A Thinking Man

The Walk 
You did not walk with me
Of late to the hill-top tree
By the gated ways,
As in earlier days;
You were weak and lame,
So you never came,
And I went alone, and I did not mind,
Not thinking of you as left behind.
 
I walked up there to-day
Just in the former way;
Surveyed around
The familiar ground
By myself again:
What difference, then?
Only that [...]

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I have just created a Wordle from my blog. See the big version HERE.

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If I say to you, “Don’t think of a pink elephant,” it is, of course, the first thing that comes to your mind, whereas if instructed to think of a green one, you are unlikely to have internal pictures of pink.
There is a school of thought which says that we should be more careful about [...]

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(On the day that I read that a Roman Catholic Church in Toxteth, Liverpool, was about to start using the Tridentine Mass exclusively - services in Latin - again, I was reminded of this parable that I wrote some years ago.)
The mountains were cypress-green and breathtakingly beautiful.  Spiros was standing in one of the most [...]

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Later today Peter Hain, MP, former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, will deliver a lecture at the New York University Centre for Irish and Irish-American Studies on whether the model for peacemaking that was used in Northern Ireland can be applied to other conflict situations throughout the world. A central thesis of his [...]

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What’s the point of education?
When I used to be a teacher trying to inspire teenagers with the English literature, I frequently encountered the questions: “Why do we have to do this? What has poetry got to do with me? What’s the point if I know what I am going to do (plumbing/hairdressing)? [...]

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It’s official. You have to show me more deep respect. The Roman Catholic Archbishop has said so!
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor called for more understanding and appreciation between believers and non-believers, urging Christians to treat atheists and agnostics with “deep esteem”. In a lecture given at Westminster Cathedral, which comes after a spate of [...]

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It’s about control, control, control! Why won’t they leave us alone?
It seems that almost everywhere you look religious authorities are trying to impose their conclusions about how they think people should behave, what they should say, how they should dress, what they should or should not do with their sexual desires on people who [...]

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I mentioned in my last posting how communication was one of the issues that contributed to the high stress levels of my hospital stay. I want to expand on that today. However, I must acknowledge that the communication confusions were also a source of mirth, albeit unintended.
From my perspective there were four communication [...]

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There are many people who chose to base their lives around a particular religious text. This religious text may contain writing composed thousands of years ago (in the case of the bible, composed over thousands of years). They choose to use this text to determine what they eat and wear, who they marry [...]

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