people, to connect the dots from the church buying its first hotel in the area in 1975, to Scientologists and their businesses now owning 185 properties covering 101 acres in the heart of downtown Clearwater — which is also Scientology’s headquarters, and home to its “flag” campus, to which Scientologists across the globe make pilgrimages. What is done on these pilgrimages is not known.

10 percent of all American workers are making $100,000 or more a year, but most of those high paying jobs are concentrated in the major cities along the east and west coasts.  For much of the rest of the country, these are very challenging times as the cost of living soars but their paychecks do not.  According to the Social Security Administration, the median income in the United States last year was just $32,838.05.  In other words, 50 percent of American workers made more than $32,838.05 and 50 percent of American workers made less than $32,838.05 in 2018. 

On this day in 1659, William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson, two Quakers who came from England in 1656 to escape religious persecution, were executed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for their religious beliefs. The two had violated a law passed by the Massachusetts General Court the year before, banning Quakers from the colony under penalty of death. Whether the Society of friends plans to sue for reparations is not known.

                            Simone Weil

This is the poem that the ecstatic Simone Weil, a staggeringly complex woman whose life was confusion, erratic and overwhelmingly religious. Born into a Jewish family--but not knowing what a Jew was until her teens--this woman, thought to be one of the brightest women of her generation, alternately was adored by all who knew her and drove them crazy. In WWII she walked with one foot in the War, one in Heaven.
This was the poem that, according to her, revolutionized her life, a frightening poem when one thinks on how Weil died, essentially on a hunger strike against life.

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack,
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lack'd anything.

A guest, I answer'd, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and tast me meat:
So I did sit and eat.

George Herbert