Today is James’ birthday party. “Choo Choo James is turning Two!” read the invitation. This morning I received a text from his mother. “James has a cold and cough and totally understand if you don’t want to expose your children!” I remember when I used to send out similar messages, back when I was a new mother, one who hovered.
The word “individualism,” I fear, is going the way of such related words as “freedom,” “independence” and “self.” All these words have evolved so many meanings by now that they’re almost meaningless.
In a recent New York Times Op-Ed article, Thomas Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, wrote that despite financial reform legislation, the biggest banks still control our economy and pose a serious threat.
This month, Notre Dame began a year-long conversation about equal opportunity in K-12 education, and the four high-profile panelists who conversed from red leather chairs on the Leighton stage said just about everything this parent wanted to hear.
Welcome to Molarity Redux, the 17th strip in the updated, continuing adventures of Jim Mole and friends. Is Watson getting too big for his processor?
Seventy years of misguided public policy and regulations have shattered America’s traditional city forms, impairing their ability to serve the common good, former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist charged in an April lecture at Notre Dame.
Religious institutions, especially the Anglican and Catholic churches, have played a leading role in peacebuilding in Sudan for decades. Their role in the process leading to South Sudan’s independence is the most recent example.
When my first child was an infant, I had fantasies about motherhood and parenting that were sweet and gentle. One of my fantasies had to do with books. I decided that for holidays I would buy books relative to the celebration and keep them in a decorative basket in the front room. Then at story time we would sit together and read.
The Notre Dame Blue-Gold Spring football game offers a wonderful spectatorpalooza. Free parking near the stadium. Tickets cheap enough that spectators probably can afford a snack at the concession stands. The best seats you can grab. The marching band playing ND football game favorites. The leprechaun and cheerleaders whipping up the crowd.
Perhaps even more than most other mammals of the northern hemisphere, human inhabitants of the cloud-shrouded Saint Joseph River valley long for the vernal equinox. I certainly do. And this was Palm Sunday. The earth had begun its warming tilt toward the sun three weeks before, the moon was swelling night by night, and the forsythias my wife had planted two years ago were blazing into flower.
With numbers, if not words, economists call football coaches wimps. Their calculations indicate that punts and field goals on fourth down are acts of surrender to misguided conformity, statistical risks under the guise of prudence.
If I’ve learned one thing in my spectator sampling of the less-heralded side of Notre Dame competitions, it’s not always to trust advance information posted online. Take golf, if you would, please — and please without telling me the details of your shot on the 14th hole.
As Stanley Hauerwas once observed, “We assume that being modern involves at least agreement that no one ought to take religion too seriously, especially if it is going to ask any real sacrifices from us. . . . Any idea that religious convictions might challenge our deepest beliefs about ourselves or ask us to make extraordinary sacrifices is simply unthinkable.”
As I am predictably running late getting my kid to the ice rink, I notice the license plate on the BMW Roadster in the parking space behind me. “40 BDAY.” I roll my eyes, thinking, “You have got to be kidding me,” and try not to hit it as I parallel park my minivan.
This edition of NetworthyND moves from out of this world to the sublime, jazzy and poetic, and, finally, back down to earth to consider the state and fate of K-12 education in the United States.
On April 7, a sold-out audience in Notre Dame’s Leighton Concert Hall watched this year’s edition of “The God Debate.”Before a packed house, “New Atheist” Sam Harris and philosopher of religion William Lane Craig argued whether God is the source of morality.
Strips 68-72 of the popular comic strip Molarity, which previewed in The Observer in 1977. It’s time to rock the hall Mass, and also to figure out how women fit with the old guard.
Here in the Midwest we don’t get to enjoy beautiful spring days without consequence. Warm air in Michigan in April will be met with something colder, and our beautiful day will erupt in a night of stormy protest. I erupted today too. Lost it.
Geoffrey Keating Furniture
After a decade as a doctoral student, Geoffrey Keating ’00M.A. finds his true calling as a furniture maker.
Whether globalization contributes to the common good is a question that has been answered: Yes, some of the time. The more pertinent question is how globalization, through business, can serve society.
The study of astronomy at Notre Dame got a boost in 1867 when French emperor Napoleon III gave Father Joseph Carrier, CSC, a 6-inch refraction lens, which was state-of-the art technology for the time.
Many would be surprised to know that the Holy See maintains two observatories — one at Castel Gandolfo, the pope’s summer residence outside Rome, and another on a mountaintop in Arizona.
At the end of this life on Earth, we all face a journey into the mysterious unknown.
Paul Tierney ’64, once known as a corporate raider and a savvy, successful fund manager, is now making bold impacts by bringing venture capital into what he calls frontier markets. And doing some real good.
For their RuneWarriors trilogy, James Jennewein ’77 and Tom S. Parker spend eight to 10 hours a week on social media. “It is like having an ongoing dialogue with your readers,” says Jennewein.
Paige Wiser ’92 is dressed and ready for work. In a comfortable-looking striped, button-down shirt and black pants, a dinner beside her, she nestles in, her daughter, Audrey, on the couch nearby and son, Jack, lying on a mattress in the room. Her work assignment is to critique a reality TV show.
TV critic Paige Wiser may enjoy Dexter, but she also has a lingering fondness for child-friendly shows old and new.
At about 3 in the afternoon the three of us were almost halfway up the mountain. Brennan, our 15-year-old son, went ahead without his backpack to scout out the best route. My wife, Rhonda, and I gratefully sat down to rest and soak in the tranquil beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
When the puck dropped last spring to determine the unsettled 1989 state championship between two New Jersey high school hockey powers, it was surrounded by the sticks of husbands and fathers who never thought they’d play the big game taken from them two decades earlier.