I spent the first few years of my life in the West End neighborhood of Birmingham, Ala. My mom would routinely pile us kids into the old Ford, and off we would go downtown, observing very old, very beautiful buildings all over the city. These glimpses of structural beauty were deeply stamped upon me –
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“Be always employed in something useful,” wrote young Benjamin Franklin, promoting the virtue of industriousness and discouraging the wasting of time. “Cut off all unnecessary actions.” Surely, though, he did not intend that we maintain a perpetual busy-ness just for its own sake. After all, as Henry David Thoreau pointed out, “It is not enough
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Another Ash Wednesday has come and gone. On this day, many Christians attend church, where a priest or a pastor marks their foreheads with a cross made of ashes, saying, “Repent, and believe in the Gospels,” or more traditionally, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The latter injunction, which derives
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Recently, I dated a man a few times who, as I quickly learned, was opposed to marriage. He pointed out that the legal binding of a marriage puts the man in a very vulnerable position, one in which if – or he would say when – a divorce occurs, his home, children, and livelihood are
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In Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House,” we encounter Mrs. Jellyby, a fanatical, crusading philanthropist who by correspondence and personal contacts hopes to bring education and trade to a remote part of Africa. Mrs. Jellyby spends much of her time dictating letters and memorandum to a “jaded and unhealthy-looking” girl who “seemed to have no article of
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In an age when Americans are increasingly polarized, there’s something fascinating about the way Meghan Markle – the ex-actress, British duchess, and now Cali-girl extraordinaire – seems to unite us. No matter what poor Markle does, she always seems to leave many Americans with the idea that she’s a clueless pseudo-elite, eager to tell us
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