Skeptical Faith

Google Image I can’t believe it’s been five years since the murder of nine people by a white supremacist as they prayed at the end of a Bible study at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C.  I recall writing a blog about it shortly afterward. Its five-year anniversary was observed recently in the midst of national outrage over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. For those of us who are searching for God, the church killings were absolutely bewildering. What did those people do to deserve to die? Weren’t they just studying the Bible and praying? What kind of twisted mind would see them as threats? A Threat to White Supremacy The answer, of course, is that it had nothing to do with what they did or didn’t do. It had everything to do with who they were. They were black and they represented, as all black folks do, a threat to white supremacy. People of races and religions other than the majority have experienced similar treatment. Indeed, it was nothing “personal.” Th...

Google Image I’m pretty much of a news freak. Having worked much of my adult life as a journalist, I still read the local daily newspaper religiously. I read other national newspapers online. I watch the evening news on a national network. I read the news presented on my home web page. I cannot NOT read it or watch it.I believe knowing what’s happening in the world is important. (Actually American news organizations provide very little news about “the world.” It’s only about us – the U.S.)   But I must admit the news gets wearisome. It’s hard not to get the impression that the world is going to hell. I have to remind myself about news values – what makes something newsworthy. A Break from the Normal According to the textbook I used to teach journalism at a state university, there are two major criteria: that the news represents “a break from the normal flow of events, an interruption in the expected” (“Man bites dog”), and that it’s “information people need to make sound deci...

Google Image I read in the newspaper recently about Richard Schuster, 42, an Air Force veteran who has faced combat, cancer and addiction, and now COVD-19. He’s been through, and has overcome, a lot. But at the time the article was written, he was quarantined in isolation in a New York hotel room and it appears to have been a greater challenge than all the others. “Until you’ve been in a situation like this, you can’t wrap your head around the silence in my hotel room,” he said. “It’s deafening at times. I could just sit here with nothing, and the only noises I would hear would be the elevator as the medical staff is coming down and knocking on doors. “This can really break somebody,” he is quoted as saying. Solitary Confinement a Great Hardship? I get it. I always wondered why solitary confinement in prisons was considered a great hardship. To me, it seemed like a much better situation than being with another prisoner, or even more so, with several others. In solitary, you h...

Sister Anthonysami Alphonsa National Catholic Reporter “And now for something completely different,” to quote the old Monty Python’s Flying Circus TV show. I think we need a break from references, and blogs, about the pandemic. So here’s a blog that is motivated by a pet peeve, the misuse and overuse of the term “hero” and “heroic.” I often think that we play footloose and fancy-free with the terms. Large groups of people are now “heroes,” whether or not millions of individuals in those groups are anything near heroic. There’s been an inflation in that term, as with many others, in my opinion. I’ve mentioned several times in these blogs about my admiration for nuns, whom I believe have taken a bad rap in stereotypes about nuns being naïve, out-of-the-loop and whacking kids with rulers back in the day. (In my elementary school, grades 1-8, the only teacher who regularly used a ruler on kids was the school’s only non-nun teacher.) Genuinely Heroic In my experience, the vast m...