Ruminations By Robert Drynan If one reads Middle Eastern and European Medieval history, it is easy to fall into the trap of oversimplifying present events with an overlay of the past. But shortly after the events of September 11, 2001 the President of the United States himself lamentably introduced the term Crusade to define […]
Front Row Center By Michael Warren Other Desert CitiesBy Jon Robin BaitzDirected by Russell Mack This play is set in 2004 during the Bush-era Iraq war, and was first produced on Broadway in 2011. The theme of family love in spite of personal and political divisions is even more appropriate today, as this dysfunctional
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Imprints By Antonio Ramblés antonio.rambles@yahoo.com Channeling Venice There’s little that words can do to embellish the iconic images of Venice’s canals which have enchanted visitors for centuries. Paintings of these waterways by English Romanticist J.M. Turner, French Impressionist Claude Monet, and American John Singer Sargent are widely published and well known. In the eighteenth and
A Baseball Player Named Pearl By James Tipton A little over one-hundred years ago a young baseball-player-turned-dentist borrowed $600 from his fiancée to self-publish his first novel. That was in 1903. A few years later that author, Pearl Gray—now writing under the name Zane Grey—was earning $100,000 a year with his best-seller Western
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Uncommon Common Sense By Bill Frayerbillfrayer@gmail.com Drifting Towards Authoritarianism? Many people in the United States and, indeed, throughout the world, have become alarmed at the persistent popularity of Donald Trump. Political pundits immediately dismissed him as a serious candidate as soon as he announced his intentions to run for president, and they have been
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A Leaky Ship Sinks An Empire By Greg Custer The next time you look seaward from your Cancun resort, scan the Caribbean horizon and imagine a small flotilla of 16th century Spanish ships heading south to north (that’s right to left for the directionally challenged). Suddenly the ships stop, reverse course and disappear to
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La Vista By John Thomas Dodds If there is one thing ex-pats have in common its having travelled far and wide, and one of the things we might have noticed is the human penchant for seeking the high ground. It is the domain of the wealthy and the spiritual, the adventurous and the driven,
MARK SCONCE: Poet And Prince Among Men By Margaret Ann Porter Literary scholars agree that the seminal literary work of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin (1799-1837) is his poetic novel Eugene Onegin. In it, Pushkin delves into the inhumanity of social convention and its tendency to crush souls and murder love, yet Pushkin somehow renders the
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A First Encounter By Carol D. Bradley I am grateful for so much; grateful for many things, big and small. I am grateful for my health and the good health of my husband and my family. That’s a big thing. I am grateful for our life here in this beautiful place that happened to
Wise Men Speak (Courtesy of Cal Crenshaw) If God wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates. ~Jay Leno~ The problem with political jokes is they get elected. ~Henry Cate, VII~ We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office. ~Aesop~ If we got one-tenth of what was
