DANIEL FINNERAN

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Religion and Politics: The Unwelcome Guests

Do you dare discuss religion and politics over the holiday season?  It’s an ageless maxim that, when gathered with family and friends during the course of the holiday season, all discussion of politics—and, to a lesser extent, religion—should be studiously avoided. These are the two guests, unique among all possible guests, to whom it’s not …

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Use Your Discernment (So Long as You Discern Nothing Different) 

Written 6 November 2022 There’s a shrinking number of celebrities in whom we Americans place our collective trust. A very small number, indeed, for whom, no matter the direction toward which our political preferences incline us, there’s near universal veneration.  Take, as one example, the late Alex Trebek, whose name was, and yet remains, synonymous …

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Deep Thoughts About Sandwiches: John Montagu, Gambling Debts, and Reading Terminal Market

Unlike most of his corpulent countrymen, John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, spent more time at the gambling than at the dinner table.  A founding member of the notorious Hellfire Club, to which only the most refined rakes and well-born lechers in England were granted admittance, Montagu was, by any measure, an extraordinary man. …

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On Revolts and Revolutions: 18th-Century France and Modern China

Louis XVI: C’est une grande révolte!  La Rochefoucault-Liancourt: Non, Sire, c’est une grande révolution. Upon learning of the fall of the Bastille in the summer of 1789, Louis XVI—the hapless (and soon to be headless) French king against whom popular opinion in the country had long since turned—responded with one of the great understatements of …

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Donald Trump and King Pyrrhus

And, just like that, Rome’s conquest of Greece was nearly complete.  The strong, sturdy, ageless foundation of Hellas, upon which the rest of the civilized world then firmly stood, suddenly began to quake. Those ancient, mighty pillars by which the early Western man was raised, atop which the hundred famous city-states he inhabited were built, …

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Lines Written To And Beneath A Full Moon, 18 March 2022 (1)

Lines Written To And Beneath A Full Moon, 18 March 2022 (1) White milky ball of alabaster glow Shining borrowed light (2) on the world below;In your brilliance bathing sweet silent dreamsRippling, at a glance, the tides at their seams. Chaste (3) quiet sovereign, nature thy subject broodEnthralled by your beauty, by your strength subdued. …

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Off We Go!–To WWIII, Led by Biden’s Inarticulacy– A Political Poem

Two Saviors In Two Weeks: First Obama, and Now Christ Returns – A Political Poem So said the man who knows not what he says: Cherish the hours, for short are the days‘Till you soldiers of American fameWill be deployed to the heart of Ukraine! “You’ll see when you’re there”, said he to the crowd. …

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Full of Faux Sincerity, Lacking (all) Intelligibility, Kamala Harris Can’t Speak – A Political Poem

Two Saviors In Two Weeks: First Obama, and Now Christ Returns – A Political Poem Of Trump ‘tis said he lacks proper grammar;Of Biden, he suffers an inborn stammer. With his words, the first is carelessly loose—Committing great crimes of verbal abuse. And I don’t just mean insults at foes launchedLanding on Rosie O’Donnell’s large …

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The “Don’t Say Gay” Bill, Poeticized – A Political Poem

Two Saviors In Two Weeks: First Obama, and Now Christ Returns – A Political Poem From the incorrigible yet inimitable mind of Eugene Erigena–a man better born than reared. Eclipsed is the sun in the sunshine stateDarkened by clouds of conservative hateWhich haunt the land like a joyless specter,Draining the fruit of its orange nectar; …

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