In 2004, the CEO of the Massey Coal Company spent three million dollars of his own money to ensure the election of a member of the West Virginia Court of Appeals. It worked. The candidate, Brent Benjamin, was elected.
When it came time for the court to rule on a case involving the Massey company, Judge Benjamin participated in the decision, although he could have recused himself. The judges ruled in favor of Massey, but their decision was overturned by the U. S. Supreme Court.
Kristen Mulvihill and David Rohde had been married for only two months when David, a New York Times reporter on location in Afghanistan, was kidnapped by the Taliban. During the seven months of his captivity, Kristen, an active Catholic, prayed every day for her husband’s safe return.
David, though not himself especially religious, also prayed daily. He did so, not because of a deep belief in God, but rather to pass the oppressive time of being held prisoner.
Writing a memoir, as I have recently done, offers the chance not only to reflect on your life but to give expression in words to its meaning. Rather, one should say, to its meanings.
Probably, you will recognize and perhaps develop themes that run through the times of your being alive. They will serve as markers in weeks, months, and years that otherwise can seem chaotic.
Can a world-wide revolution take place, and we not know it? In the previous century, that actually happened before our very eyes.
We think of revolutions as involving soldiers in the streets and great turmoil in the cities. That’s what the takeover of the Russian government was like in 1917 when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar.
This month’s winner of the Nobel Prize for literature was a man I remember first encountering in the fall of 1992. My wife Susan and I were standing in the senior common room in Harvard’s Quincy House when one other person came into the room. He walked over to Susan, stuck out his hand, and said “Vargas Llosa.”
Not everyone would have known, but Susan immediately recognized the name of a Latin American literary lion. Mario Vargas Llosa went on the give a talk to common room members that fall. Unfortunately, on that occasion he did not talk about writing, a subject I would like to have heard him discuss. Instead he told us about running for president of Peru, and failing to get elected.
If, like me, you grew up Catholic long ago, you might well have hated England’s King Henry VIII for having taken his nation away from the Church of Rome in the sixteenth century. You probably would have backed the pope who refused to annul Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, an action that ultimately led to the fateful division.
“I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accept instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials, and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.”