Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant;...

Fidel Castro just passed away this month; Che Guevara was his loyal friend and fellow revolutionary. Che, an Argentinian, became a medical doctor, but after travelling through Latin America and seeing the dire poverty and blatant political oppression,...

Walter was born in 1930 in Poland. He is Jewish and lives now in Golden, Co. NPR did an interview this past year with Mr. Plywaski in which he described his time spent in a Jewish ghetto and then numerous concentration camps throughout Poland starting...

Just to add an interesting fact or two to the prior blog on Ned and Pen Hallowell I gleaned by checking Wikipedia... Pen Hallowell was an intimate friend of supreme court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Both fought together in the Civil War, and both...

Hallowell is a name well-known to Swarthmore College students, alumni, staff and teachers. It's the name of one of the dorms on campus, one that I stayed in for one year. What's significant about the name of Hallowell? A new book called "Thunder at the...

I just finished 2 Hemingway novels, Men Without Women and Winner Take All. Both are collections of short stories written early on, probably in the 1920's and 30's. I actually didn't read them, I listened on audio book cd in my car. Both were narrated...

Referring again to the Dec., 2016 Catholic Worker's edition of their newspaper: there's an article about Black Lives Matter and some connection that some Catholic worker folks have had in connection with that movement. While historically the Catholic...

Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote a short novel called The Double about a Russian clerk who is convinced there's a double of him that is trying to ruin his reputation. The clerk, a Mr. Golyadkin, leads a rather mousy, hum-drum existence working in a drab government...

According to the December, 2016, edition of The Catholic Worker newspaper which is the mouthpiece of the Catholic Worker movement, Ben Salmon was a fervent Catholic layman who opposed all wars. When the U.S. under Woodrow Wilson entered the first World...

I watched the new movie Manchester by the Sea yesterday. The acting was superb, especially by Ben Affleck's brother Casey and Lucas Hedges. Casey plays Lee, a down on his luck janitor who's haunted by his terrible past. He is not able to overcome it and...