By Wayne Allensworth From Fox News: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is pushing back and adding more razor wire to the border fence after Monday’s Supreme Court ruling that the border patrol can remove the wire along the southern border. So far, the border patrol in the borderland has not cut down any of the razor wire. In the meantime, Abbott says he won’t back down despite the Supreme Court’s...
By Wayne Allensworth Rolf spent much of his boyhood in wartime, one in which piles of rubble accumulated as the Allied bombers leveled his city. Rolf and his friends played in the piles of rubble, and later joined the exodus of Germans heading West as the Red Army approached from the East. Everyone knew what would come under the Soviet thumb. So, they packed their belongings and made the trek in...
By Wayne Allensworth “Sic transit mundus” (Brother Joshua in A Canticle for Liebowitz) In 1959’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, author William M. Miller’s story suggests a series of questions that are as pressing now as they were during the Cold War, when a nuclear apocalypse was very much on the collective mind of the world: Is civilization possible without the continuing advancement of...
Do we pursue the wrong kind of “happiness”? By Wayne Allensworth The “pursuit of happiness” seems to be a quest everyone in our society is on. It takes on the aura of a requirement in an age of radical individualism, in which “self-realization” is supposed to be the aim of life in an otherwise meaningless universe. But how does one “pursue” happiness? And, most of all, what is it? As has...
By Wayne Allensworth In Act 3, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Marc Antony, alone with the body of the murdered Caesar, pledges to avenge his death. He speaks of the coming bloody war, and the horrors to come: Blood and destruction shall be so in use,And dreadful objects so familiar,That mothers shall but smile when they beholdTheir infants quartered with the hands of war,All pity...
By Wayne Allensworth For nearly 40 years, your humble observer’s life has been connected in one way or another with Russia, or, better still, the Russian world, that broad cultural expanse that extends across much of Eurasia. And from the beginning of that journey, what drew me in as much as anything about Russia and the Russians were that country’s impressive cultural achievements. A tragic...
By Wayne Allensworth The old gentleman had told me that he was very grateful. Grateful to God for all the blessings he had experienced in his long and eventful life. Grateful for the friends he had made, and grateful for his family. I had sat across from him and watched his eyes soften and then twinkle a bit. He was pale and declining, but for a moment he almost seemed hale and if not hearty, at...
By Wayne Allensworth The ghosts of Christmases past are still very much with us. I’m quite thankful they are, for those “ghosts” remind us of a time that was less sterile and less fragmented. So, it’s no surprise that the proponents of “progress” have made war on those ghosts and on that particular holiday. Tom Piatak has done great service in his efforts to note and counter what...
By Wayne Allensworth The idea of progress holds that mankind has advanced in the past … is now advancing and will continue to advance through the foreseeable future… The idea of progress is a synthesis of the past and a prophecy of the future. It is inseparable from a sense of time flowing in a unilinear fashion. — Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress The 21st Century has been...
By Wayne Allensworth I had to be careful. The ornaments were wrapped, each one in tissue paper and some of them were very old. I had dropped a couple of them and they shattered. As brittle as dried leaves. Their skins had grown thin as they had grown old. Christmas ornaments collected by my mother over time. So many Santa Claus ornaments, old St. Nick in his jolliest attire, thick beard and...
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