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3 days ago | 
post-gazette.com | David Mills
“It’s true that if you venture out onto the street, the same thing could happen to you as could happen to anyone: you could have an accident,” said the Argentinian cleric Jorge Bergoglio in a book-length interview he gave three years before becoming Pope Francis.
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1 week ago | 
post-gazette.com | David Mills
“I don’t believe one religion could be right as far as heaven goes,” said Linda, whom I happened to sit next to one evening at my local place. “So many people Jewish, so many people Catholic, so many people everything else,” one religion couldn’t claim heaven for itself. “If you believe in God, you believe in God.”I asked people there what they thought about religion.
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2 weeks ago | 
post-gazette.com | David Mills
People started chanting “Sell the team” in the sixth inning of the Pirates home opener, with the Yankees ahead 7 to 1. They didn’t chant again, surprisingly, I’m guessing because, just 1/243rd of the way through the season, they had already fallen into despair. My friend, a Bronx-born Yankees fan, was enjoying the carnage, though feeling bad for the Pirates.
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3 weeks ago | 
post-gazette.com | David Mills
“So I come out of the stall — I’m not on yet — and there are these guys in the women’s room,” says the evening bartender at our local place, talking to me and another regular. This happened just before I arrived. It’s a townie dive bar and though not, with all the smoking and the swearing, a place of traditional middle class decorum, it is a place that insists on respect for the rules of civil society.
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4 weeks ago | 
post-gazette.com | David Mills
She’s not to everyone’s taste. Tuesday was the 100th birthday of the writer Flannery O’Connor. She’s got her own volume in the Library of America series, the writer’s equivalent of the Hall of Fame, but you’re more likely to read her in a classroom than a book club. Her stories appeared not only in the more literary magazines, but in places like The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire and Mademoiselle.
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1 month ago | 
fresnobee.com | David Mills
My young friends told me the same story as the novelist: People don't see them when they're behind the counter. They might greet the customer by name and he'd looked confused or even annoyed, till something in his brain would click and he realized he was speaking to someone he knew. They were the help, and invisible. Writing novels not paying the bills, Camilla Grudova worked as a server at the same arts center where her own book had been launched and she'd been a celebrity.
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1 month ago | 
oursundayvisitor.com | David Mills
The character of the minister matters to his work. And each of us, in the way we live, is a minister to others, whose words and actions preach well or badly. St. Paul tells the Christians in Philippi that his imprisonment — he was probably under house arrest in Rome — had only spread the Gospel further and encouraged most of the brethren to preach more boldly (Phil 1:12-14).
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1 month ago | 
post-gazette.com | David Mills
My young friends told me the same story as the novelist: People don’t see them when they’re behind the counter. They might greet the customer by name and he’d looked confused or even annoyed, till something in his brain would click and he realized he was speaking to someone he knew. They were the help, and invisible. Writing novels not paying the bills, Camilla Grudova worked as a server at the same arts center where her own book had been launched and she’d been a celebrity.
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1 month ago | 
post-gazette.com | David Mills |Clifford Bob
As I steer my way through the back nine of life — which is more generous and less truthful than saying the ninth inning of life — I thought that I would derive boundless joy from my favorite sports teams. Oh cruel fate. The Steelers, Bucs, Pens, and WVU’s football and basketball teams bounce between terrible and mediocre. Where, outside of family, to look for unbridled joy? There’s no obvious answer.
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1 month ago | 
post-gazette.com | David Mills
Elon Musk was partly right about the dangers of empathy. Speaking recently on the Joe Rogan Experience, he declared “the fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy.” It had, said the richest man in the world and head of President Donald Trump’s effort to radically shrink the federal government, been “weaponized.”Rogan and Musk had been talking about California giving free medical care to illegal aliens.
