Iconic Women 3
Category: Daily Life in the USA
Re-entry Ups and Downs
Greetings…. I’m still feeling my way along as a I readjust to Louisville and the US of A. Today’s The Record has my column about my experience. For those who might be interested, here is the link:
Iconic Women 1
In the Sunday bulletin from St. Augustine Church, a black Catholic community in Louisville, I saw a full-page display of “iconic women.” I’d like to remind us of these people who may have been the real, more substantive influencers of the modern era (most of them).
Bike Weather Again
This morning dawned rather cold and cloudy but by mid day, everything had changed. There was a really bright blue sky that invited me to a ride through Louisville’s magnificent Cherokee Park. The uncommonly cold and snowy winter was with us just a day or two ago but now the smallest buds are starting to appear.
Women’s Day
Fratelli Tutti
Even as individuals maintain their comfortable consumerist isolation, they can choose a form of constant …. bonding that encourages remarkable hostility, insults, abuse, defamation and verbal violence destructive of others, and this with a lack of restraint that could not exist in physical contact without tearing us all apart. Social aggression has found unparalleled room for expansion through computers and mobile devices.
[From Fratelli Tutti, #44, by Pope Francis]
Dangers of Phone Use
“Even in social company people often slide into a kind of connected isolationism, in which ordinary conversational connection seems to be undermined by the near-addictive grip within which the machine holds us. We tend to exalt the value of such connectedness without acknowledging the divisive effect it can have on our senses, our emotions, our relationships, and our need for times of solitude and quiet. From a spiritual perspective the electronic gadgetry can easily become a compensatory “god” on whom we depend for the satisfaction and fulfillment of our most basic needs.”
From Diarmud O’Murchu’s Ecological Spirituality
Talking to the 4th grade
This morning I spoke to the fourth-grade class at John Paul Academy. The teacher, Isaac Larrison, taught in another school in northern Kentucky with my sister, and when he heard I was back in Louisville, he invited me to his classroom where I talked about Cambodia.
Around Louisville
Part of my transition back to Louisville is getting acclimated to Cherokee Park. Through extremely visionary planning on the part of Louisville’s early leaders, a series of large urban parks was created here by Frederick Olmsted, the designer of Central Park in New York City. One of these is the 400-acre Cherokee Park on the east side of downtown. All of my early years were in the West End of Louisville and my years as a priest in the South End so I’m very unfamiliar with the maze of trails and paths in Cherokee Park which is near my home now. Today I took an exploratory bike ride to the park and ended up at the Daniel Boone statue, one of the park’s landmarks.
New Year’s Eve
Tuesday, 17 February 2026, is the first day of the Lunar New Year (aka Chinese New Year or Tet [Vietnam]) so today is New Year’s Eve. May the Year of the Horse be a good year for you!