“This is the place where spouses wailed, where mothers buckled to the tarmac in grief and where children lifted their teddy bears to see a parent carried off in a flag-covered box.” So wrote Matt Sedensky as the war in Afghanistan comes to it’s end. Perhaps now Dover Air Force Base will no longer be a place where Presidents stand and generals salute as our nation’s military fallen are returned home. It is holy ground, but only a stop on their final passage home.
Ross Douthat, NY Times columnist and a committed Catholic, writes some interesting op-ed pieces – but are often religious essays about faith’s intersection with life lived in an ever secularizing world. In his Sunday essay, he writes:
The resilience of religious theories is matched by the resilience of religious experience. The disenchantment of the modern world is a myth of the intelligentsia: In reality it never happened. Instead, through the whole multicentury process of secularization, the decline of religion’s political power and cultural prestige, people kept right on having near-death experiences and demonic visitations and wild divine encounters. They just lost the religious structures through which those experiences used to be interpreted.
It is a long read, but completely worth your investment of time and thought.
In the well known parable of today’s gospel, the landowner goes out to secure laborers for the harvest. At the end of the day, all laborers are paid the same regardless of the time of day at which their labor began. Some complain that they worked from sunrise, while the ones who only began day’s end are paid the same. This has been a week of teachings on wisdom and riches…. what is today’s lesson?
friarmusings 