On the first day of February this year, Father W. died at the age of 93. The world did not take much notice of this event but, when I found out about it last month, I did.
My reason for paying attention is that this priest of the archdiocese of Boston was the last survivor among my teachers in high school and college.
Now they have all preceded me in death. Those pedagogues have departed this world, leaving me with varied memories of their classrooms and their personalities.
Hadi Hadizadeh does not look like a man who, seven years ago, spent 128 days in a small Iranian cell under grim conditions.
During almost all of that ordeal he was kept in solitary confinement. His only break came each weekday when he was taken out of his cell for 20 minutes, but blindfolded.
Despite that treatment, he looks now to be in flourishing health at age 60. Of medium height, affable, and given to frequent smiling, Hadi appears none the worse for the persecution he suffered for supporting democracy in his native country of Iran.
“Ask not.”
That’s the way Ted Sorensen answers when people ask him if he wrote the most famous line John F. Kennedy ever spoke.
It’s a cute way of deflecting the question. And a smashingly effective one to boot.
“Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?”
That question comes from Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher, who ranks as one of the most provocative thinkers alive today. Last year, he won the million dollar Templeton Prize, given each year to a person whose work brings together science and religion.
Where is Osama bin Laden?
This is not a question I spend much time thinking about.
But I am acquainted with someone who does think about it. And he knows a lot more about this terrorist leader.
Of his mother, Dudley Clendinen writes: “She was an extraordinarily charming and thoughtful and also artfully manipulative woman, skilled at moving people around like puppets while smiling at them fondly.”
This description appears in his new book, A Place Called Canterbury, available in stores this week in time for Mother’s Day.
“In fewer than one hundred years, human beings made greater gains in life expectancy than in the preceding fifty centuries.”
This sentence opens the book “The Longevity Revolution” published last month by Robert Butler, M.D. It calls attention to a reality that has already profoundly changed the lives of people who live in the United States and other industrialized countries.
And it will bring about further changes of great significance.