T G I F
HolocaustMemorial Day
“The degree to which one is sensitive to other people’s suffering, to other men’s humanity, is the index of one’s own humanity.”
“True love for man is clandestine love for God.”
“There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done to other people…The prophets’ great contribution to humanity was the discovery of the evil of indifference.”
Rabbi Abraham Herschel
Digital Guilt
the “spiral of expectations.” When communication technology makes a new thing (like responding on the go) possible, doing that thing can be a way for people to signal how dedicated they are as workers or family members—and, crucially, not doing that thing can suggest that they aren’t dedicated enough. Now when people feel they haven’t responded sufficiently quickly, they think they owe their correspondent an apology.
…with the mass adoption of email and smartphones, is that the “acceptable” window of response time has gotten much smaller. Someone could conceivably apologize for their delay when responding in the afternoon to an email sent that morning.
Scot McKnight
REMINDER WHEN FILING YOUR TAX RETURN
The Internal Revenue Service’s Publication 17, available on the agency’s website, contains a section on stolen property that may leave readers scratching their heads.
“If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless you return it to its rightful owner in the same year,” the guideline states.
If you sit and stare at a flowing creek for long, perhaps playing about its shallows with sticks and such it is possible to see how utterly connected the many currents and flows are with one another. An action in one spot can yield a reaction downstream, though the one downstream may know very little of what happened before. We individuals who inhabit this point in the stream of time fancy our decisions as though they were independent of so much that went before.
Fr Stephen Freeman
Thinking…
[There] are those who prefer certainty to truth, those in church who put the purity of dogma ahead of the integrity of love. And what a distortion of the gospel it is to have limited sympathies and unlimited certainties, when the very reverse, to have limited certainties but unlimited sympathies, is not only more tolerant but far more Christian. For “who has known the mind of God?” [Romans 11:34] And didn’t Paul also insist that if we fail in love we fail in all other things?
William Sloane Coffin
Cyber Shelters ?
More than 75 years after the invention of nuclear weapons, only nine countries appear to have a usable one. But dozens of countries already have cyberweapons. “Everybody seems to want them,” Mark told me, “and this gives enormous power to the countries who sell them and can use them for diplomatic advantage.”
Something to remember when filling your vehicle.
The unemployment rate is at 3.9 percent, lower than its been at any point since 1970 save April 2000 and mid-2018 through March 2020. Year-over-year wage growth is near its highest level since the metric began being tracked in the mid-2000s. Yesterday, we learned that real GDP grew at a 5.7 percent clip in 2021, its fastest rate since 1984. After a global pandemic led most countries around the world to more or less shut down commerce for several months, the U.S. economy is all of … 1 percent smallerthan it likely otherwise would have been.
View from the Lanai
The Road Not Taken – Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Still on the Journey
I think this installment was shorter but denser with thoughts that were meaningful to me—like Coffin’s “Thinking.” Predictably, Frost’s words only seem to take on more meaning with every passing day. Thanks.