Category Archives: Spiritual Life

Three-Inch Screens

March on Media:
Part I in an Ongoing Series on the Place of Technology in Our Lives

A few months ago, at a family get-together that took some pains to arrange, I looked around our assembled group and saw just about every single relation staring at the small, glowing screen of a smartphone. They hardly noticed one another, let alone my staring; their attention was held captive by a series of three-inch squares in shifting shades. That family picture has stayed with me since then, although I never snapped it with a digital camera. No electronic copy of it sits anywhere on my laptop or Ipad or Blackberry or e-mail inbox. I simply see it in my mind’s eye and it still saddens me. Continue reading

The Man in the Gray Cat Suit

In my prior incarnation, I was an English teacher, serving as adjunct faculty in the English Department at a local university, where my colleagues were literary and imaginative and favored felines. As an esteemed professor, the former chair of the department, so succinctly stated: “We are cat people.” Shortly before starting in the English department, I had adopted a very young kitten, just weeks old, entirely gray except for a spray of white at his throat and chest. My colleague from the department observed that the tiny cat appeared at all times to be wearing his “bib and tucker,” an observation that instantly earned Tucker his name. Continue reading