Monthly Archives: March 2019

We were part of the Catholic Worker Women’s Pilgrimage to Rome to pray and vigil outside the Clergy Sexual Abuse Summit at the Vatican in February. We would like to share a bit about that trip. We came back on fire  to continue the efforts towards Church reform. Our T-shirts carried this message for the Pope and Bishops:Continue reading “An Invitation From the Catholic Worker on Lehigh Avenue in Philadelphia”

I would be delighted to receive your reactions to my blog posts. If you wish, leave a reply or email me at ronwendling@outlook.com. Thank you.

This book gets you thinking about the purposes of nursing homes, the varieties in meaning of the term “assisted living,” hospice care, and especially about how the way we treat the elderly is dominated by institutionalized medicine. The author questions whether medicine’s goal of merely keeping elderly people “safe” in nursing homes is in conflictContinue reading “How Humane is our “Care” for the Elderly?: A Review of “Being Mortal” by Atul Gawande”

Here is a video of our daughter, Jen, doing what she loves to do: welding. Notice the welding helmet and the machine she is using, which is a Miller plasma cutter. Jen is cutting snowdrops into an old toolbox as a design for a garden club member. As a welding teacher she is challenging genderContinue reading “Creativity”

As I discovered in my grade school visit to our local library (see previous post), Phoenicia was a flourishing maritime civilization that peaked around 1,000 years before the birth of Christ. When my wife and I visited Israel (see other previous posts) and headed north along the Mediterranean from Tel Aviv toward Haifa, we wereContinue reading “The Phoenicians”

I have often wondered why I chose a career in academics. I flirted with the idea of becoming a newspaper journalist because I admired my journalist aunt. I also thought of becoming a lawyer because a lot of bright lights where I went to high school seemed headed in that direction. But the more IContinue reading “Grade School Academic”

Notice the use of light (especially the first three) and the geometric forms (especially the last two). I find the interior space appropriately religious but far from threatening.

Gaudi was a modernist Spanish architect with a one of a kind style, and his various works are popular tourist sites all around Barcelona.  None is more visited, however, than his still incomplete magnum opus, Sagrada Familia. Gaudi drew his inspiration from geometrical forms he found in nature, but his main architectural inspiration was theContinue reading “Antoni Gaudi’s Barcelona Church: Sagrada Familia (The Exterior)”

As you make your way down toward the Barcelona Harbor it is easy to find this Church, constructed in the 14th century.  Named Our Lady of the Sea, the church was then closer to the sea than it is today and its neighborhood, as is typical of city harbors, was  home to many lower classContinue reading “Church of Santa Maria Del Mar in Barcelona”

    John Marcher, the central character in this short story, is secretly convinced that he has at least one important characteristic of a Romantic hero. He believes he is destined to experience something, perhaps good perhaps not, but in any case extraordinary. But the true hero here is not John, but May Bartram, theContinue reading “Regretting His Romanticism: A Review of The Beast in the Jungle (1903) by Henry James”