The Writer's Almanac: "Poem: 'Fix' by Alicia Suskin Ostriker, from No Heaven. © University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with permission.

Fix

The puzzled ones, the Americans, go through their lives
Buying what they are told to buy,
Pursuing their love affairs with the automobile,

Baseball and football, romance and beauty,
Enthusiastic as trained seals, going into debt, struggling—
True believers in liberty, and also security,

And of course sex—cheating on each other
For the most part only a little, mostly avoiding violence
Except at a vast blue distance, as between bombsight and earth,

Or on the violent screen, which they adore.
Those who are not Americans think Americans are happy
Because they are so filthy rich, but not so.

They are mostly puzzled and at a loss
As if someone pulled the floor out from under them,
They'd like to believe in God, or something, and they do try.

You can see it in their white faces at the supermarket and the gas station
—Not the immigrant faces, they know what they want,
Not the blacks, whose faces are hurt and proud—

The white faces, lipsticked, shaven, we do try
To keep smiling, for when we're smiling, the whole world
Smiles with us, but we feel we've lost

That loving feeling. Clouds ride by above us,
Rivers flow, toilets work, traffic lights work, barring floods, fires
And earthquakes, houses and streets appear stable

So what is it, this moon-shaped blankness?
What the hell is it? America is perplexed.
We would fix it if we knew what was broken."

The Evangelical Scandal - Christianity Today Magazine

Ron Sider on Evangelicalism.

On 12 April, 2005.

It was on this day in 1633 that Galileo was put on trial for publishing evidence that the sun and not the earth is the center of the solar system. He was a devout Catholic but didn't believe his ideas should threaten the church. He wrote, the "Holy Sprit intended to teach us in the Bible how to go to Heaven, not how the heavens go."


Galileo had gotten into trouble with the church about his ideas before, but he thought the new Pope Urban VIII might be more open-minded. Galileo visited him and brought along his microscope, hoping to dazzle him with its power to enlarge objects and bring them closer. After a few hours of demonstrations, Galileo asked if the ban on sun-centered teaching could be lifted. The Pope said that if Galileo wanted to write about his theories, he had to present them as theories only, and couldn't present them as the truth.


So Galileo wrote a book in which three friends discuss whether the earth or the sun is the center of the solar system. The book presented the sun-centered argument as convincing and the earth-centered argument as idiotic, but at the very end, the three characters agree that no one really knows the truth. When it was published, the book became a best-seller.


The pope decided Galileo's book had crossed a line, and mocked the church, and he ordered the printing stopped, all copies seized, and Galileo was put on trial for heresy. Galileo was sentenced to house arrest.


In 1636 he developed an infection in his right eye and because of his house arrest he could not seek treatment. Two years later he was blind. He wrote to a friend in a letter, "By my remarkable observations, the sky...was opened a hundred or a thousand times wider than anything seen by the learned of all the past centuries. Now, that sky is diminished for me to a space no greater than that which is occupied by my own body."


It took more than 350 years for Pope John Paul II to declare, in 1992, that Galileo had been unjustly condemned by the Catholic Church.

“I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all our time thinking about them.” Mark Haddon in The curious incident of the dog in the night-time

Dick Staub:
Staublog -
What is Wrong with CCM? What is Wrong with Me?: "A newspaper invited submissions from readers regarding what is most wrong with the world and Chesterton’s essay was short, true and applicable for me today. Chesterton’s answer to what is wrong with the world?

“I am.”
"