Stranger In A Strange Car
Toward the end of my New Mexico journalistic career, I had a run-in with a celebrity driving a gold Land Rover – gold! I was backing my old Toyota coop out of a dead-end intersection on a dirt road in the Tesuque hills between Santa Fe and Los Alamos. It was night, and I had […]
CONTEMPLATING MEDITATION
By Larry Joseph Calloway (c) Contemplare et contemplata aliis tradere (to contemplate and hand on to others the fruits of contemplation) – Motto of the Dominican order of Catholic friars.
On Karma
INTRO: One of the few Hindu beliefs that Buddhism carried from northern India in its migration throughout Asia (and the world) was Karma. It was based on the observation that all human actions — by body, speech or mind — have consequences. Moral causation is a principal in many religions, but Indian karma was distinguished […]
Report From The Fringe
MY SISTER, who lives in New York and knows more than the usual number of professional actors, has never been to a fringe festival. So I sent her my review notes of the one in Edmonton, Alberta, the largest in north America, with about one-thousand personnel including actors, directors, writers, technicians and volunteers. The first […]
5:30 A.M. July 16, 1945
(Some notes on Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer:” The re-enactment of the Trinity test setup in the unpopulated desert west of Alamogordo, NM, is true to life in my opinion, based on inteviews for the 50th anniversary series I wrote for the Albuquerque Journal. The location setting centered on the steel girder tower as well […]
Government Crisis Mfg. Co.
A View From The Factory Floor BY Larry Calloway In the last half of his 30 years representing New Mexico in the U.S. Senate, Jeff Bingaman saw dysfunction of Congress go tactical and political, beginning in 1995 under then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich and continuing under Mitch McConnell whenever he was Senate majority leader. Both are […]
The Winning of the West and the Theft of Mt. Rushmore
How the Union army continued west after the Civil War. Reviews of “Lakota America” by Pekka Hamalainen and “West from Appomattox” by Heather Cox Richardson————————————————— The Dec. 5 (2020) New Yorker has drawn attention to Pekka Hamalainen, the Danish scholar of American Indian policy. Here is my review of his first book, “Lakota America.” […]
Keeping Your Cool
I recall the day at St. John’s College Santa Fe when news reached the Western world that the Taliban had blown up the two standing Buddhas carved in a cliff in the Bamiyan valley of Afghanistan. We had been reading Buddhist literature as part of the St. John’s College Eastern Classics program, and as […]
The Architecture Of Whatever Is
This new interpretation of Spinoza, the persecuted 17th century advocate of scientific thinking, constructs an alternative to religious faith that goes beyond negative atheism. Clare Carlisle draws from his philosophy a concept of living “in God.” It suggests, in her words, “the possibility of an immediate, non-dualist awareness of being-in-God, which perhaps resembles the kind of […]
The Curse Of Espinoza
BARUCH SPINOZA in his youth suffered a thorough cursing by the elders of his Amsterdam synagogue, and 365 years later they’re still at it. The original writ against the 23-year-old rabbinical dropout, who would grow to become the foremost philosopher of liberal democracy in the new world of scientific thinking, was presented at the Amsterdam […]