Dr. E. from TMV, is a New Columnist for The National Catholic Reporter

The name of my new weekly Monday column at The National Catholic Reporter online, is El Rio Debajo El Rio: The River Beneath The River.

I’m honored to join the four talented, long-time online columnists there at NCR, all of whom are tireless social justice and peace activists and prize-winning journalists: Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister; Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton; the Jesuit Father John Dear; and NCR Senior Correspondent John L. Allen, Jr., who is Vatican analyst for CNN and covers global issues. The National Catholic Reporter also has a weekly print edition that carries the work of additional insightful and daring journalists.

As of this month, I’ve been blogging at TMV for 12 months. And that has been a huge honor also. My brother and sister journalists here at TMV are as dear to me as kin; the talented young ones, the talented and vibrant mid-aged ones, and the talented and outrageous elders here as well. I daily read most all my co-bloggers’ works as well as many smart, brave and vivacious bloggers on other sites. It’s like being in a perpetual open air lyceum. I don’t know that my world is made bigger, but it is definitely made deeper.

I’ve also come to know many of the intelligent commenters here at TMV, and have considered many points of view and gained valuable insights into human nature, cultural and otherwise, from the souls who post their knowledge, facts and opinions.

Thus, from time to time, I will be linking back and forth between my columns at the National Catholic Reporter and my columns at The Moderate Voice to invite readers from each site, and other blog sites as well, to come to the feasts laid out by the other. I think many will find kindred spirits.

If you would like to read the first column I filed this morning over at the National Catholic Reporter– The River Beneath the River– you can find it here: The Babushka Brigade: What Old Believers Say about Torture of Human Beings.

Too, because this is my first year anniversary at TMV, I would like to thank you all, from all of us here at TMV, really, for your ongoing support of our work.

I realize that at this moment we are all trackside regarding SuperTuesdayTwo, anticipating the last leg of the horse race of our times… and that there are millions of blog and MSM opinions and analyses flying everywhere like the dirt coins divotting into the air from the sharp horseshoes of the fastest runners. Nonetheless, no matter which horses win this race, I just wanted to say that to me, our Readers, and hopefully the ongoing sanity of their hearts and minds, are pretty much our only reason for being… and for writing.

See you at the track finish line. And after. The real stories are just beginning. Trust me, the race AFTER the SuperTuesdayTwo race is going to be the most astonishing of all thus far.

dr.e

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CODA: Just for levity’s sake regarding aversions to having one’s photo taken… Literally, the photo image on this article is the first new public picture of Dr. E. since 1990. I wouldn’t ordinarily mention such matters, mainly because I’ve met more people like myself who ever try to avoid being frozen into an unmoving image, than I’ve met folks who happily ham it up for the lens. It’s not just that I have asymmetry of everything imaginable, and long hair that sometimes ’sleeps funny’ and wants to act semi-primate. It’s a cultural and constitutional aversion at gut level.

But I didn’t think anyone was more shy than me to have their image petrified… until I asked Holly in Cincinnati for her photo for TMV’s lineup at Newsweek’s Ruckus. She sent me a sweet but fingertip-sized photo of herself that needed an electron microscope to view. (You will soon see all our photos uploaded to the Ruckus website, nonetheless.)

But, NCR politely emphasized they wanted a recent photo, and I don’t know if you can relate to this… but the one and only photo I’d given out time and again over the last 18 years, well let me just put it this way dear reader… there’s a difference between being in one’s 40s and being in one’s 60s. So, the jig was up.

Yet, maybe there are compensations to being a ‘woman of a certain age’ too. My elderly Aunt Edna, a Cherokee blooded woman who married into our family, drove a chrome bedecked gunmetal gray Studebaker with her elbows unbent and whilst wearing her turban and hoop earrings, and with a Lucky Strike ciggie dangling from her lips. She used to say: “Don’t let the Devil catch up to you: Always drive 20 miles faster than your age.”

Thus, according to “the Aunt Edna Rule” then, if you and I went on a road trip together– and you rode shotgun and if I were the driver– we’d be qualified to break every upper speed limit in most every one of the fifty states. Especially in a chopped and racked Cameo Chevy pickup with a big V8 under the hood, some baby moons, throaty glass paks, and neon-blue dot tail lights, you know, we’d be truly stylin’. And that might really be something to write about.

I am laughing. I hope you are too.