Goodbye August

Goodbye August 2025.

Even When We "Lose Control," God's Love Sustains Us

In our society we're supposed to have things "under control" in our lives if we are responsible and mature adults. But let's face it, most of us don't "hold it together" all the time. In the increasing chaos that is spreading over the world today, it's not surprising that so many of us feel rattled, shaken up, and even scared. We're not "in control."

But if I "lose control," who will take over in my place? This question does come down to the level of the individual human person, because the rancor over global and national “big issues” can permeate the interior realms of persons and vital interpersonal communities more forcefully than ever before (given that technological media drowns us every day with detailed conflicting narratives beyond our capacity to assess or evaluate). Far from empowering us, this increasingly perceptible atmosphere of confusion and mistrust only underscores our lack of control over so many external factors in our lives, and fosters a malaise of anxiety over the scope of our own personal intelligence and freedom. Do my understanding and actions move me forward in my development as a person, or do I “lose control” over my own humanity in the whirlwind of desperate circumstances that surround me and press themselves upon me? I am a small, vulnerable, endangered person seemingly overshadowed by so many vast and terrible forces.

But if I don't control the direction and purpose of my life, then who does? Those who engineer the “dominant mentality”? Is the value of my life determined by those who "take control?" Must we all ultimately yield to those who strive to manipulate our minds with their ideologies and/or control us through the expanded sensory images that constantly bombard us — i.e. those who have power in this world? This is an existential problem, which means it's a question that really punches me in the guts, and not just me.

This is one of the reasons why people are afraid to admit their vulnerability even to themselves, much less reveal it to others. If we are vulnerable, if we are weak, how can we protect ourselves from being defined (and perhaps used and discarded) by those who grasp hold of power?

I don't know if we can protect ourselves, ultimately, from being misused and humiliated by those who boast of their power and want to do violence to us. But we have to try to remember that — however overwhelming it may be — our vulnerability does not define us either. And no ideology or clique or group or anyone can take it upon themselves to be the measure of the meaning and dignity of a human person. The powers of this world have their limits, and therefore oppression has its limits.

For "the Lord hears the cry of the poor..."

God defines and controls the meaning of my life. He doesn't manipulate me. He is not some great and distant super-power who “manages” everything else for his own benefit. God is not like the tyrannical "boss" of the universe, imposing a scheme on me that is alien to myself.

God is my Creator. He alone can form within me the understanding and free actions that truly correspond to “who-I-really-am.” He is the guarantor of my inviolable dignity, even when I am absolutely helpless.

God is Love. He has come to share our lives, to share our weakness, to bear the burdens we carry day by day in this harsh and broken world, the afflictions that the violence of others imposes on us (and even the afflictions that we impose on ourselves).

It is after all grace, the gift of God's love in Jesus Christ, that saves, heals, and transforms our lives beyond our own power or anything else in this world.

Saint Augustine and “The Hundredfold”

Saint Augustine. There's no end to what we could say about him. I want to refer to one of the many things about him that has always fascinated me. Saint Augustine is a radiant example of what Jesus calls "the hundredfold" (Mark 10:31).

Jesus says that if we follow Him, we will receive eternal life...but also, we will receive a hundredfold in this life (along with "persecutions"). He also says "seek first the Kingdom of God, and all these things will be added as well" (see Matthew 6:33). What exactly does Jesus mean here? He does not mean the we should follow Him in order to get stuff in this life. That would be to reduce Jesus to our own measure. Jesus wants to transform us according to God's wisdom. He wants to give us a new mind and a new heart. He promises eternal life, which is the free gift of participation in the life of God. God is the Mystery toward which everything in this life points, and His love is therefore the real meaning of everything in this life.

For this very reason, eternal life “already” illuminates our present historical life beyond our limited measure. The Servant of God Msgr. Luigi Giussani often said something that resonates deeply with me, and corresponds to my own experience. He said that if you really follow Christ, you will also discover that you love your wife a hundred times more than you ever could have imagined; that you love your children a hundred times more, your work a hundred times more, your friends a hundred times more. You will discover the real greatness of this life, and you will even be able to embrace suffering.

There is a particular way in which Saint Augustine's life indicates this pattern. Here was a man who aspired to be a great rhetorician, an artist with words. He pursued this ambition with relentless passion, but without understanding its true value. And then he found Christ, and he gave up all thought of being a rhetorician. He gave up the desire to be known for his speeches and writings and works in this world. He longed for Christ, followed Christ, and kept his heart fixed on Christ.

And from out of his singular passion for Christ — without even thinking about it, or caring, or noticing it — he wrote an amazing book. Desiring only to praise Christ, he wrote a book that was not only the greatest book of its epoch, but one of the greatest ever written in human history. In His Confessions, Saint Augustine gave the world inimitable and unforgettable Latin prose, soaring and poetic diction, and timeless, soul-penetrating insight into the heart of the human being.

Aurelius Augustinus the rhetorician and scholar, had he followed his ambition, might have become a teacher with some following, or even perhaps a minor provincial statesman of his period. Students of late antiquity might have known his name even today. But Saint Augustine, by following Christ, became also “a hundred times more” in the history of this world. He wrote books that speak to every time and in every language, and he gave us words that ring out through the ages — words that rival any that have ever been uttered in human speech.

There is something of the hundredfold here, although it has been more for our benefit than for his.

"Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace" (Confessions X:27).

Happiness: Only For “People in Power”?

What is “happiness”? 

We live in a society that claims that the "real world" is confined to its material elements, and that the ultimate arbiter of rational human interest is empirical science. 

Everything that appears to be outside of these confines belongs to the realm of dreams or delusions, or at best to matters undefinable, or completely relative to the psychological needs, personal “goals,” desires, wishes, and fantasies of different people. 

Of course, we want to affirm the value of ideals like “happiness” (as well as “goodness,” “honor,” “fidelity,” and the other words we use to signify the aspirations we seem to “care about” most in life). Isn’t this what “freedom” is all about? Aren’t we “free to choose” what makes up our happiness? And then, aren’t we “free to choose” different (even opposing) ways of happiness tomorrow, without answering to any authority beyond our own judgment? “I do me” and “you do you” and everything’s fine… as long as you don’t break the law….

So why are we all so anxious, overwhelmed, and… unhappy? 

If happiness is confined materialistic laws and subjective experiments in self-identification, irrational urges, or the whims of the moment, then life is very burdensome indeed for most of us. Human freedom, it turns out, is a very fragile thing in this world. The chance for happiness seems reserved to those who have power - while the rest of us just have to shuffle along as best we can in this limited existence.

Wait, that can’t be right! The human heart cries out against this ultimate cynicism and discouragement. There must be something “more”… but where can we find it? Must we depend on the scraps that fall from the tables of the powerful? 

Here, serious attention to the real human question "what is happiness?" becomes almost “subversive.” The need for happiness, if we confront it truly, will take us beyond this world, beyond everything, toward an Infinite Mystery which is the only reality that truly corresponds to our hearts. It is a religious question, and human cultures throughout history - regardless of how they have attempted to answer it - have always recognized its religious nature.

But if we really believe that there is nothing meaningful for human life beyond this world and our capacity to manipulate it, then the need for ultimate happiness is desperate, unsettling, even pathological.

It is therefore something to be suppressed. We must not ask this question. We must distract ourselves from it, even though it permeates our being. We must live our lives on the shallow surface of every experience.

The truly religious person, however, is someone who is at least seeking the answer. And the Christian claims that the Answer has come into the world, and is seeking us.

This is a basic reason why Christian faith doesn't make any sense to people in our society. This is why people can't understand why it matters to believers. Indeed, this is why many Christians themselves don't understand the place of faith in their own lives.

We have been conditioned to evade ourselves, to suffocate our hearts, to flee from the deep cry within us that cannot be satisfied by anything in this finite world. And this evasion has become a forgetfulness. We have cheapened and falsified all the terms associated with the question of happiness: love, justice, goodness, truth, beauty, freedom. We no longer remember how to ask the question.

No wonder the Christian proposal makes no sense. Luigi Giussani often cites Reinhold Niebuhr's insight: “Nothing is more incomprehensible than the answer to a question that has never been asked.”

There is, of course, still another possibility. There is the possibility of meeting some real people who have actually begun to be happy. The human person might wake up, remember their heart, and discover that they have been controlled by lies.

Nothing is more subversive to the dominant powers of this world than happy people.

Prayer for Peace and the Queen of Peace

Pope Leo XIV has invited us to observe today (Friday, August 22) as a day of fasting and prayer for peace. Today is the “Octave” of the feast of the Assumption, which is appropriately celebrated as the feast of the “Queenship of Mary.” The Blessed Virgin Mary — the Mother of God, the Theotokos — has taken her place in fullness of the glory of the New Creation, by virtue of the singular grace of her Son who preserved her from original sin and all personal sin in order to associate her in a unique way in the history of the redemption of the world. Mary’s stature is entirely the fruit of the saving love of her Son Jesus; her free cooperation with the obedience of Jesus to the Father is itself the gift and fruit of His grace and entirely dependent on His grace. In turn, we might say that her maternal love for the world and for each one of us is an “intrinsic” (and especially beautiful) facet of the grace He gives us as He leads us on the path to our destiny in God’s Kingdom. Mary is our Mother, and through her maternal mediation we are formed in the whole of our humanity as His brothers and sisters.

It is a great consolation to remember that she is our Mother, especially in these times in which we live. As members of a materially wealthy and spiritually impoverished society — in a world of so much confusion, so much danger, so much suffering — we find it increasingly difficult to distract ourselves from the desperate circumstances of the moment and the unknown future that looms before us. We are living on the edge of chaos, with war so much closer that we realize, and with political leadership that gives little evidence of wisdom (and all too much evidence of foolishness).

It is ultimately a blessing to be drawn up so close to the crisis, in that our hearts are shaken and we must recognize our need for Someone greater than our hearts, to whom we can turn and cry out for the wisdom we cannot give ourselves, the path forward we cannot see, the tasks and the endurance we are called to in these days, in the face of turmoil beyond our understanding (but not beyond the goodness and mercy of the One who sustains us and draws us to Himself). It is a special consolation to know in these times the closeness of Mother Mary and the tenderness of her maternal love that remembers everyone, and mysteriously accompanies us even in the darkest and most terrifying moments, when we feel most alone and defenseless. She carries us into the Heart of her Son, Jesus.

For some of our brothers and sisters, the particular nightmare of open war or other degrading forms of violence is already a dreadful daily experience. We pray especially for them today, and we fast — we freely make sacrifices that create space within our bodily persons to remember God, and to draw closer in solidarity to our suffering brothers and sisters.

Saint Bernard: “Invoke the Name of Jesus”

“Are you troubled? Think but of Jesus, speak but the name of Jesus, the clouds disperse, and peace descends anew from heaven. Have you fallen into sin? So that you fear death? invoke the name of Jesus, and you will soon feel life returning. No obduracy of the soul, no weakness, no coldness of heart can resist this holy name; there is no heart which will not soften and open in tears at this holy name.”

~Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153)

More “Artful August” Scenes

It’s been a wet August, though not especially hot. Here are a bunch of “scenes” that I have worked up with digital art tools in recent weeks. AI is everywhere in the pictorial realm these days, including my own “studios.” Nevertheless, making pictures like these — that begin from real photographs — still requires more “hands-on” work than one might expect.

The horizon of the Blue Ridge in the Shenandoah Valley continues to provide a foundation for most of the scenery I try to create, along with seasonal flowers, creeks, fields, etc. These are various styles:

"Allow the Poor to Enter..."

"Only together, only by becoming a single Body in which even the most fragile participate with full dignity, are we the Body of Christ, the Church of God. This happens when the fire that Jesus came to bring burns away the prejudices, cautions, and fears that still marginalize those who bear the poverty of Christ written in their history. Let us not exclude the Lord from our churches, our homes, and our lives. Let us instead allow the poor to enter, and then we will also make peace with our own poverty, the poverty we fear and deny when we seek tranquility and security at all costs" (Pope Leo XIV).

The Witness of Mary, and the Church's Enduring Fruitfulness

Here is a selection from Pope Leo's homily on the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Nothing I write could come close to the depth of this meditation. So I present a selection from his homily for today (thanks to Vatican Media). The Pope emphasizes that the Assumption — the triumphant fulfillment of Mary's life — is linked to the prayer she gave us in her encounter with Elizabeth while Jesus was yet in her womb. Mary's glorification, soul and body, fulfills the union with Jesus that she lived every moment of her historical life. When we live through faith in Jesus and love for one another, the hope of the resurrection and the promise of God's kingdom begins to transform our lives here and now, and thereby changes our world in which we journey toward the definitive realization of God's kingdom. His glory is manifest in the love and mercy that bring forth new ways of living, and in the light it shines on the meaning of everything in history. Pope Leo emphasizes that "the Resurrection enters our world even today... Prior to being our final destiny, the Resurrection transforms — in soul and body — our dwelling on earth. Mary’s song, Magnificat, strengthens the hope of the humble, the hungry, the faithful servants of God." 

After three months, the worldly "novelty" of a "new Pope" has mostly worn off. The various platforms of secular media shift their preoccupations faster than ever. Indeed, this is a time in history in which it's easy to be "anxious and worried about many things." Our soft-spoken Anglo-American-Hispanic-Peruvian Pope doesn't stir up many headlines, but let us not forget to attend to the spiritual (Spirit-filled) profundity of his teaching. He continually recalls our hearts to the "memory" of Christ the Redeemer and the fruitfulness of our adherence to Him. 

Here is a rich selection from Pope Leo's beautiful homily for today:

"The liturgy of this feast of the Assumption offers us the Gospel passage on the Visitation. Saint Luke recorded in this passage a decisive moment in Mary’s vocation. It is beautiful to recall that day, as we celebrate the crowning moment of her life. Every human story, even that of the Mother of God, is brief on this earth and comes to an end. Yet nothing is lost. When a life ends, its uniqueness shines even more clearly. The Magnificat, which the Gospel places on the lips of the young Mary, now radiates the light of all her days. 

"The Resurrection enters our world even today.  The words and choices of death may seem to prevail, but the life of God breaks through our despair through concrete experiences of fraternity and new gestures of solidarity. Prior to being our final destiny, the Resurrection transforms — in soul and body — our dwelling on earth. Mary’s song, Magnificat, strengthens the hope of the humble, the hungry, the faithful servants of God.  These are the men and women of the Beatitudes who, even in tribulation, already see the invisible: the mighty cast down from their thrones, the rich sent away empty, the promises of God fulfilled. Such experiences should be found in every Christian community. They may seem impossible, but God’s Word continues to be brought to light. When bonds are born, with which we confront evil with good and death with life, we see that nothing is impossible with God (cf. Luke 1:37).

"Sometimes, unfortunately, where human self-reliance prevails, where material comfort and a certain complacency dull the conscience, this faith can grow old.  Then death enters in the form of resignation and complaint, of nostalgia and fear. Instead of letting the old world pass away, one clings to it still, seeking the help of the rich and powerful, which often comes with contempt for the poor and lowly. The Church, however, lives in her fragile members, and she is renewed by their Magnificat. Even in our own day, the poor and persecuted Christian communities, the witnesses of tenderness and forgiveness in places of conflict, and the peacemakers and bridge-builders in a broken world, are the joy of the Church. They are her enduring fruitfulness, the first fruits of the Kingdom to come. Many of them are women, like the elderly Elizabeth and the young Mary — Paschal women, apostles of the Resurrection. Let us be converted by their witness!"

Maximilian Kolbe, Praising God, and Serving Our Neighbors

Today is the feast of Saint Maximilian Kolbe. He taught us to praise and love God always, to conquer indifference, to give ourselves in loving service to our neighbors, to follow Jesus through Mary in the Church.

Economy and the “Inexhaustible Treasure”

Jesus said to his disciples: “Do not be afraid any longer, little flock, for your Father is pleased to give you the kingdom. Sell your belongings and give alms. Provide money bags for yourselves that do not wear out, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can reach nor moth destroy. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be" (Luke 12:32-35).

Where is our "treasure"?

We live in a society that worships money. 

Money has a legitimate place in life, as a medium of exchange and a symbol of the material value of our work (which is not the whole value of the personal self-giving action that constitutes human work). We earn money because our work, our personal effort to invest ourselves and participate in building up a human environment, manifests and communicates our transcendent human dignity and inestimable value as unique, free human persons, even if we perform the humblest of tasks. 

Workers cannot be bought, as if they were nothing more than material tools along with other “things” in the industrial production process. They are persons who contribute themselves, through their work, to a production project. For this they have a claim on the owners to be just (and further, to be equitable and charitable), They have a claim to be respected, treated with dignity, and given the means to take care of themselves and their families. Money enters in here, as a “medium of exchange” that is not just “transactional” but that represents — in part — the recognition of a common human bond, a sense of solidarity among all the persons involved in realizing the task that has been undertaken. The “wage” should be just, remembering that “justice” is a foundation for relationships with persons. A true “just wage” is not only materially adequate. It should be given as a sign of the owner’s appreciation of the persons with whom he or she is working together to realize a project. 

Some workers are more personally invested than others. “Equality,” therefore, is naturally proportional: the point is not that “everyone gets the exact same payment” (which, ironically, would reduce human work to a mere function, a thing that is “bought,” that has a price that defines its value). The just wage instead, is one way the employer prioritizes the personal value of the worker and his or her family. It serves the workers’ right to live and flourish by making it possible for them to obtain the material necessities of this life and some of its comforts as well, and also to save and eventually invest in their own property, to acquire “ownership” — concrete stewardship over a stable “place” with its own resources, where the worker is free to develop his or her own creativity. Here we see (I hope) some elements of what a person-centered economy might look like.

Money also enables people to help one another, and also support institutions that enrich their hearts, minds, and souls in literally priceless ways (consider their fundamental connection to their churches, that must be supported in order to carry out their ministry). These institutions still require food, water, electricity, repairs, and the resources to take care of their own employees. Everyone has material needs and can benefit from some of the comforts that reinvigorate life. This is all legitimate, and makes money necessary in society. 

But a human culture is spoiled when material things are ripped from the place where they contribute to an integral human life, and are used to measure the value of human persons. We all need “things” to meet our own essential material needs, but something is wrong if those needs preoccupy us, cause us to worry, or loom over us pretending to be the limits of the meaning of human existence. "Humans do not live on bread alone." Food, possessions, success, wealth are not the meaning of life. Still, even though our life is a journey toward a transcendent fulfillment beyond what we can imagine, we are journeying as bodily persons living on this earth, and so we need sustenance for our pilgrimage. 

We need some comforts too, which can help us live as bodily persons with a greater energy and scope. We need to rest, relax sometimes, and to have spaces of tranquility, for the growth of our families, and for hospitality. These are modest comforts that provide space for a healthier, more expansive, more magnanimous life: a life worthy of human dignity. Nevertheless, it is a life that "moves" toward God's kingdom. There is a problem when — instead of seeking reasonable comforts and useful things for the sake of living with an attention to our humanity, searching for truth and goodness, living generously and sharing with our companions on this journey toward the Inexhaustible Treasure  — we find ourselves living for the sake of acquiring ever greater comforts and luxuries, and ever more sophisticated technological and other devices beyond the practical paths opened up here and now for ours or anyone else's human development. 

If we live to acquire stuff, and we make these (ultimately limited) "riches" the measure of what it means to live, we will be ultimately disappointed. No security system can protect our superfluous stuff from the reach of the most subtle of all thieves: time. What we once thought was so precious about the things we bought fades or becomes useless or, eventually, boring. Boredom is the “moth” that inevitably destroys finite things for persons who seek from them the infinite satisfaction for which our hearts were made. But the world of consumerism fills our ears with lies and distracts us with false promises. So we throw away our old things and buy new things; then, eventually, we throw them away too. We become our own thieves, stealing from ourselves, stealing away the possibilities for a great life in which every day is a sign that draws us toward eternal fulfillment, toward the Kingdom that God ardently longs to give to His children. But we live in distraction, grasping blindly at the edges of things, desperate and dissatisfied. We rely on our own strength and measure, and the experience of our own inadequacy makes us afraid. This is what a materialistic consumer economy looks like.

But Jesus says, “Do not be afraid.” God loves us. He has created us to share forever in His Infinite Glory. He has made us for Himself, and He wants to give Himself to us. Let us place out hope in Him, and “make room” in our hearts for the Kingdom He is pleased to bestow upon us.

August Scenes

Here is some digital artwork for the month of August.

It seems that a "Fall" semester begins in a couple of weeks. But August 2025 still feels like Summer, with heat, humidity, and thunderstorms. And still quite a bit of sunlight into the evening.

Nagasaki, Edith Stein, and Prayer for Peace

We remember many persons and many moments in these dramatic days of August. We mourn the past with an unconditional sorrow, while we also recognize in these events (in pictures like these) that our world continues to hold and put its trust in vast and even greater powers for destruction. We have lost connection with reality if we think that we can somehow “balance” these powers by our own cleverness, or by making “deals” while ignoring the precariousness of the future and the seriousness of what is at stake. We are not playing cards. This is not a game.

Today marks 80 years since the monstrous nuclear blast that indiscriminately wreaked and poisoned the city and the civilian population of Nagasaki in Japan. This was the second city that the USA afflicted with its new, horrible weapon of massive explosive power and unprecedented release of huge levels of deadly radiation. The blast killed tens of thousands in agony, and the radiation continued to kill and kill and sicken and wound and disfigure innocent civilians beyond anyone’s calculation.

The choice was made to drop these bombs without any idea what kind of damage they would do, how long it would last, and how many people would suffer. We still don’t know the whole awful story, much less the potential consequences of the various nuclear weapons we now hold, along with too many other nations, still pointing them at one another, still counting on a system of mutual threats to unleash unimaginable catastrophe on the world and presuming that everyone will be too scared to use them. This is what we call “peace” in the modern world.

Pope Saint John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis, and now Pope Leo XIV didn’t (and don’t) regard this as a “peace” worthy of an interconnected world of human persons created in the image of God.

These words of John Paul II, and the prayer that accompanies them, are direct and powerful. Let’s ponder these words and pray this prayer. Let’s also pray the Rosary for peace, for conversion, for God’s mercy to empower us to live as brothers and sisters, and to reject the gluttony of consumerism and the sloth of indifference. May the Lord’s merciful love change our hearts and move us to embark on the arduous path of dialogue, willingness to forgive, to listen, to be patient, to be clear about our principles while distinguishing them from our prejudices, and to be willing to learn and grow from real encounters with other people. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are a warning to all of us that the only reasonable path is to work together to build real foundations for peace.

If we feel that this is impossible; if we feel powerless in relation to the massive technological powers that we have unleashed and that are developing even now in new and incalculable ways, then we can still begin. We can pray. We can give our powerlessness to God, and allow Him to shape us anew according to His will, to learn the ways of His love and compassion.

August 9th is also the feast of Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) who was martyred in Auschwitz-Birkenau on August 9, 1942. She was a profound philosopher, born into Jewish heritage, then passing through atheism and arriving — by the grace of God — at faith in Jesus, conversion to His Catholic Church, and the vocation to give herself totally to God as a Carmelite nun. The Nazis still came for her, but all their power couldn’t rob from her the love of her heart.

Her words here are a constant inspiration to me: “Become like a child and lay your life, with all the searching and ruminating, into the Father’s hand” (Edith Stein).

Saint Dominic: The “Example of Humility”

August 8 is the feast of Saint Dominic. “Arm yourself with prayer rather than a sword; wear humility rather than fine clothes,” said Saint Dominic. Those who do not have faith “are converted by an example of humility and other virtues far more readily than by any external display or verbal battles.”

JJ's Quotations, Thoughts, and Aphorisms, No. 1

“I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it” (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964).

Here is a quotation from one of the pioneers of modern "Media Studies," Marshall McLuhan. Right now, I am inclined to reflect generally on McLuhan and his methodology, rather than the content of this particular quotation (it's interesting, but I have to think more about it before writing).

We still have a lot to learn from Marshall McLuhan. The tweedy literature professor at the University of Toronto liked to examine how forms of media affect our perceptions. His 1964 book Understanding Media was written in an aphoristic style, which McLuhan found useful for "probing" new issues and provoking others to think about them. In his many years of teaching literature, McLuhan wrestled with the "problem" of "disconnection" between teachers and students growing up in mid-20th-century Anglo-America (many teachers would say that this is still a problem in 2025). He saw that the unprecedented rise of mass media was having a much deeper impact on the way students - and people in general - were perceiving and experiencing things, which tended to "shape" the environment and forms of their awareness, intellectual development, and communication. In articles and books published after World War II, McLuhan began to analyse and probe the impact of modern advertising (The Mechanical Bride, 1951) and electronic media in the context of the dominant "print culture" that had shaped the Western ways of learning since the revolutionary invention of the printing press in the 15th century (The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1961). He had a lot of fascinating insights about how media technology influenced historical developments in ways that were not much noted or studied at the time.

With Understanding Media, McLuhan dealt with the major cultural changes that were being fostered by "new media," especially the electronic audiovisual communications device that was finding its way into every living room in the affluent world and was becoming increasingly accessible everywhere on earth: Television. What Professor McLuhan didn't expect in 1964 was that his precient thoughts and his questioning and probing style would be taken up into the dramatic and wildly experimental decade that was emerging, and that his own persona would rise to celebrity status. By age 60, McLuhan had attained the status of a media guru, an "icon" of the TV age ("icon" is one of many terms he coined and/or repurposed specifically with reference to the social impact of media). But he remained focused on his work and "detached" from his ballooning image, except to treat it as another phenomenon to probe and question, while appreciating its ironic and humorous aspects.

McLuhan's emphasis on understanding the impact of media was an effort he undertook in order to cultivate a wisdom about the gains (and losses) of media technology for human ways of living, learning, and communicating - and how to foster a "media ecology" to focus on the primacy of the human person in new media environments. He didn't particularly invite all the attention he received (in fact he saw many grave dangers in emerging media) but his open analytical style and his awareness of the magnitude of the ongoing new media revolution gained the attention of a wide variety of personalities in the explosive and confusing cultural shifts of the late 1960s-1970s, up until his own illness and death in 1980.

Marshall McLuhan wanted to get people to think, because he was aware of the history of communications media (beginning with the fundamental developments of spoken and written language), and the influence of media on human perception, on how humans receive and process information, and on the formation of dominant cultural mentalities. Media "extend" the reach of our senses, changing the way we interact and communicate. This can enrich us in many ways, but it is also prone to "unbalancing" our natural sense integration and the construction of communicative "symbols," and thus potentially distorting our process of coming to know and engage reality in all of its factors.

JJ could say many more things about Marshall McLuhan, but I want to introduce here a blogging approach that I call "Quotations, Thoughts, and Aphorisms," which is in part inspired by McLuhan's efforts to understand media. McLuhan recognized his own ignorance, a learned ignorance, and put forth many tentative statements (like the one quoted at the beginning of this long post, which I'm not going to consider further today) and questions that might awaken insight into the powerful developments of his times (and ours). I can no longer afford to wait until I have "thought everything through" (which seldom happens anyway) before expressing what's going on in my mind and in my studies. There is an urgent need to explore the impact on human society and culture of the emerging new forces of this ongoing tumultuous epochal transition we are experiencing in various ways all over the world. So I embark here on another broad categorical literary experiment in my blogging efforts. The QTA segment may or may not become a "future feature" on the blog. Let's see what happens.

One mode of exploration begins (but doesn't necessarily end) with a quotation. I often post (or visually present) quotations on the blog, and I shall continue to do so. Some quotations stand on their own, while others prompt commentary. Perhaps such commentary will develop as I write it into it's own independent post.

Providing a bit of context, commentary, or just appropriately-placed sarcasm will also increase the range of what I can quote. In this way, I can post not only edifying quotations, but also some of the more clever, sometimes nasty, but paradoxically perceptive statements that recent history's more ambivalent or downright villainous characters have said or written. 

"Political power comes from the barrel of a gun" (Chairman Mao Zedong).

Too much of what Chairman Mao said remains relevant and influential today. These words are relevant to China at this very moment, where Emperor Xi Jinping may be struggling to maintain his power within the current "Communist Dynasty" that rules over a fifth of the world's population (unfortunately, the "dynasty" remains entrenched). But I'm not going to go down this rabbit hole right now. Stay tuned...

My "Study Projects" (East Asia Studies, Media Theory, Technology and Culture) are populated by more rogues than saints — as well as a vast majority of people navigating the stormy waters of perplexity, ambiguity, and/or attempts at compromise. There is much material here for critical thinking and "sorting through," as well as expressions that shed light on recent historical events and the immense sufferings of peoples. Some of them are shocking, but they identify spheres of historical memory of the recent past that must not be forgotten.

Also, at this point in my life, I have many "musings" — questions, tentative assessments, hunches, intuitions, quips, and many (oh so many!) ironic observations. It might be better to try to formulate and express them, rather than just ruminating about them inside my head.

And I have plenty of ideas and tendencies of thought that are wrong and/or foolish. Why confine them to my over-cluttered brain space? Perhaps some "fresh air" will disperse them into the wisps of incoherence that they truly are, or at least turn them around in the right direction.

My research projects these days lead to more questions than answers, and more awareness of my own ignorance. I am beginning to learn how to formulate good questions and sketch out what seem to me to be pathways toward insight. The most important work of my life is not something I will be able to finish. At best, I might manage to outline a "Preface" to the study of themes and environments that the coming generations will not be able to ignore if humans hope to live more fraternally in a technologically supercharged, globally interactive world that is simultaneously ecologically imperiled and full of gigantic new possibilities.

The Bombing of Hiroshima, Eighty Years Later

Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. Eighty years ago.

100,000 people died instantly. Tens of thousands more died horribly in the minutes, hours, and days that followed: "...their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks” (John Hersey, Hiroshima).

O God, have mercy on us!

A Hyper-powered New Epoch is Emerging in Our World

"True patriotism never seeks to advance the well-being of one's own nation at the expense of others. For in the end this would harm one's own nation as well: doing wrong damages both aggressor and victim" (Saint John Paul II, Speech to United Nations, 1995).

Thirty years later, it is even more clear that nations must collaborate for the well-being of the whole human family and our earthly home... indeed, for the very survival of these. Collaboration, however, cannot be manufactured by a global totalitarian system (note the monstrous failed experiments of the last century). Nor will it come about by the magic of some "invisible hand," as the unsought consequence of nations closing in on themselves, betraying cooperative commitments, and limiting themselves to making transactional "deals" with each other that are inherently unstable and ignore the needs of the rest of the world.

We inhabit local places directly, but we have reached out to wider geographic places by the technological "extensions" of our presence via rapid and facile mobility, enhanced electronic communications, and all the engagements and activities they make possible. We have unprecedented and astonishing possibilities in this 21st century which inevitably involve us in an exponentially bigger "space," drawing us to reach out in exploration toward greater understanding, empathy, and real communicative connection with other persons over great distances.

The human "reach," however, remains limited in the temporal realm, even with all the "extensions" of transportation and communication that make us in some respects "larger" but also carry the danger of misshaping  our spatio-temporal ground, distracting and distorting our perception, and over-extending and exhausting our capacities. As bodily persons, we need some kind of locality. The vast majority of us need a strong local foundation for a dignified human life with its proximate physical needs and its engagement with firm integral human relationships. 

Fundamentally, there are the relationships that originate from and are generated by our natural bodily persons. Here we refer to the proper features of our "historical" roots and expression-by-self-giving that move through time in the lineage of our families, wherein we receive the gift of human life and give it to others, thereby "living" an organic bodily-personal "extension" from past-to-present-to-future and collaborating naturally in the intergenerational history of the whole human family. For embodied personal existence, this also entails the gifts and responsibilities of human formation, concrete care, and the most specific forms of love by which as bodily persons we naturally participate in the "movement" of human history. 

We all are involved in at least some features of this lineage and the personal bonds built by it (by our origin from our parents, and at least "mediately" through extended family bonds or those very real bonds forged by the profound human "re-generative decision" of adoption). Furthermore, basic human community is facilitated by local, physical proximity that is usually essential (at least) for securing fundamental physical needs, but that also provides a larger space for interpersonal and communal life constituted by the freedom and creativity of people sharing life together in a given, natural fashion. Human beings are thus "naturally networked," and this is what has inspired us to develop further techniques of "networking" with wider spaces and more distant peoples and activities — by traveling, by hospitality, by study, and by communications media.

It is essential to our humanity that we continue to have families, communities, nations, and peoples whose own responsibilities and actions must be respected and valued according to the principle of subsidiarity. At the same time, the various spheres of subsidiary action naturally seek to be interconnected and at the service of one another through a conscious and vital solidarity. 

We find ourselves today in a whole world of unprecedented mutual dependence, co-involvement, and — thanks to the ongoing technological revolution — a proximity to one another over distances that can be enriching in many ways but also strange, partial and ephemeral, easily misunderstood, and sometimes invasive or too much to handle. It's easy to lose our balance, our sense of place, and become isolated. We are also caught up more and more in systems we don't understand, and sustained by powers we do not know. We are still limited and ignorant of many things in a world whose interdependence benefits some at the expense of others, with new forms of oppressive poverty, and possibly new reckless experiments of thoughtless plundering of the physical world. These new forms of violence are among the most imminent dangers that threaten all of us in the hyper-powered emergence of this new epoch in human history.

For the whole human family to flourish today and tomorrow, we must grow in the awareness that the earth is the common home of everyone, and that we are all brothers and sisters. We must remember that the physical creation is good, and that it has been entrusted to us to contemplate the wisdom and beauty of its Origin through all the intrinsic, diverse, and interrelated significance of created things (with their mysterious, constitutive, distinctive qualities as signs of the unfathomable Divine omnipotence and gratuitousness).

The world has also been entrusted to the freedom of our creative work to understand and further its vital development — with a freedom informed by wisdom and responsibility, attention, care, and restraint in governing our own ambitions as we develop harmoniously and reap with gratitude the fruits of creative things.

We can only be stewards of creation together, as children of God, as brothers and sisters of His Son who draws all things to Himself by the Holy Spirit. Indeed, this "fraternity" — this communion of persons - is who we are called to be, together.

"A Love That Wanted Us..."

"Our existence did not originate from our decision, but from a love that wanted us... a love that precedes us, surprises us and is infinitely greater than us: the love of God" (Pope Leo XIV).