This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
One hundred years after its invention, film art still occupies a marginal place in academic circles. The very activity of watching television is routinely dismissed as inherently inferior to the activity of reading, regardless of content. But narrative beauty is independent of medium. Oral tales, pictorial stories, plays, novels, movies, and television shows can all range from the lame and sensationalist to the heartbreaking and illuminating. We need every available form of expression and all the new ones we can muster to help us understand who we are and what we are doing.
Art | Beauty | Invention | Need | Novels | Reading | Television | Art | Beauty | Understand |
The greatest step forward in human evolution was made when society began to help the weak and the poor, instead of oppressing and despising them.
National Conference of Catholic Bishops NULL
Poverty is not merely the lack of adequate financial resources. It entails a more profound kind of deprivation, a denial of full participation in the economic, social, and political life of society and an inability to influence decisions that affect one’s life. It means being powerless in a way that assaults not only one’s pocketbook but also one’s fundamental human dignity. Therefore, we should seek solutions that enable the poor to help themselves through such means as employment. Paternalistic programs which do too much for and too little with the poor are to be avoided.
Dignity | Influence | Life | Life | Little | Means | Poverty | Society | Society |
Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman
Autobiographical memories are particularly prone to inaccuracy. Traumatic events embed memories in a powerful but somewhat fragmentary way. Neurological disorders and drugs can disrupt the brain’s ability to distinguish between true and false memories and beliefs. The brain perceives reality and transforms it into an extraordinary range of personal, ethical, and creative premises that we use to build meaning, value, spirituality, and truth into our lives.
Ability | Distinguish | Events | Meaning | Reality | Spirituality | Truth |
Our life is not a problem to be solved, it is a gift to be opened… If we are preoccupied with what is missing and what is broken and wrong, we lose the miraculous harvest of all these tiny gifts, piled on upon the other, that accumulate without our acknowledging them. If we listen more carefully for the infinite blessings of a single day, this will not discount or obliterate our sorrows. But it will help us remember how strong and rich we can be, even in the midst of suffering.
Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman
Our beliefs serve myriad purposes: They help us to organize the world in meaningful ways… They can also connect us with the transcendent dimensions of experience, and give us inspiration and hope, essential tools for confronting those moments of confusion and doubt that are so often part of life.
Doubt | Experience | Hope | Inspiration | Life | Life | World |
Rowing harder doesn’t help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction.
Wrong |
The measure of a man is not his strength; it is the depth of his nobility. The measure of any person is how he or she treats those who are less gifted, less intelligent, and less able. The measure of a Christian is how willing he or she is to reach down and help those who are less fortunate -- to take the strength and advantage they have to help those who have not.
An open mind should be more than a catch-all receptacle. It should have a screening mechanism to keep out the trivial, a sorting capacity to organize ideas and reconcile contradictions, and a critical tool to help us decide what we believe. That’s the difference between a mind that receives information and a mind that thinks.
A good man never dies - in worthy deed and prayer and helpful hands, and honest eyes, if smiles or tears be there; who lives for you and me - live for the world he tries to help - he lives eternally. A good man never dies. Who lives bravely take his share of toil and stress and, for his weaker fellows’ sake, makes every burden less - he may, at last, seem worn - lie fallen - hands and eyes folded - yet, though we mourn and mourn, a good man never dies.
If only man were worthy of help as God is able to provide it.
Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers
The roots of a child’s ability to cope and thrive, regardless of circumstance, lie in that child’s having had at least a small, safe place (an apartment? a room? a lap?) in which, in the companionship of a loving person, that child could discover that he or she was lovable and capable of loving in return.
Ability | Safe | Companionship | Child |
Robert Edward Rubin, aka Eddy Rubin
Relying on politics for your sense of who you are greatly impedes your ability to remain true to yourself, your views, and your values.
Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers
There are many things children accept as “grown-up things” over which they have no control and for which they have no responsibility – for instance, weddings, having babies, buying houses, and driving cars. Parents who are separating really need to help their children put divorce on that grown-up list, so that children do not see themselves as the cause of their parents’ decision to live apart.
Cause | Children | Control | Decision | Need | Parents | Responsibility |
It is in deeds that man becomes aware of what his life really is, of his power to harm and to hurt, to wreck and to ruin; of his ability to derive joy and to bestow it upon others; to relieve and to increase his own and other people’s tensions. It is in the employment of his will, not in reflection, that he meets his own self as it is; not as he should like it to be.
Ability | Deeds | Harm | Joy | Life | Life | Man | People | Power | Reflection | Self | Will | Deeds |