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In my Catholic elementary school, there were three minorities, all Hispanic. I lived in the country, and my neighbors were white. All of them. My teachers emphasized repeatedly and strongly that skin color was irrelevant in the eyes of God. I remember singing “What Color is God’s Skin?” (this version) in music class. But as I’ve…
Read MoreEarly last week, we received a fat packet in the mail from Nielsen ratings, asking us to complete their in-depth survey of all things money-related. (And here I thought they were only about TV ratings.) Late last week, I answered a call which turned out to be a political poll…which I completed. Now, for quite…
Read MoreOK, so if you haven’t picked up on it by now, you can’t possibly have been paying attention, there’s this: I am really opinionated. I come from a long line of passionate and vocal opinionated people. My kids are well on their way to continuing the family tradition. A few weeks ago at…
Read MoreRight after 9/11, a man I know shared a vision he had. His vision was of the people of the Middle East hearing American planes coming, except instead of dropping bombs, they dropped food and water and medical supplies. (He wrote it much more poetically than that, but that was the gist of it.) At…
Read MoreIn which I get off my scaredy-cat box and tell you what I think about the current political climate you and I are all participating in.
Read MoreIt occurred to me today that if I were Wonder Woman, I wouldn’t bother going around beating up bad guys. I would just round them up in my lasso of truth and put them in front of a Facebook live stream and make them tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.…
Read MoreI dreamed last night that I met Pope Francis. Well, not so much met as happened to be standing right there when he blew by, laughing and carrying, of all things, a part of a broken toilet that needed to be thrown away. I was supposed to be meeting up with a friend from grad…
Read MoreHow did we get here? We lost the willingness, if not the ability, to empathize with the pain of the Other. #Election2016
Read MoreFor weeks, I’ve been debating stepping into the online political fray. I have a lot of opinions, and I’ve been driving around town distilling them into a collection of pithy one-liners that, as a Catholic rather than a Democrat or a Republican, would be certain to offend virtually every single person I know. Conventional wisdom…
Read MoreI hope you’ll bear with me today, because there’s a reason I’m about to tell this story. One thing that sometimes accompanies an extra 21st chromosome is “pronation.” This means that due to low muscle tone, the feet turn out. Julianna has fabulous health and good cognitive functioning but her feet are regularly regarded as…
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Kathleen M. Basi 