A list of lists celebrating/bemoaning/lambasting/lamenting the year and the decade. Some deal with the Café’s usual concerns; some don’t. But they all share the common trait of looking over one’s shoulder at a significant moment on the calendar before one looks ahead.
In the recent tax deal, modest support for middle class Americans was combined with massive tax cuts for the rich. This is unfair: the rich don’t need the help. It is also inefficient: the rich will save rather than spend their tax cuts, so that cutting their taxes yields little stimulus per dollar of deficit. Can citizens adjust their conduct to counteract such wrong policy?
Are Catholic bishops making decisions best made by patients and physicians? And if so, should the government be supporting hospitals in which this occurs with your tax dollars?
The person who made the crucial conjunction between the religion of the settlers and the mass of the African people was a Yoruba receptive, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the foremost churchman of nineteenth-century Africa and a pioneer of the cause in his native Nigeria.
The Christmas rant is over again,
we’ve heard about the one true meaning,
not to be confused with holiday happenings
of home and hearth, of kith and kin.
But what if this is a sad division?
And I say it is. May it cease.