“Life is cheap” is an expression usually reserved for primitive peoples or violent times, be it warring tribes and clans slaughtering each other like chickens or the showdown-at-noon culture of the American Wild West. At least drawing six-shooters was between two men... Read More →

  I had just started high school at the beginning of the Seventies when Erich Segal’s best-selling tearjerker Love Story and its theater-filling movie version were released to harrow the souls of the romantic. Segal had set out to write an elemental love story in a... Read More →

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made (Genesis 3:1). Before proceeding with this short reflection, let me acknowledge that those who perpetrate evil do not always intend to do so. It is... Read More →

  No one really believes in utterly free, unfettered choice. There are good choices and bad choices, and an enduring challenge in life is to know the difference. There are choices that we forbid ourselves and others to make. For instance, I... Read More →

While New York’s numbers have been stable for a while, the first weekend of October brought unsettling reports of a rising number of positive tests for coronavirus in certain New York City neighborhoods (and a couple of adjacent counties). Read More →

When the president announced his new Executive Order, I was called by the redoubtable Cathy Ruse, who was one of my own main allies on Capitol Hill thirty years ago when I was going door to door, trying to sell this bill.  Cathy sent me congratulations, for it looked like a... Read More →