Author: Jim Bowman

Jim Bowman covered religion 1968-78 for the Chicago Daily News, since then has written books, articles, etc., mostly on corporate history but also on religion (Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968), and more recently on politics (Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters -- Lulu.com, Kindle). Longtime Oak Park, Illinois, resident, he lives now on Chicago's North Side, where four of his and Winnie's six children live close by.

Don’t Mind Me, I’m Dead

Like me at mass in the Year of Our Lord 2015 — with rare exceptions. Ignore, ignore “presider.,” focus on event, namely holy sacrifice of the mass.

chandleur

Don’t Mind Me, I’m Dead
Once you have kids and fall into the trap of working from home life becomes a whirlpool. Wait a minute, I just looked it up and the better word for life at home with the kids, food and work is maelstrom. Furniture, blender, kitchen, wailing children, cranky spouse, laptop all swirl like planets in a constellation doing their best to undo an orderly life.
I miss my association with a big organisation. The automatic recognition of you being somebody once you are an important cog in the corporate machine. No Matter, forward soldiers regardless.
I asked my mind what to do about it. It said, ‘ignore.’ Pretend you are dead. It works. I have killed myself existentially. I am but a body lying there the rest of me is floating above deaf to mayhem and disobedience from my kids. My third eye will only intervene…

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Gauchos-Motorcycle Cowboy Milkmen of Chandigarh

Fresh from the udder via motorcycle. Entrepreneurism at work in the subcontinent.

chandleur

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Most people prefer the pasteurised milk that arrives in half litre polythene packets from established government milk plants. Some with roots in rural Punjab prefer their milk fresh from the udders delivered by milkmen riding on motorcycles with huge aluminium and colorful plastic containers. They are an essential part of morning life in Chandigarh.

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A Catholic musician asks, How is our music?

Liturgical music is “too often merely serviceable, barely imaginative, and almost entirely a matter of patching things through from one cadence to the next.”

As Catholics, basically, we’ve already won the art contest. Any historical survey of visual or musical art makes it perfectly clear that the Church is peerless. In order to maintain “top chef” status, the Church in its art simply has to basically not ruin its own reputation.

It is worth asking whether we are currently meeting the standards that have been set over the two millennia. How is our drawing in the churches, for example? How is our sculpture? Do our churches show a concern for proportion and shape? How are we doing with verbal art, in hymnody?

And of course, how is our music?

She’s not looking to blame anyone, but says ” our devotion to God should involve the highest aspirations possible, particularly in our art.”

When art is excellent,she says, it “has the power to make one Christian’s devotion accessible to another..”

All based on the idea that worship should energize and comfort us.

Nanny of the Week: Is the minimum wage a nanny state policy? – Watchdog.org

Seattle makes the coveted $15 minimum wage, people lose jobs.

Welcome to the nanny state, folks. How so? What are nany-state laws anyhow?

First, they are deliberately intended to limit individual freedom by making certain choices unlawful, even when individuals who make those choices are not committing a crime or otherwise threatening anyone else’s rights to life and property.

Second, even though the laws are promised to be for the benefit of society as a whole, they almost always have unintended consequences that go far beyond the behavior they’re intended to prevent or make mandatory.

The minimum wage fits squarely inside both categories

And this is without reference to how they screw up the economy, especially for people who need lower (fair) prices and jobs most.

Tsk, tsk.