Columns

His parents were only barely, partially literate. 

When I was still a kid I lived apart from my parents. My father was out of the picture. My mother worked as a hostess of the women’s hushed “dining room” in an upscale big-city department store.

Last week’s April 2 column’s “callout” here (called by some a “sub headline”) was long. Long enough to be dealt with as a slice of Geoffrey Chaucer’s 1392 “Canterbury Tale.” (And thus the father of “April Fool’s Day” and the grand “Chaucerian” list.)  

Just before the crowded, over-loaded days of Pascua, both local Mexicans and northern residents here reluctantly noted the United States’ political embrollo tumble toward numerical chaos.  The cluster of U.S. candidates for president shrunk.  Now chiefly centering on two/three candidates for each party, instead of vast stages crowded with accusatory dreamers.  While that was welcome to many rational minds, this change seemed to bring no profound intellectual clarity or emotional charity with it. 

A number of readers, here from the United States, have recently had the same rare impulse: cutting their daily electronic intake of what one reader calls “idiotic political developments” north of the border.

The passion of Jesus Christ is the central event that divides Western civilization for both believers and non-believers.