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(published in the Culpeper News, 1 June 2000)

I’ve lived most of my life in the United States, and the rest of it – for various periods at various stages in my life – in Italy. The U.S. is my home, but sometimes I tend to think it is almost exclusively the daily use of the English language that I refuse to part with. I find so much about life in Italy preferable that if I could have my mother tongue there there’d be no question about where I’d want to live.

Of read more

Believe it or not, there was a time in this country, and there soon will be again, when “morality” or “ethics” was not shorthand for cruel talk about sex. When Upton Sinclair said, “My efforts are to find out what is righteousness in the world, to live it, and try to help others to live it,” he was talking about helping huge groups of people out of misery, helping them to lead fuller lives. In other words he was “mixing” ethics with economic issues. read more

11 January, 1999
Various newspapers, beginning with the L.A. Times, have recently been running an editorial by Neal Gabler explaining the sexual inquisition in Washington, DC, as a struggle between proponents and opponents of religion, and taking the side of the religious. I think Gabler is right about the struggle, and would like to comment from the opposing camp.

Of course, beliefs can be put together in any combination. Many people oppose the impeachment of Clinton and attend church. Many read more

”I was amazed by the quality of individuals applying” at a Sept. 13 job fair at the Cleveland Convention Center, said Bill Mazur, director of warehouse operations for Mazel Co. in Solon, Ohio. Although his company needed employees and regularly used job fairs, Mazur said he had to ”have his arm twisted” to go to this one, because the fair was aimed at applicants with criminal records.

The first annual Community Corrections Job Fair was sponsored by Cuyahoga County, the read more

If you go into Village Frameworks and Gallery on Main
Street, right next-door to the soon-to-be-opened movie
theater, and walk to the back right wall, you will see there
– unframed and rather unceremonially propped up – a
wonderful drawing in colored pencil measuring 17

Talking in words about architecture is one of the most difficult activities I am aware of. Everyday talk along the lines of “Meet me in front of the yellow building on the corner,” is not too hard. Nor is commentary on a single building along the lines of “I like that one,” “It’s top-heavy,” “It’s joyful,” “It looks cheap,” “Why couldn’t they have used darker bricks?” But comparisons of buildings, descriptions read more

My favorite authors are Derrida and Rorty, and when I read them I do to them what they do to others, namely I try to detect in them remnants of religion that do not fit with the majority of their statements. I pick out dichotomies used by them which I think they ought to be compelled by their own thinking to drop – for example Rorty’s split between “public” and “private” which I think derives straight from Augustine’s “sacred” and “worldly” read more

Also published on Democratic Underground at www.democraticunderground.com

David Brock’s “Blinded By the Right” is an apolitical book, and while it denounces and apologizes for the “conservative movement” that replaced politics with sex scandals, it does not make a political apology.

Brock does not say he is sorry that people died and suffered in the richest country on the planet because they had no health insurance. He does not say he regrets seeing families booted read more

First Things
To the Editor:

Stephen Worland

Many people, even residents of Culpeper County, Va., are shocked to learn that public school students in the county are routinely taken out of class to be proselytized with Christianity. “That’s illegal!” everyone exclaims. If more people knew about this practice outside of Culpeper and other counties where it goes on, I imagine it would receive as much attention as proposals to have a “moment of silence” or post ten ancient orders on a wall. On the other hand, read more