Bryan Strawser

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Bryan Strawser

A priest in Boston shows us how to die

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The Boston Globe highlights the life and death of a priest who gave us an amazing lesson on how to die with grace:

“Under my promise to always tell you the truth, I have discontinued chemo and other treatments,’’ he wrote, adding, “I’m beyond the place where chemo can help me. I have come home to die. I am near the end of my journey.’’

Father Field, who had stood in the pulpit month after month, performing pastoral duties through intense pain, sat in a wheelchair on June 27. Speaking into a microphone, he asked if anyone had questions. There were none. Instead, the parishioners took their turn to stand. They began to clap, their applause echoing through the church for minute after minute, as if to prolong his time with them.

A masterful teacher who deftly discovered new insights in familiar Gospel passages, Father Field spent the past two years using his own life as a lesson in how to let life shine in the shadow of death. “I am in a place of great peace and gratitude,’’ he wrote. Father Field, who lived in the church rectory, died Monday. He was 59 and had celebrated his 20th anniversary as an ordained priest last month.

His journey reminds me the life and death of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago…

Lee Bollinger gets it totally wrong on public funding for journalism

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The idea of public funding for the press stirs deep unease in American culture. To many it seems inconsistent with our strong commitment, embodied in the First Amendment, to having a free press capable of speaking truth to power and to all of us. This press is a kind of public trust, a fourth branch of government. Can it be trusted when the state helps pay for it?

via Lee Bollinger: Journalism Needs Government Help – WSJ.com.

No, journalism does not need government help. And we’re not willing to pay for it.

WordPress is free. So are other blogging platforms. Go use them, write interesting and insightful content, you will bring in business.

When companies like the New York Times spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build new HQ buildings in New York City, find themselves unable to pay for the building a few years later, and then wonder what happened to their business model – there are bigger issues at stake here than just government funding.

Charlotte zings Reid from beyond the grave – John L. Smith – ReviewJournal.com

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Her obituary, printed in Tuesday’s Review-Journal, reads in part, “We believe that Mom would say she was mortified to have taken a large role in the election of Harry Reid to U.S. Congress. Let the record show Charlotte was displeased with his work. Please, in lieu of flowers, vote for another more worthy candidate.”

via Charlotte zings Reid from beyond the grave – John L. Smith – ReviewJournal.com.

Justice for Johannes Mehserle – Reason Magazine

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Radley Balko, as usual, gets it right on the trial and verdict of former BART police officer Johannes Mehserle:

Early in the morning of January 1, 2009, in a now infamous incident captured on video by dozens of cell phones and replayed across the globe, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Officer Johannes Mehserle shot and killed 23-year-old Oscar Grant as Grant lay on his stomach on an Oakland BART platform. Last week, a Los Angeles jury found Mehserle guilty of involuntary manslaughter. Because the jury had the option to convict Mehserle of second-degree murder, and perhaps because the jury contained no blacks (Mehserle is white, Grant was black), the verdict has enraged civil rights groups and sparked protests and rioting in Oakland. The Department of Justice is now looking into the possibility of trying Mehserle a second time under federal civil rights law.

The jury got it right.

via Justice for Johannes Mehserle – Reason Magazine.

New York Times profiles Techmeme

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The New York Times profiles Gave Rivera and Techmeme today, one of my favorite websites:

News lovers in Washington can’t live without Mike Allen at Politico. Hollywood squabbles over the relative merits of Sharon Waxman’s TheWrap versus Nikki Finke’s Deadline. The newspaper industry reads the news collected by Jim Romenesko.

One of the first Web sites loaded on Silicon Valley’s laptops and iPhones each morning — and then again and again throughout the day — is Techmeme.

The site, developed by a former Intel engineer, appropriately enough relies on software algorithms to collect technology news in real time into what is essentially the front page of an ever-changing industry newspaper.

But Techmeme also turns to humans to filter the ever-growing number of articles and blog posts published online each day, a method that is being used by Mediagazer, a new sister site for media industry news.

Mr. America | The New Republic

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There are moments when Scott Brown evokes a 12-year-old boy who woke up one day in a politician’s body—as if the Tom Hanks character in Big had asked that fortune-telling machine for a Senate seat. He certainly has the 12-year-old’s vernacular. Stumping for John McCain at a small Christian college in March, the junior senator from Massachusetts opined, “If you told me five months ago that I’d be standing here in front of you, I would say, ‘You’re full of it.”’ He also has the 12-year-old’s gee-whiz sensibility. After learning that he’d made Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most powerful people, Brown exclaimed to The Boston Globe, “I didn’t realize it was in the world. … Lady Gaga’s number four, so let’s be real.” As a senator, he seems most excited by activities that appeal to the prepubescent mind. “As soon as his hip gets better, we’re going to do some bike-riding,” he said in April when asked about his relationship with his new buddy, John Kerry.

via Mr. America | The New Republic.

Robert E. Lee, on the press

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It appears we have appointed our worst generals to command forces, and our most gifted and brilliant to edit newspapers! In fact, I discovered by reading newspapers that these editor/geniuses plainly saw all my strategic defects from the start, yet failed to inform me until it was too late. Accordingly, I’m readily willing to yield my command to these obviously superior intellects, and I’ll, in turn, do my best for the Cause by writing editorials – after the fact.

– Robert E. Lee, 1863