Check out this photo.  That’s you several decades ago.  Well, not exactly you, but let’s say there’s a pretty remarkable resemblance.  What you’re looking at is a zygote, a fertilized ovum, a one-celled organism.  This, however, is not a science essay.  It’s more along the lines of a self-introspection.  I’d like you to meditate upon...Read More

  Orson Welles peaked early in life.  He rose to fame with the infamous radio broadcast of a fictionalized invasion from Mars (which many people believed) in 1938 when he was twenty-three years old.  This newfound fame won him a movie contract in Hollywood where he was given carte blanche to direct the movie Citizen...Read More

During the Middle Ages, a popular image of the stages of life in Roman Catholicism was of a mandala with Christ in the center and the different ages of man represented as spokes around that hub (see my post on The Stages of Life and the Liturgy of the Hours).  With the dawning of the...Read More

Charlotte Bühler (1893-1975), was a German developmental psychologist who was a founder of humanistic psychology, but whose views on the human life cycle are less well known compared to the theories of Piaget, Freud, and Erikson.  She nonetheless made a unique contribution to the study of the life stages with her emphasis on how the...Read More

To watch a great film is to be fed aesthetically, emotionally, and intellectually.  But there are certain great films that do more:  they serve as time machines, bringing us backwards or forwards into stages of life that we have already traveled or will eventually and hopefully travel in the future.  I call these ”stages of...Read More