A beautiful tribute to artist John August Swanson by Cecilia Gonzalez-Andrieu: a life dedicated to art, faith and justice americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2… My full comments fellow below: John August Swanson drew on many currents and styles of art, but for all the complexity and symbolic depth of his work, it has always seemed that his natural audience was children--and those who retain the ability to see with the eyes of a child. . .

“Now It Can Be Told” runs the headline on a breathless @nytimes story of how Neal Sheehan got the Pentagon Papers from my father @DanielEllsberg. Sheehan wanted to counter the usual (accurate) narrative that my father gave the papers to the Times. . . nytimes.com/2021/01/07/us/… 2/ whereas (as he relates in an interview held for publication after his death) by the time my father gave him a full set of the Papers in April 1971 Sheehan had already secretly made his own copy (my father having given him full access in March).

Feast of St Joseph Pignatelli (d 1811) “second founder” of the Society of Jesus. He was among the Spanish #Jesuits roused by soldiers after midnight on 4/2/1767 to learn that all Jesuits were to be expelled from Spain. The same had occurred in Portugal and later France. The total suppression of the Society followed in 1769 when Pope Clement XIV, under pressure from Bourbon princes, disbanded the Society. At once 23,000 Jesuit priests were dispensed from their religious vows. There was an anomaly. The decree had to be delivered to each community.

1. This marks the 400th posting of #TolstoysTalesofTrump! Learning that even my own father @DanielEllsberg was mystified by this saga, perhaps some explanation is in order. First: These are not actually written by Tolstoy (1828-1910), who did not live to see the rise of Twitter. 2. The conceit of this series was to imagine a commentary on the age of Trump by transposing him into the world of Tolstoy’s “moral tales”—the world of vain and corrupt landowners, petty aristocrats, and capricious masters who mistake servility and fear for real love.

Dorothy Day on the dropping of the atomic bomb: “Mr Truman was jubilant. True man; what a strange name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus Christ as true God and true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in that he was jubilant. He was not a son of a God, brother... 2/ of Christ, brother of the Japanese, jubilating as he did. He went from table to table on the cruiser which was bringing him home from the Big 3 conference, telling the great news; “jubilant” the newspapers said. Jubulate Deo. We have killed 318,000 Japanese. That is, ...

In Jan 1967, Dorothy Day, disturbed by Cardinal Spellman's support for the Vietnam War, published an article: "In Peace Is my Bitterness Most Bitter." "It is not just Vietnam, it is South Africa, it is Nigeria, the Congo, Indonesia, all of Latin America. It is not just... the pictures of all the women and children who have been burnt alive in Vietnam...It is not just the words of Cardinal Spellman...It is the fact that whether we like it or not, we are Americans. It is indeed our country, right or wrong, as the Cardinal said in another context..."

I wrote Sr Wendy about a friend whose prolonged illness left him unable to pray. She replied: "I wish you could convince him that we can always pray. When we are sick we pray in a sick way, in a feeble, hopeless, useless way, which draws the utmost love and compassion ... ...from Our Blessed Lord. Essentially He is our prayer, praying within us...And in fact when we think we can pray, we may well be getting in His way. Blessed those who have nothing. Oh how often Jesus spoke about this state of interior poverty, of littleness, of powerlessness...

German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed 75 years ago today, April 9 1945, for his part in a conspiracy to overthrow Hitler. "The church's task is not simply to bind the wounds of the victim beneath the wheel, but also to put a spoke in the wheel itself." He was 39. DB's impact has been felt on several levels. First, his witness has inspired Christians wrestling with the ethical dilemmas of responsible action in the face of oppression. "The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically ...

“We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time.... ...We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.”...

#MastersofSocialIsolation #12. In 1941 #ThomasMerton entered the strict cloister of the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani. In the Trappists his heart was captured by the image of men “on this miserably noisy, cruel earth, who tasted the marvelous joy of silence and solitude." Henceforth he would serve the world by his prayers. Yet even as he longed for even greater solitude, his attitude toward the world was changing. On an errand in Louisville he had a mystical epiphany in which he saw his deep connection with the mass of human beings.

#MastersofSocialIsolation #10. In a time when Jewish children in Europe were hunted like vermin, Anne Frank did not choose her isolation. With her own and another family she was confined for 2 years in a “secret annex” in Amsterdam, never going out, keeping still all day. She kept a diary, not simply as a distraction but as a duty, a responsibility to render her experience and her feelings in the most accurate terms. Along with the everyday experiences of a young girl confined indoors she recorded very unchildlike reflections on her perilous life.

#MastersofSocialIsolation #3 Henry David Thoreau. In his classic “Walden” he described the 2 years he spent in a small cabin on the banks of Walden Pond, near Concord MA. There he sought to escape the deadness of a world in which “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” He was 25 at the time. As he wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

On Dec 2 1980 four N. American churchwomen in El Salvador were murdered by Salvadoran soldiers. They had been targeted as “subversives” because of their work with the poor. Yet in bearing witness to the cross they were also witnesses to the resurrection. Maryknoll Sr Ita Ford... ...wote to her niece on her 16th birthday: “This is a terrible time in El Salvador for youth. A lot of idealism and commitment are getting snuffed out here now. The reasons why so many people are being killed are quite complicated, yet there are some clear, simple strands....

A favorite story of #DorothyDay, who died Nov 29 1980. When she was a child in Chicago, Dorothy went to visit her friend Katheryn Barrett in a neighboring tenement apt. Bursting into the kitchen she found Katheryn’s mother kneeling on the floor saying her prayers. Mrs Barrett said Katheryn was out and then proceeded with her prayers. Day writes, “I felt a warm burst of love toward Mrs. Barrett that I have never forgotten, a feeling of gratitude and happiness that still warms my heart when I remember her. ...

At yesterday’s #DorothyDay symposium at Maryknoll both her granddaughter Kate and I spoke about the lessons we had learned from her. In my case those lessons began when I went to work with her when I was 19. Here was my list: 1. From Dostoevsky: “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.” Dorothy was not sentimental—she knew the sights and smells of life among “the insulted and injured. It was exhausting and unrelenting.

50 years ago today my father @DanielEllsberg began taking volumes of the Top Secret history of the Vietnam War (the Pentagon Papers) from his safe at the RAND Corporation to photocopy on a friend’s xerox machine. He acted in the hope that revealing this history of lies might help end the war. He was particularly inspired by his reading of Gandhi about the power of Truth. He described his motivations for me, and shared the books he had been reading by Gandhi, Thoreau, M.L. King.

In 1852 abolitionist, orator, and former slave Frederick Douglass delivered his most famous speech: “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July”—a blistering review of the gap between the ideals of America and its failures in practice. Should be the centerpiece of July 4 celebration “Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us...The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”bit.ly/29lNffs

On June 21 in Naples Pope Francis delivered a remarkable speech on the task of theology and the need for a "theology of dialogue and welcoming." bit.ly/2J5CAFZ. Some highlights in this thread. He refers to the “Babel syndrome”--not the confusion that arises when we don’t know what the other person is saying, but "when I do not listen to what the other person is saying and think that I know what the other is thinking and is about to say."

Many people knew Sister Wendy Beckett through her BBC art series. But that was really a sideline from her true vocation as a contemplative. She took it up as an opportunity to talk about God to a largely secular audience. Rather than an art historian like Kenneth Clarke... she was more like the anchoress Julian of Norwich, who saw the universe as a hazelnut in the hand of God. Living as a hermit on the grounds of the Carmelite monastery in Quidenham, she rose each night at 2 and spent the whole night in prayer. She read several books a day

Here is a story to recall on this 100th anniversary of Armistice day. In 1917 Ben Salmon applied for conscientious objector status on the basis of his Catholic faith. Neither the US gov nor the Church recognized the right of Catholic COs. He was arrested in Jan 1918. 1/8 Following a military court martial he was sentenced to death—later reduced to 25 years in prison. Sent to Leavenworth and other prisons, he spent most time in solitary in punishment for his refusal to work. For six months he was held in a windowless cell over the sewer, 2/8