The long and difficult road

Oct312019 by jrcowles1 Comment

Of All The Nerve: Wheelchairs, Sciatica, And Equality

"Life" Issues, activism, autonomy, awareness, Challenge, Change, Christianity, Church, citizenship, civics, community, Compassion, culture, disability, empathy, entering into suffering, Equality, Ethics, Freedom, Gratitude, Healing, health insurance, Healthcare, mindfulness, movement, progressive politics, solidarity, Suffering, The long and difficult road

I had never thought much about physical disabilities until the autumn of 2012, when an airplane flight from Hell from Wichita, KS, to Denver – long horror story ... please don't ask! -- squeezed me into a last-row seat of a tiny Embraer jet aircraft for four hours, resulting in a severely compressed sciatic nerve that basically crippled me for several months. At first, the pain was so intense that I thought I would die, then later on, the pain was so intense I was afraid I would not. (My wife and I slept in our first-floor guest suite for some period of time.) Gradually, thanks mainly to the intervention of an excellent chiropractor, I incrementally, over a period of about four months, recovered to the point that, instead of walking half the length of my driveway, I can now walk perh

Jul72016 by jrcowlesNo Comments

In Memoriam — Elie Wiesel and Passing Judgment on God

C. S. Lewis, Christianity, community, Compassion, courage, covenant, culture, Elie Wiesel, Ethics, faith, faithfulness, God, in memory of, Judaism, monotheism, Pain and Suffering, paradox, Religion, Skeptic, The long and difficult road, Theodicy, Theology, Tolerance, Uncategorized, World Trade Center

Of all the things that impressed me about the late Elie Wiesel – how strange the prefix “the late” now sounds before his name! -- what always impressed me the most was his utter, unflinching, and uncompromising honesty. There was apparently no question– about God or about human beings, about good or about evil, about war or about peace – which he considered unaskable. Likewise, and for essentially the same reason, there was seemingly no chain of reasoning, no argument, no concatenation of inference that he shied away from following to its uttermost conclusion. This moral and intellectual stamina even included such fraught issues as those impinging on the Problem of Evil, understandably a subject of more than more than merely academic importance to Elie Wiesel, given his status as a

May192015 by a quiet walkNo Comments

on being human—Prayerful Tuesday

"Life" Issues, Compassion, death, Dr. Kent Brantly, entering into suffering, faith, faithfulness, God, Gospel of Matthew, Grace, Grief, Hebrew Scripture, Holy Mystery, Human Condition, Jesus, journey, justice, Karen Armstrong, mercy, Micah, news, our 3 brains, Pain and Suffering, peace and justice, Quote, The long and difficult road, Uncategorized, violence, war, way of life

Matthew 25:36 “I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” One of the books I read while I was on my sabbatical was Fields of Blood, Religion and the History of Violence by Karen Armstrong.[1] As always I was impressed with her writing and level of scholarship but more than that in this book Ms Armstrong lays out the reasons for our love of violence and power. Right at the beginning she identifies one of the factors in our continuing struggle between living in a harmonious world or living in a power driven world, the construction of our brains. We have 3 brains, the old brain or reptilian brain is responsible for our fight or flight actions. It drives us to defend our territory for food and other resources, it is the