Author Archives: whispersfrombabylon

Thank you for allowing Debora Coyne and myself, to contribute to your ongoing discussions about the economy of Newfoundland and Labrador. I want to emphasize up front that I am by nature an optimist not a pessimist.  I am not … Continue reading →

Last night I watched the movie “Spotlight”.  It was my second viewing, the first being over Christmas with and  at the insistence of my oldest son, who still cannot wrap his mind around what he refers to  as the ‘irrationality … Continue reading →

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2000/08/in-defense-of-immortality In Defense of Immortality In 1904, less than six years before his death, William James made a revealing statement in response to a questionnaire circulated by his former student James Pratt. To the question, “Do you believe in personal … Continue reading →

Youth springs to life with embarrassment and  self-consciousness, age  oftimes  dawns  with boring self-obsession. I know nothing more tedious whether in myself or in others than ‘woe is me’ sentimentality.  I dislike myself when I fall prey to ‘meism’, and … Continue reading →

“Nemo nisi per amicitiam cognoscitur” “No one learns except through friendship” Augustine If memory serves it was Professor Edward Norman, then of Peterhouse Cambridge who wrote a small monograph on the 19th century Oxford Movement entitled, “The Parting of Friends”. … Continue reading →

Long ago, back in those Middle Ages that encompassed the early 1970’s, four young Jesuits taught the Ethics of Experimental Medicine in a large Nursing School in Toronto.  It was a wonderfully open minded era, and medicine was blazing new … Continue reading →

Chris Hitchens and Richard Dawkins  have and had  wonderfully enquiring minds.  Salman Rushdie’s is a perceptive critic of contemporary culture, and Bill Maher delights me every Friday night with his  irreverence.  But when it comes to matters of faith and … Continue reading →

My good friend Michael B  retired and relocated to Hungary almost a year ago. He does not speak the language, although his partner does, and so I worry about how, at the age of 70 plus, this most Anglo of all  Anglo’s … Continue reading →

I  write on WFB.com   as part of an “internal consciousness examination.”  There are times when I honestly forget that someone might read my ramblings.  Yesterday I was deluged because of my comments about “golf, Florida houses and grandchildren”   … Continue reading →

Passionate, decisive, intelligent, emotive, tolerably narcissistic and arrogant, risk embracing, engaged, driven, a change agent, jesuitical, dismissive, sensitive and insensitive with alarming blind spots,  all describe  my own sense of an imperfect self.   Like the Energizer Bunny, I also … Continue reading →