The Beast of Seumus Farquarson: A Halloween Tale

In the Scots highlands there are malignant brownies said to inhabit the crags of my clan's district. These small beasties are nothin' in comparison to what I saw that night. I passed out after slippin' and gashin' my head on a rock. It was not an enormous gash but enough of a bruiser to give my reveled body a reprieve from guzzling. I wanted to sleep anyway, but this was not the place I should have snoozed. I awoke to a sloshing floppy sound, wet upon the rocks. Accompanying the sound was a smell, a stench, pardon the expression,

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When The Teacher Comes

FACING OURSELVES HONESTLY is a bitter pill to swallow; we hope it is also good medicine. At the end of our rope, a guide or mentor can be just what is needed to move from self-pity to wholeness. If we can learn to trust. Dante fears that the bitter but gracious truths he had learned about himself will die with him, leaving no opportunity to be translated into life. He is ready for a teacher, but the Teacher has not come. Paul Patterson continues to channel Dante's imagination through the part of The Divine Comedy. In the twilight

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Tools of Character

AS DIFFICULT AS it is to learn to trust a mentor, it is even more arduous to break down our self suspicion. Do we have what it takes to break free of the entanglements of the Dark Wood - to melt with feeling-intellect the icy encrustations of Hell that keep us paralyzed in our self defeating patterns? We stare eyeball to eyeball at the antagonist within, sizing up our character and our chances of restoration.

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Monsters at the Margin

VIRTUE IS FOUND at the margins of society more often than at its centre. If this is so, Mary Shelley's Monster is a real find! Her creature is an isolate of great sensitivity, kindness, and insight. Contrary to James Whale's 1931 film of the Creature as a lumbering dolt, Mary Shelley's Monster was modeled on Rousseau's notion of humanity as the "noble savage." The nobility of the Creature is evident as he unveils his chronicle to Victor Frankenstein upon the icy crags of Mount Blanc. Meet Frankenstein's Creature

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Passions of Prometheus

I DON'T THINK that it is inconsequential that my heroes are men.... It is not because women are not as passionate, creative, or in any way undeserving that they don't make my short list of heroes. Rather, it is because I share with most men an inclination toward "Prometheanism". I don't know why it is not as prevalent in most women. Perhaps it is the hard wiring of centuries of birthing and caring for life (if I am allowed that stereotypical explanation). I do not think it is because women are morally superior to men, only that

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Tribute to a Friend's 50th Birthday

Our challenge is to unselfconsciously give our lives away. In this generative discipleship phase our task is to pass it forward, hand it over, in a sense give it up and refuse to hold on to it. What is the “it” in that sentence? The “it ” is our ego, our sense of self in the best sense. We are still making a contribution but no longer looking to strengthen ourselves.

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A Stranger To Justice

Everybody loves to see justice done on somebody else. Justice has become an off-putting term for me. I associate it with political correctness and link it to individual rights. Justice seems to me merely ideological, an excuse for group or self interest. I know this attitude of mine must be prejudiced since every moral perspective, including Aristotle and the Bible, place justice close to the starting point of its ethics. It's time that I take a more objective look at the virtue starting with the reasons for my bias against it.

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The Passionate Life

Like me with my young son, we are inclined to put our passions into seeing where we stand in relationship with one another. It's about comparison. We look at each other, not so much to honestly evaluate one another but to discern what degree of giftedness our brother or sister has in relation to ourselves. We look over our shoulders to see how someone else does. When we live comparatively like that, the sole purpose of life is to gauge our significance. We all have doubts about ourselves and our worth. It's natural. But the more doubt we

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I Believe in Dialogue: A Response to I Don't Believe in Atheists

After the first hour of reading Chris Hedges' I Don't Believe in Atheists, my animus toward the and very popular "fundamentalist" atheists was sated. Like Chris, I have as much disdain for these pompous ignoramuses as I do for narrow religious fundamentalists. Any wrongheaded and stubborn opinion rooted in ignorance ought to repulse us.

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Traintalk: Am I a Tourist or a Pilgrim?

THE LAST FIVE years have been comfortable. THE LAST FIVE Admitting this comes hard for someone with my intensity. An amiable life conjures images of being lazy, being part of a bovine collective, lulled asleep by consumerism and the mind-numbing drone of what my grandfather called “the idiot box” — the family TV set. I laugh as I write this staring at recent additions to that idiot box: a DVD player, a VCR, and Digital Surround Sound. That little distraction that once graced the center of the living room has taken over. My so-called room of living has evolved

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