The House of the Spirits - Isabela Allende
“Memory is fragile, the space of a single life so brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events. We can’t gauge the consequences of our acts. We believe in the fiction of time.”
Towboat — A … pushing burdens upriver.
Humaneness — The fragile thread of ... fraying when cruelty reigns.
Eyewitness — “To forget the dead would be akin to killing a second time. I am an … to their deaths. I owe them this testimony.” (Night - Elie Wiesel)
Helpless — To stand …, watching consequences unfold without the power to alter them.
Overwhelming — The … rush that leaves memory staggered and grasping at fragments.
Unconscionable — “with a wanton and …. cruelty.” (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - Frederick Douglass)
See — “To … a World in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a wild flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.” (Auguries of Innocence - William Blake)
Effective — “The system was ….: everyone was afraid, everyone lied, and everyone was guilty.” (The Gulag Archipelago - Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
Opaque — “And somehow it was …. to his understanding.” (1984 - George Orwell)
Foggiest — “I haven’t the … idea what is going on,” I said truthfully. (The Quiet American - Graham Greene)
Takeaway — “The … from my grief was this: you do not get over it, you just carry it.” (The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion)
Hostage — “We don’t realize it until we are taken ….” (I Am Malala - Malala Yousafzai)
Estimate — “There is no way to … the number of lives that have been lost at sea.” (The Perfect Storm - Sebastian Junger)
Stiffen — “I saw the body …, jerk, and then lie still.” (A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway)
Pinochet — Augusto José Ramón …. Ugarte (1915–2006), dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990. He persecuted leftists, socialists, and political critics resulting in the executions of up to 3,200 people, the internment of as many as 80,000, and the torture of tens of thousands.
Ineffective — “But if the last page has been written by someone else, then the whole book is worthless, ….” (Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler)
Rhetoric — “…. is a part of politics, the art of persuading the multitude by the use of speech.” (De Inventione - Cicero)
Irreconcilable — “The racial tensions are not about to be resolved because the root of the matter is ….” (The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin)
Technique — “The fact is that soon everyone improvises a … for himself in order to survive.” (If This Is a Man / Survival in Auschwitz - Primo Levi)
Segregate — “…. substitutes an ‘I it’ relationship for an ‘I thou’ relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things.” (Letter from Birmingham Jail - Martin Luther King Jr.)
(Composed on my way to Italy - April 27, 2025)
Philip Shenon - Jesus Wept
"We humbly beg God's forgiveness and ask pardon if our brethren feel injured. It had been a thousand years since the split between Catholics and the Orthodox, more than four centuries since the break with Protestants."
For John Thornton (1966–2025)
Friend. Founder. Fierce believer in truth.
This acrostic is in honor of you.
You built things that mattered.
You saw journalism as a public good and made it real.
You gave others a platform to speak.
Proof - “As this book will document, there is clear .... that John Paul and Benedict joined in a wide-ranging conspiracy to shield child molesters from justice.” (Book - Author)
Headstrong - “The life of an intelligent, .... woman in 9th-century Europe, the kind of woman who might have dared such an adventure in an era when obedience was a woman’s most admired trait” (Pope Joan - Donna Cross)
Infallible - “Küng argued that the concept of an ... pope had never been valid and was imposed in 1870 only because of the bullying of Pius IX.” (Book - Author)
Lust's - "Love comforteth like sunshine after rain, but .... effect is tempest after sun." (Venus and Adonis - William Shakespeare)
Invertebrates - “They were moral ...., spineless before power and silent in the face of sin, choosing institution over integrity.” (Papal Sin - Garry Wills)
Profess - “Many ... faith, but few are willing to carry its burden when it demands truth over tradition." (Constantine’s Sword - James Carroll)
Share - "Jesus. We really do .... the same brain. I developed a minor obsession with Amor Towles a year or so ago." (Text message from John Thornton to Lee Walker)
Hammerheaded - “Only the most ... ideologues could look at centuries of suffering and still insist the Church had never erred.” (God Is Not Great - Christopher Hitchens)
Eucharist - “The wine was cheap, the .... wafer stale, but somehow the mystery held—God smuggled in under cover of carbs.” (Traveling Mercies - Anne Lamott)
Newsboys - “The ... cried the scandals on street corners while the bishops stayed silent in cathedrals—truth shouted by children, buried by men in robes.” (“The Boys on the Steps” - Maureen Dowd)
Oxygenated - “In that moment, it felt like the whole Church took one deep, ... breath—truth had finally been spoken aloud.” (Breath of Grace - Mary Gordon)
Neighbor - “The command to love one’s ... becomes a scandal when the Church cannot protect the children next door.” (The Givenness of Things - Marilynne Robinson)
John Thornton - (1966-2025) the founder of The Texas Tribune and one of the most vital and influential leaders in nonprofit journalism
Eunuchs - “In the courts of kings and cathedrals alike, the ... stood silent—trusted with access, stripped of power, watching it all unfold.” (The Master’s Chamber - Colm Tóibín)
Seedbed - “The Church was meant to be the ... of grace; instead, it too often became the greenhouse of guilt, shielding rot from the light.” (Learning to Walk in the Dark = Barbara Brown Taylor)
Unwonted - “In the silence of the confessional, it was an ... courage that first named what others had only whispered.” (Confessions of a Quiet Country - Elizabeth Strout)
Strikebreak - “To defend the institution, they crossed the line—every silence, every sealed file a spiritual ... against the faithful.” (Lead Us Not into Temptation - Jason Berry)
Wichita - John Thornton was born in ...., Kansas in 1966.
Enfant - “The Church claimed to serve the ... Jésus, yet it failed the ....s in its pews—sacrificing flesh to preserve façade.” (Les Voix Étouffées - Laurent Gaudé)
Putted - “While Rome burned, they ... through PR talking points like weekend golfers—measured, mannered, missing the hole entirely.” (Par for the Clergy - Frank Bruni)
Theocratic - “What began as a movement of the heart calcified into a ... machine—shielding authority, resisting reform, and punishing truth.” (Gods and Powers - Elaine Pagels)
M Bjornerud - Turning to Stone
"I had trained myself to set any such notions aside in order to develop an objective analytical understanding of nature. The terrain was animate, sentient, creative. It would just take me thirty years to say that out loud."
Mist - "The morning light pours down through the tall trees onto the open space in front of the cabin, sunbeams everywhere and... floating like freshly minted souls." (Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami)
Basalt - "This process created the smooth...ic lava plains of the moon, including the Sea of Tranquility, where Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar module.... was thus the first rock humans encountered on another world." (Book - Author)
Jurassic - "But with the rise of geological prospecting elsewhere, names began to creep in from all over.... refers to the Jura Mountains on the border of France and Switzerland. Permian recalls the former Russian province of Perm in the Ural Mountains." (A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition - Bill Bryson)
Outfit - "We now know that the separate bookkeeping devised for Blackwater, DynCorp, and similar...s was part of a careful displacement of oversight from Congress to the vice president and the stewards of his policies." (Moral Imagination - David Bromwich)
Redden - "I also collected a suspiciously light cynthia moth cocoon. My fingers were stiff and ....ed with cold, and my nose ran. I had forgotten the Law of the Wild, which is, "Carry Kleenex." (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Annie Dillard)
Norway - "In 1905, John Munro Longyear was prospecting in a remote part of northern... with an eye toward opening a new iron range. But he needed coal for smelting, the nearest coalfields were on Svalbard-vestiges of an ancient tropical forest on those polar islands" (Timefulness - Author)
Enjoyed "I am willing to grant that some groups may have.... an edge but I suspect that the second interpretation grasps a central truth about evolution. The Burgess Shale promotes a radical view of evolutionary pathways and predictability." (Wonderful Life - Stephen Jay Gould)
Rhyolite - "There are three major tectonic settings where granite (and its volcanic equivalent, ....) is forming on Earth today: continental arcs such as the Cascades or Andes; continental rift zones like the East African rift; and continental hotspots like Yellowstone." (Book - Author)
Unsteady - "The ice slopes towards the sinkhole and so too does the light, as if pulled into it. We approach it with care-this black hole set within blue-black ice-conscious of our footing, of how easy a slip would be. A few yards from its edge we stop and regard it briefly, shivering and chilled." (Underland - Robert Macfarlane)
Devastated - "It's impossible to give anything close to a full account of the various species, genera, families, and even whole orders that went extinct at the K-T boundary. Mammals' ranks were....; something like two-thirds of the mammalian families living at the end of the Cretaceous disappear at the boundary." (The Sixth Extinction - Elizabeth Kolbert)
Tradition - "The poison may also be passed on from mother to offspring. Insecticide residues have been recovered from human milk - chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides freely cross the barrier of the placenta, the....al protective shield between the embryo and harmful substances in the mother's body." (Silent Spring - Rachel Carson)
Uranium - "uranium has a specific weight of 19, much more than lead, twice as much as copper: the gift given to Bonino by the Nazi aeronaut-astronauts could not be..... But if it wasn't...., what was it?" (The Periodic Table - Primo Levi)
Rainwater - "The tightly folded Appalachians are something like the ribs of a washboard. In the Paleozoic era, when the tectonic washboard was made and repeatedly lifted from the east, falling... gathering in streams found its way westward across the ribs." (In Suspect Terrain - John McPhee)
Novena - "Whole devotions dropped from use, indulgences (Luther's old point of contention), ....s, even the Mass, the central and most stable shared act of the church, had become unrecognizable-a thing of guitars instead of the organ, of English instead of Latin, of youth-culture fads instead of ancient rites." (Bare Ruined Choirs - Garry Wills)
Iridium - "We then had a mystery: the origin of the clay layer... appeared to be extraterrestrial. We first guessed that it had come from a nearby supernova explosion. Some astrophysicists had proposed that the K/T extinction had been triggered by such an explosion" (Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist - Luis W. Alvarez)
Neotectonics- "But the curriculum was still anchored in the logic of nineteenth-century museums. The emerging fields of geochemistry, ...., and climate science were simply absent, or at best, wedged in as footnotes on the last day of traditional courses." (Book - Author)
Gentle - "Combining the two extreme ends of physics-cosmology, the study of the universe, and quantum mechanics, the study of atomic and subatomic systems-is ambitious by any standard. But that hasn't stopped some distinguished physicists from working on the topic. First up was John Wheeler in the 1960s, who argued that quantum uncertainty would fuzz out the singularity, replacing the infinite curvature of spacetime with something....r and more complex." (The Goldilocks Enigma - Paul Davies)
Thousand - "We are equipped to appreciate processes that take seconds, minutes, years or, at most, decades to complete. Darwinism is a theory of cumulative processes so slow that they take between....s and millions of decades to complete. All our intuitive judgements of what is probable turn out to be wrong by many orders of magnitude. Our well-tuned apparatus of scepticism and subjective probability-theory misfires by huge margins, because it is tuned-Ironically, by evolution itself - to work within a lifetime of a few decades. It requires effort of the imagination to escape from the prison of familiar timescale" (The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins)
Ophiolites - "Most exposures of peridotite and serpentinite occur in rare places around the globe, where subduction somehow went awry and slabs of oceanic lithosphere were thrust onto continental crust. These "misshelved" rock complexes are called...., and famous examples occur in Newfoundland, Northern California, Oman, and Cyprus." (Book - Author)
Stealth - "The numbers showed a pattern: tiny changes grew quietly until they took over the whole system. Scientists had to rethink what it meant to predict anything at all." (Chaos: Making a New Science - James Gleick)
Tachylyte - "Pseudo..... is a dark, glassy rock formed when frictional melting occurs along a fault during an earthquake. Even many geologists find its name befuddling because they've never heard of "true".... Despite its obscure name, however, pseudo.... rewards study because they are the closest we can get to witnessing the deep origins of earthquakes."(Book - Author)
Overtaken - "Nature's own rhythms have been.... by human activities. What once took millennia now happens in decades." (The End of Nature - Bill McKibben)
NAFTA - "Companies found they could move their plants across the border under .... and leave U.S. environmental regulations behind at the Rio Grande." (Living Downstream - Sandra Steingraber)
Estate - "In Staffordshire, on the... of a relation, where I had ample means of investigation, there was a large and extremely barren heath, which had never been touched by the hand of man" (The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin)
Haidt - The Anxious Generation
"Companies that strive to maximize engagement by using psychological tricks to keep young people clicking were the worst offenders. Social media companies hooked children by designing a firehose of addictive content."
Hyper - "When adolescents have continuous access to a smartphone at that developmentally sensitive age, it may interfere with their maturing ability to focus. Studies show that adolescents with attention deficit....activity disorder (ADHD) are heavier users of smartphones and video games" (Book - Author)
Ankle - "My lord, as I was sewing in my closet, lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbrac'd, no hat upon his head, his stockings foul'd, ungart'red, and down-gyved to his.... (Hamlet - Shakespeare)
Introvert - "The....'s way of being in the world this deep, sustained attention to inner experience-represents not a retreat from reality but rather a different, equally vatid way of processing it. I am reminded of Temple Grandin's observation that her autism allowed her to see what others missed." (An Anthropologist on Mars - Oliver Sacks)
Dostoevsky - "The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key" (Notes from the Underground - ....)
Took - "It... considerable strength of mind to refuse the endless circus of distraction, to choose instead the harder path of genuine attention." (Upstream - Mary Oliver)
Triggering - "The constant notifications were... a cascade of interruptions, each ping cutting a thought before it could fully form." (The Shallows - Nicholas Carr)
Hazy - "Memory grows... in the digital age-not from age or illness, but from our outsourcing of recall to our devices." (The Gutenberg Elegies - Sven Birkerts)
Enlist - "Social media platforms... our natural desires for connection and validation, turning them into engines of anxiety." (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts - Jaron Lanier)
Accident - "By pure... we created tools that perfectly exploit our brain's vulnerability to distraction." (Irresistible - Adam Alter)
Nonacceptance - "The... of constant digital interruption has become our era's small act of rebellion." (How to Do Nothing - Jenny Odell)
Xenophobic - "The... impulse to reject unfamiliar perspectives finds perfect in our personalized news feeds." (#Republic - Cass Sunstein)
Ices - "The mind... up when oversaturated with digital stimutt, losing its natural fluidity of thought." (Come Home - Maryanne Wolf-Reader)
Onomatopoela - "The... of digital life-ping, swish, ding-colonizes our soundscape, sach artificial word-sound tugging at our attention." (Orality and Literacy - Walter J. Ong)
Unfaithful - "Memory becomes... to lived experience when we trust our devices to do our remembering." (Alone Together - Sherry Turkle)
Sacrificed - "What gets... first is the very thing we need most: the capacity for sustained attention." (The Shallows - Nicholas Carr)
Giggle - "Coming from who knows what house dance, there ghosted past us two of the Donnellan sisters. A... bubbled out of one of them and the other hooked her arm and hurried them past." (This Is Happiness - Niall Williams)
Emoted - "Children who primarily... through digital interfaces showed marked differences in reading real human expressions." (The Big Disconnect - Catherine Steiner-Adair)
Newsweek - "As.... shifted to digital, the weekly rhythm of reflection gave way to the constant scroll." (Cognitive Surplus - Clay Shirky)
Edifies -"What genuinely... comes not from screens but from slow, sustained engagement with ideas." (Reader, Come Home - Maryanne Wolf)
Rigged - "The game is... from the start: apps designed not to satisfy but to create endless craving." (Adam Alter - Irresistible)
Accomplish - "The need to ... something real grows more urgent as our lives become increasingly virtual." (William Powers - Hamlet's BlackBerry)
Time - ... Magazine's shift to digital marked another victory of the immediate over the Important." (Cognitive Surplus - Clay Shirky)
Idiom - "The digital age steamrolls over every... of face-to-face conversation, replacing subtle expressions with standardized reactions." (Orality and Literacy - Walter J. Ong)
Obsess - "Students increasingly... over metrics - followers, likes, views - treating these digital signals as measures of self-worth." (It's Complicated - Danah Boyd)
Nymph - "Like a... vanishing at dawn, our capacity for wonder dissolves in the blue light of screens." (Last Child in the Woods - Richard Louv)