Pinionmarc Readings

“Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Sports Desk: 447-4070 irsports@helenair.com
CC went on streak in late '40s

CURT'S REPLAYS by Curt Syness

On October 30,1949, in Dillon, the Carroll College football team lost 19-16 to Western Montana College.
It would be another five years before they lost again to a Montana Collegiate Conference foe. The streak consisted of 24 straight conference victories and five consecutive MCC championships.

After losing to the Bulldogs, the Saints bounced back with an 18-2 win over Butte's Montana School of Mines in the season finale.
“Flashy Bill Sternhagen, hard-running Carroll halfback, tallied two of the Saints touchdowns and Don Christensen scored the other,” the Independent Record reported.
The victory gave first-year coach John Gagliardi's charges a 3-1 record and a second-place tie in the conference. Selected to the all-MCC team were Sternhagen, Christensen, John McGinley, Tom Redfern and Jack Cumeford.

The Hilltoppers opened with two non-league losses, - Southern Idaho and Northern Idaho before defeating the Salt Lake City Parsons. Their first conference game was a 34-7 victory over Rocky Mountain. Next came an upset over nemesis Western, 7-0.
“In the third quarter, linemen Dick Tomcheck and Rich Kuhl smashed through to block a Bulldog punt,” according to the IR.
“Ray Skillestad picked up the deflected pigskin and raced 20 yards for the winning touchdown, with Claude Weaver booting the extra point.”
The Saints closed with a 6-0 shutout (TD run by Christensen) over Eastern and a 14-7 triumph over Montana Mines (two Ray Skillestad TDs). The Orediggers third period TD was the first score in 13 quarters against the vaunted Carroll defense. CC finished with a 4-0 conference record and captured their first league crown since 1941.

Carroll beat Westminister University to start out and then tied with the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In a convincing 28-0 trouncing of Western, the Saints' scores came on a Skillestad-to-Bob Mackey pass; Claude Weaver's fumble recovery after Tomcheck blocked a punt; a pass from Jim Flynn to Walt Romasko; a run by Christensen; and four Weaver PATs. The Hilltoppers then dispatched Montana Mines (40-7), Rocky Mountain (40-7) and Eastern (38-0) to retain their MCC title. In the season finale, senior halfback Don Christensen raced for five TDs in a 32-0 win over Ricks College. This brought "the Scobey Skyrocket's" season total to 16 touchdowns and 31 for his illustrious career.
Christensen, Skillestad, Weaver, Flynn, Tomcheck, Gillen, Romasko and Jim Johnson were selected to the all-conference team.

After a season-opening loss to Ricks, the Hilltoppers defeated the Butte Buzzies and then took the measure of the Montana School of Mines, 27-0. Skillestad fired two TD passes, a 58-yarder to Romasko and 22-yards to Tom Kelly. Eastern Oregon edged the Fighting Saints 27-23 on a last minute touchdown, and then sophomore-back Chuck Sternhagen sprinted to pay-dirt four times in a 37-6 victory over the Yellowjackets in Billings.
The gridders routed Western 40-0 (racking up 492 yards total offense) and next clinched the MCC; crown with a 20-14 comeback triumph over Rocky Mountain. Sternhagen rumbled 13 yards for the winning score.
They ended the season with victories over Westminster College and powerful Weber State. Skillestad established CC passing records of 305 game yards and season 1,215 yards and 12 TDs, Chuck Sternhagen scored 13 TDs and Claude Weaver kicked 52 career PATs, Named to the all-MCC squad were Skillestad, Weaver, Sternhagen, Romasko, Kelly, Kuhl, Don Niklas and Jim Murray. John Gagliardi left for St. John's University in Minnesota at season's end and went on to become the winningest coach in college history.

Rev. Ray Hunthausen, who was a standout on the 1941 undefeated Saints, took over as head coach in 1953. They lost to Ricks College and beat Westminster Parsons to start the campaign, before topping Western Montana, 31-0 and Rocky Mountain, 31-6. Carroll would tie with South Dakota Mines before winning 50-0 (with 412 yards rushing, Frank Becky scored three TDs) over the Orediggers and 45-14 over the Yellowjackets (Tom Kelly and Mike Malone scored two TDs apiece) to complete another undefeated conference championship.
Skillestad and Walt Romasko each received their third all-conference selections, and were joined on the post season team by Joe Pat Sullivan. Sternhagen, Niklas, Murray, Kelly, John Romasko, Tim Calnan, Bill Mehrens, Becky and Elmer Albery.

“Carroll captured its fifth straight MCC football title by routing a determined Western Montana, 39-13, in a hard fought championship contest at Vigilante Stadium,” the IR stated. Freshman back Bob Ortwein ran for two touchdowns and quarterback Claude Weaver twice connected with end Mac Grimes for long scores. It was CC's 21st successive conference victory.
Other contests included losses to Ricks College and Eastern Oregon, a tie with Westminster and victories over Eastern Montana (50-0), Wyoming's Northwestern Community College twice and the Montana School of Mines (53-6). In perhaps the biggest game of the year, over Rocky Mountain on a snow-covered Vigilante Stadium, “Bob Ortwein took a handoff from Claude Arnold and crashed through the line from the 4-yard stripe in the third period to break up a 6-6 deadlock and give the Saints a 13-6 win.”
Leading the gridders scoring was Mehrens, with 56 points (nine TDs, two PATs). Chuck Sternhagen graduated with 25 career touchdowns. Chosen for the 1954 All-MCC team were Dan Cloninger, Jack Noonan, Harry Downs, Albery, John Romasko, Mehrens; Ortwein, Grimes, Mike Malone and Arnold.

The Hilltoppers won their first three conference games, over Western (40-6), Eastern (50-0) and the School of Mines (45-0). The Saints' defense permitted only 50 total yards), running their winning streak versus league foes to 24 straight games. Pacing the attack for the three wins were Tom Davidson, with seven scores, and Fred Moodry's four TDs. When CC was then upended in Billings by the underdog Rocky Mountain Bears, 13-6, the streak was over. It was not only their first conference defeat in five years, but also humped the Saints down to a second-place MCC finish. Terry Radcliffe, only a freshman, wound up as the second-leading rusher in the nation, averaging 125 yards per game.
Over the course of the win streak, the Fighting Saints (32-10-3 overall) outscored their conference opposition 794-101 and registered 11 shutouts, winning by an average score of 31-4.”

CURT SYNNESS, a Helena Independent Record sports historian, can be contacted at 449-2150 or email curt52s@msn.com.

Installing Love On The Computer

INSTALLING LOVE

Tech Support: Yes, how can I help you?

Customer: Well, after much consideration, I've decided to install Love. Can you guide me though the process?

Tech Support: Yes. I can help you. Are you ready to proceed?

Customer: Well, I'm not very technical, but I think I'm ready. What do I do first?
Tech Support: The first step is to open your Heart. Have you located your Heart?
Customer: Yes, but there are several other programs running now. Is it okay to install Love while they are running?

Tech Support: What programs are running?

Customer: Let's see, I have Past Hurt, Low Self-Esteem, Grudge and Resentment running right now.

Tech Support: No problem, Love will gradually erase Past Hurt from your current operating system. It may remain in your permanent memory but it will no longer disrupt other programs. Love will eventually override Low Self-Esteem with a module of its own called High Self-Esteem. However, you have to completely turn off Grudge and Resentment. Those programs prevent Love from being properly installed. Can you turn those off ?

Customer: I don't know how to turn them off! Can you tell me how?

Tech Support: With pleasure. Go to your start menu and invoke Forgiveness. Do this as many times as necessary until Grudge and Resentment have been completely erased.

Customer: Okay, done! Love has started installing itself. Is that normal?

Tech Support: Yes, but remember that you have only the base program. You need to begin connecting to other Hearts in order to get the upgrades.

Customer:Oops! I have an error message already. It says, “Error - Program not run on external components” What should I do?

Tech Support: Don't worry. It means that the Love program is set up to run on Internal Hearts, but has not yet beer run on your Heart. In non-technical terms, it simply means you have to Love yourself before you can Love others.

Customer:So, what should I do?

Tech Support: Pull down Self-Acceptance!; then click on the following files: Forgive-Self; realize your Worth; and acknowledge your Limitations.

Customer: Okay, done.

Tech Support: Now, copy them to the "My Heart" directory. The system will overwrite any conflicting files and begin patching faulty programming. Also, you need to delete Verbose Self-Criticism from all directories and empty your Recycle Bin to make sure it is completely gone and never comes back.

Customer: Got it. Hey! My heart is filling up with new files. Smile is playing on my monitor and Peace and Contentment are copying themselves all over My Heart. Is this normal?

Tech Support: Sometimes. For others it takes awhile, but eventually everything gets it at the proper time. So Love installed and running.

One more thing before we hang up. Love is Freeware. Be sure to give it and its various modules to everyone you meet. They will in turn share it with others and return some cool modules back to you.

Customer:Thank you, God.

Courtesy of: Linda Krehmeyer
Corporate Benefit Consultants, Inc., Ph: (314) 373-2904,V Fax: (314) 373-2905.

Dear Paul & Jeanne -

We just got a Christmas letter from our friend Father Harvey Egan, who is 90 years old and is retired in Minneapolis. He begins by saying: "This is Christmas. The heavens are opening. People with the best of human qualities from all religions and no religion are guiding us to an eternal union with a God of all-consuming love. Increasing numbers of sensitive teachers now define a religious person as one who is authentically human. I find my kind of Christianity mostly harmonizing with our current culture. You don't have to believe in God to be authentically human but I think it helps."

Father Egan is the man who taught me that Catholic means more than "not protestant." Catholic means I can believe in God and enjoy Jerry Seinfeld at the same time. Father Egan is a man who was able to proclaim the faith in a consumerist and militarist society and never lose his laugh. He taught me that our tradition is one of endlessly questioning, while at the same time, it is the only thing that can ground us and give meaning to our lives.

What does all this have to do with a Christmas letter? Everything. The last time I checked, Christmas was still a religious feast. Everybody who is Christian goes to church at Christmas and learns this stuff about tolerance and freedom - or should learn it. It's doubtful anyone, Catholic or Protestant, will learn it from the pulpit. We will learn it from listening to the old prophets among us like Father Egan and from the old prophets of the Bible, which is still inhabited by a h9oly power, demythologized or not. I discovered we are all selective fundamentalists. Conservatives like the parts condemning sex but are quiet about money. Liberals are hot for the parts of the Bible which attack the rich but they are quiet about sex and personal sin. Anyway the voice of God isn't confined to the Bible. We learn that if we try to listen to God and see God's handiwork everywhere. Jeanne and I made some retreats this year in an attempt to listen to God. It worked.

90 year old Father Egan ends his Christmas letter saying, "I have lived with love and will take love with me when I go." You all, my friends and family, are the love I live with. Thank you.”

Merry Christmas.

[[Hand written: "Your letters are the best. I hope you don't mind my shameless plagiarism too much, all love", Jim O'Leary]]

Dan and Jacque Reilly with Olivia Belle

“Daniel Reilly is 40 today.
It's a milestone plenty of others are celebrating as well, but for him it´s pause for special attention because when was growing up in Huron he doubted he´d see 20.
Born with hemophilia, he has been able to control the incurable genetic bleeding disorder with a clotting factor he takes every two weeks on average.
But as a young man in the 1980s, his health problems escalated when he contracted both hepatitis C and HIV through contaminated blood products he needed for his hemophilia.
"About a third who have HIV in the United States are co-infected with hepatitis," he said in a phone interview last week-end from his Northglenn, Colo., home.
Northglenn is north of Denver, where he works as co-infection director of a nonprofit organization called Hep C Connection.
As Jacque, his wife of nearly 13 years, and his daughter, Olivia Belle, 2, help him celebrate his birthday, he can say with confidence that his health is now good. But he went through a two-year patch of rough road to get there. A road he wouldn´t wish on anyone. Although he learned of his hepatitis in the late 1980s, Reilly didn´t pursue a course of treatment because of his HIV and his belief that his life would be short. But HIV medications improved dramatically in the ensuing decade, and sufferers were given a new lease on life.
He began taking weekly injections and oral treatment to fight off hepatitis C. For two years he endured the impossible - Friday night injections that landed him in bed for 14 hours at a time on Saturdays and Sundays because of extreme fatigue coupled with flu-like symptoms. Even then, he´d wake up still exhausted.
"There´s no way I could have gone through it alone if I didn´t have Jacque to help me out," he said three years ago. He reiterated his deep gratitude to his wife again last weekend.
For his part. despite the side effects, Reilly was determined to see it through, to do everything he could to improve his odds at beating a vicious enemy.
He took the injections regularly for six months, and then stopped because the virus was undetectable. It came back. and he resumed the injections for another six months. And then he demanded a course of attack that led him to be injected for another full year.
His doctors gave him the good news about Christmastime in 2002. He was totally cured of hepatitis C. He has no liver-related problems, and while he must take anti-HIV medications daily, he is doing well with that virus.
"It´s well under control," Reilly said.

On to the next challenge: fatherhood.

In an interview in February 2004, he said he and Jacque wanted to have a child. But a side effect of hepatitis C medication is that it can cause severe birth defects, even six months after the last treatment.
There was also the obvious danger of passing on his HIV. But in a process developed in Italy, Jacque Reilly was artificially inseminated after fluids were separated in a centrifuge.
"There´s still a slight, slight risk, very, very minimal.´ he said. Before they agreed to make the attempt, 4,500 other cases had been done throughout the world with no one getting infected with HIV.
"We had to look at the process quite awhile," Reilly said.
They became pregnant on the third attempt. Like all parents hope for, it was an uneventful pregnancy, although in their situation the nervousness had to have been heightened.
On April 15. 2005, they met a newborn baby they named Olivia Belle, an independent-minded young lady with an irresistible smile;
Reilly had the daughter he had always wanted.
But they have talked it through, and they won´t try for a second child.
"I'm turning 40 next week," he said last Saturday. "I tell people we got it right the first time. I feel very blessed to have her."
Reilly is also blessed with a job he thoroughly enjoys - drawing on his own life experiences to make those of others seeking help from Hep C Connection a little better.
He facilitates a monthly support group, talks to people about HIV and hepatitis treatment issues and teaches them how they can manage the side effects if they decide to pursue hepatitis treatment.
Before he became the co-infection program director, he worked on the help-line. He now supervises it. Reilly also is responsible for the organization´s quarterly newsletter.
When the Reilly´s moved from Sioux Falls to Denver, he got involved in the Colorado chapter of the Hemophilia Society, which advocates for patients´ right;.. Members have lobbied and educated Congress on the challenges of hemophiliacs. Among them is the high cost of the clotting factor - most spend more than $100,000 a year - and the need for Medicaid and insurance cover age.
Reilly has now finished his four-year commitment as president of the Colorado chapter, during which he spent a lot of time working with the national organization out of New York. But he stays involved, now chairing an adult male task force.
As a child with hemophilia, only whole blood was available to stop the bleeding. The clotting factor, though expensive, makes it easier to control but it also gave him HIV when he was given a contaminated product.
"It has kind of a double-edge sword with that," he said.
The lives of many hemophiliacs who also received the contaminated product were claimed by HJV. Hepatitis C is now the leading cause of death for those with HIV. While the drugs help, they are hard on the liver.
Reilly says he is fortunate his hepatitis C is gone, although it took three rounds of treatment.
He has his energy back. No longer head of the Hemophiliac Society in Colorado, he has more free time.
It's time he now cherishes with a very active and normal 2-year-old.
The Reillys have made it across the tallest of mountains.
Compared to all that ... well, turning 40 is a piece of cake.”

Eighteen-year-old Daniel Reilly of Huron realizes that someday he'll need crutches and then a wheelchair to get around. But it's certainly not holding him back now, as he sets his sights on his college education.
You see, he also knows he's lucky to be alive.
Reilly suffers from hemophilia.
As recently as the late 1960's, when the youngest of the 12 Reilly children was born, hemophilia was a mystery. Babies born with the disease usually didn't live long.
Veronica Reilly remembers what a Mayo Clinic physician told her when she took her son to Rochester when, at the age of nine months, he fell, cut his lip and wouldn't stop bleeding.
“When we handed him to the doctor, he said 'you'll probably never see him again,” she said.
Even with only 20 percent of his blood supply remaining in his system, Reilly survived.
As he recovered during the next 10 days, Mayo Clinic doctors diagnosed him as having classic hemophilia, the worst of the several types of the disease. His blood had less than a 10 percent clotting ability.
“They told us not to bring him back (to Rochester) because they couldn't do anything,” Mrs. Reilly said. “They said he'd probably live to be six years old, if he lived that long.”
Reilly was like any curious toddler, but any slight injury was serious. Between the ages of one and three, he frequently bumped his mouth, cut himself and began bleeding.
“The big thing with hemophilia is bleeding in the joint - it causes the most pain and cripples the joint,” his mother said.
When he was four, Reilly broke his wrist. While he wore a cast, he bled internally, and today his left arm is not fully developed. His elbows and ankles have been damaged by the bleeds, but fortunately his knees are still normal.
With the number of injuries to his ankles over the years, Reilly has had to begin wearing heavy braces to help him walk.
Someday, though, his ankles won't be able to support him any more.
Despite his disease, Reilly has led a fairly normal childhood. But although he loves sports, he wasn't able to participate. As a fifth grader, he asked if he could try to play basketball.
While he couldn't be an active sports participant, he did serve as student manager so he could be around his athlete friends. He gets his exercise through tennis, bicycling and swimming. And he also likes to play badminton with his brothers and friends.
“It (hemophilia) hasn't changed my life except for sports,” he said.
When Dan was about ready to enter a new school, either elementary, middle or high school, his mother first talked to the teachers and administrators about his condition.
Unlike other youngsters, his bleeding wouldn't stop.
“Bite your tongue and it meant a trip to the hospital,” Mrs. Reilly said.
In those early years, the Reilly's made an average of one trip to the hospital a week so that fresh blood could be slowly dripped into his veins.
When Reilly was six, Mayo Clinic doctors told the Reilly's to bring Daniel back to Rochester because something new in the treatment of hemophilia had been discovered.
It was a major breakthrough at the time.
Doctors had learned a way to take plasma from blood, freeze it, and then thaw it when it was needed.
No longer was whole blood needed. Three years later, the biggest breakthrough came when the manufacture of factorate began.
Researchers discovered how to take clotting ability out of blood and dry it. When the factorate is needed, it is reconstituted with sterile water and Reilly can infuse it into his system within 10 minutes.
It means a 10-minute process, instead of 10 hours for a blood transfusion;
When Reilly turned 13, he learned how to begin in-fusing the factorate himself. He attended a summer in Ann Arbor, Mich, with 200 other hemophiliacs.
External bleed is bad enough, but Reilly says that's not the toughest part of the disease.
The internal bleeds, into a joint or muscle, are the hardest.
That's because once Reilly bruises himself and begins to bleed internally, he needs to infuse factorate immediately to reduce permanent damage.

Imagine having debilitating flu symptoms every weekend. For two years.
It's what Huron native Daniel Reilly endured as he took Friday night injections to help his body fight off hepatitis C.
He was able to keep working, but he'd spend Saturdays and Sundays wiped out, with no appetite and no energy. He lost 35 pounds, dropping to 128 pounds on his 5-foot-10-inch frame.
Even as he was going through his weekly injections, and taking oral treatment as well, there was no guarantee the 36-year-old would beat hepatitis.
Reilly, now living in the Denver area, has had hemophilia since birth. There's no cure for the genetic bleeding disorder.
He contracted both hepatitis C and HIV in the 1980s through contaminated blood products he needed to control his hemophilia. While HIV can also be sexually transmitted, hepatitis C has to be a blood-to-blood transmission. Two-thirds of those who have hepatitis C were infected by sharing needles through intravenous drug use.
Estimates show there are four to five million cases of hepatitis C in the country, four to five times as maHy as those with HIV.
“A lot of people will go 20 or 30 years before having any symptoms of it,” Reilly said. “More than half of the people infected with hepatitis C have no idea they're infected because they have no symptoms.”
Although they can be vague - another problem with the virus - extreme fatigue is often the most prominent symptom. Before starting treat ment, Reilly would sleep 14 hours at a time and still wake up exhausted.
People will complain about pain in their liver and abdomen areas. They will tell their doctor about their nausea, sometimes leading to a misdiagnosis of flu or chronic fatigue syndrome.
“But it is just a simple blood test, like HIV, where they can check for the antibodies produced,” he said.
Reilly worked for a company in Sioux Falls that markets blood-clotting products for hemophiliacs.
Nearly two years ago, he and his wife, Jacque, moved to Denver where he went to work as co-infection program manager for a nonprofit organization called Hep C Connection.
Once hepatitis C is diagnosed more tests are done to determine the particular strain of the virus.
“That strain will tell you how long your treatment will need to be in order to get rid of the virus,” Reilly said.
Although diagnosed with hepatitis in the late 1980s, he didn't pursue a course of treatment because of his HIV. He bluntly says he wasn't supposed to live this long. But then, HIV medications improved dramatically in the 1990s, and have gone a long way in helping people fight off the virus. “It really gave people a new lease on life,” Reilly said.
Still, the problem with being co-infected is that hepatitis C progresses much faster.
“My entire immune system is weakened, for one thing,” he said.
“I also have to take anti-HIV medications daily.”
He began taking the hepatitis injections regularly for six months, and then stopped because the virus was undetectable. But it came back shortly after he stopped. He tried it again, for another six months.
But, as challenging as it sounded, he demanded to take the medication for another full year, knowing full well his weekends would be spent in bed, exhausted, with flu-like side effects.
It has now been more than a year since his injections ended. Doctors believe Reilly is out of danger.
"It finally worked," he said.
“It's not a cure for the virus, but what it does is it suppressed it enough so it's not going to do any more liver damage.”
After a year, there's a 99 percent chance the virus will never return. The liver is the only internal organ that can regenerate itself.
“Once you stop the virus from attacking the liver, the liver can start healing itself up,” Reilly said.
“I'm never going to have the liver of a 14-year-old again,” he said. But ultimately his liver will continue to process the HIV medication.
HIV medications are toxic to the liver, and have to be broken down so they can fight the virus.
“I'm pretty happy to at least have one of the three chronic illnesses I'm dealing with hopefully behind me,” Reilly said.
Although hemophilia caused the HIV and hepatitis C, it's the least of the three that concerns him on a day-to-day basis.
He continues to take a clotting factor every two weeks on average to control Bleeding. “It's not a major focal point in my life at all,” he said. In his job at Hep C Connection, he also works as a help-line counselor, talking with others who have hepatitis C or became co-infected.
About one million Americans have HIV, and anywhere from 25 to 40 percent of them are co-infected with hepatitis C. They could have contracted hepatitis from a blood transfusion, as Reilly did, or it could have come from IV drug use, tattoos or body piercing or long-term dialysis for kidneys. In the case of health care workers, it could have happened from an accidental needle stick.
When he learned his hepatitis C was finally gone, it was difficult to believe because he had worked at it for so long. “I've got a ton more energy now that I'm not having to fight off two viruses constantly,” Reilly said. He credits Jacque with his recovery.
“There's no way I could have gone through it alone if I didn't , have Jacque to help me out,” he said. “She more than picked up more than her share of the house-work around here,” Reilly said. “I was just too fatigued to be able to carry my own weight.”
The couple also is looking to start a family. One side effect of hepatitis C medication is that it causes severe birth defects, even six months after the last treatment.
The Reilly's will celebrate their 10th anniversary in August.
“I'm truly blessed to have her by my side through all of this,” he said.” HURON NATIVE FIGHTS OFF HEPATITIS C By Roger Larsen Of The Plainsman “Reilly puts his experience to work for others. When the voice on the other end of the line is describing a way of life that seems impossible to believe, Daniel Reilly understands.
He has been there.
Co-infected with HIV and hepatitis C for years, the Huron native has a 99 percent chance that treatments for the hepatitis have freed him of that virus.
A lifelong hemophiliac, Reilly now spends much of his work and free time talking about his illnesses, both as a co-infection program manager and help-line counselor at Hep C Connection in Denver and as president of the Hemophilia Society of Colorado.
The hemophilia chapter for South Dakota is actually based in Minneapolis, because there are so few hemophiliacs in South Dakota. When he lived in his home state, Reilly was a board member.
When a new job took him and his wife, Jacque, to Denver nearly two years ago, he got involved in the Colorado chapter, and in July he was elected president.
The organization advocates for patients' rights. Members will go to Washington, D.C., in March to educate Congress on the needs of hemophiliacs.
Clotting factor is extremely expensive, and most patients will spend more than $100,000 a year on it. Key issues include Medicaid-and insurance coverage.
Reilly said the hemophilia society will have a fund-raising event on Valentine's Day. It is dubbed as a Black and Blue Ball, symbolic of the bruising involved with those suffering from hemophilia.
People are invited to come in black formal attire, or in blue jeans and a shirt, to support the society.
The Reillys live in Northglenn, Colo. Reilly's wife, Jacque, is a dietitian in a nursing home.
While juggling his time between being co-infection program manager and part-time help-line-counselor, he takes calls from all over the country. The help-line number is 1-800-390-1202.
He also does public speaking and public education for patients, case managers, social workers and others. Reilly not only talks about hemophilia, HIV and hepatitis C, but their side effects as well.
They are side effects he knows well.
“I've gone through a lot to get where I am today, and if I can make anyone else's journey easier by sharing what I've learned and been through, then my life has purpose,” he said.”

Our Democracy Is in Danger of Being Paralyzed By Bill Moyers

“Thank you for inviting me tonight. I'm flattered to be speaking to a gathering as high-powered as this one that's come together with an objective as compelling as "media reform." I must confess, however, to a certain discomfort, shared with other journalists, about the very term "media." Ted Gup, who teaches journalism at Case Western Reserve, articulated my concerns better than I could when he wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education (November 23, 2001)
that the very concept of media is insulting to some of us within the press who find ourselves lumped in with so many disparate elements, as if everyone with a pen, a microphone, a camera, or just a loud voice were all one and the same. …David Broder is not Matt Drudge. “Meet the Press” is not “Temptation Island.” And I am not Jerry Springer. I do not speak for him. He does not speak for me. Yet "the media" speaks for us all.
That's how I felt when I saw Oliver North reporting on Fox from Iraq, pressing our embattled troops to respond to his repetitive and belittling question, “Does Fox Rock? Does Fox Rock?” Oliver North and I may be in the same "media" but we are not part of the same message. Nonetheless, I accept that I work and all of us live in "medialand," and God knows we need some "media reform." I'm sure you know those two words are really an incomplete description of the job ahead. Taken alone, they suggest that you've assembled a convention of efficiency experts, tightening the bolts and boosting the output of the machinery of public enlightenment, or else a conclave of high-minded do-gooders applauding each other's sermons. But we need to be - and we will be - much more than that. Because what we're talking about is nothing less than rescuing a democracy that is so polarized it is in danger of being paralyzed and pulverized.
Alarming words, I know. But the realities we face should trigger alarms. Free and responsible government by popular consent just can't exist without an informed public. That's a clich&#eacyte;, I know, but I agree with the presidential candidate who once said that truisms are true and clich&#eacyte;s mean what they say (an observation that no doubt helped to lose him the election.) It's a reality: democracy can't exist without an informed public. Here's an example: Only 13% of eligible young people cast ballots in the last presidential election. A recent National Youth Survey revealed that only half of the fifteen hundred young people polled believe that voting is important, and only 46% think they can make a difference in solving community problems. We're talking here about one quarter of the electorate. The Carnegie Corporation conducted a youth challenge quiz of l5-24 year-olds and asked them, “Why don't more young people vote or get involved?” Of the nearly two thousand respondents, the main answer was that they did not have enough information about issues and candidates. Let me rewind and say it again: democracy can't exist without an informed public. So I say without qualification that it's not simply the cause of journalism that's at stake today, but the cause of American liberty itself. As Tom Paine put it, "The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth." He was talking about the cause of a revolutionary America in 1776. But that revolution ran in good part on the energies of a rambunctious, though tiny press. Freedom and freedom of communications were birth-twins in the future United States. They grew up together, and neither has fared very well in the other's absence. Boom times for the one have been boom times for the other.
Yet today, despite plenty of lip service on every ritual occasion to freedom of the press radio and TV, three powerful forces are undermining that very freedom, damming the streams of significant public interest news that irrigate and nourish the flowering of self-determination. The first of these is the centuries-old reluctance of governments - even elected governments - to operate in the sunshine of disclosure and criticism. The second is more subtle and more recent. It's the tendency of media giants, operating on big-business principles, to exalt commercial values at the expense of democratic value. That is, to run what Edward R. Murrow forty-five years ago called broadcasting's "money-making machine" at full throttle. In so doing they are squeezing out the journalism that tries to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth; they are isolating serious coverage of public affairs into ever-dwindling "news holes" or far from prime–time; and they are gobbling up small and independent publications competing for the attention of the American people.
It's hardly a new or surprising story. But there are fresh and disturbing chapters.
In earlier times our governing bodies tried to squelch journalistic freedom with the blunt instruments of the law - padlocks for the presses and jail cells for outspoken editors and writers. Over time, with spectacular wartime exceptions, the courts and the Constitution struck those weapons out of their hands. But they've found new ones now, in the name of "national security." The classifier's Top Secret stamp, used indiscriminately, is as potent a silencer as a writ of arrest. And beyond what is officially labeled "secret" there hovers a culture of sealed official lips, opened only to favored media insiders: of government by leak and innuendo and spin, of misnamed "public information" offices that churn out blizzards of releases filled with self-justifying exaggerations and, occasionally, just plain damned lies. Censorship without officially appointed censors.
Add to that the censorship-by-omission of consolidated media empires digesting the bones of swallowed independents, and you've got a major shrinkage of the crucial information that thinking citizens can act upon. People saw that coming as long as a century ago when the rise of chain newspaper ownerships, and then of concentration in the young radio industry, became apparent. And so in the zesty progressivism of early New Deal days, the Federal Communications Act of 1934 was passed (more on this later.) The aim of that cornerstone of broadcast policy, mentioned over 100 times in its pages, was to promote the "public interest, convenience and necessity." The clear intent was to prevent a monopoly of commercial values from overwhelming democratic values - to assure that the official view of reality - corporate or government - was not the only view of reality that reached the people. Regulators and regulated, media and government were to keep a wary eye on each other, preserving those checks and balances that is the bulwark of our Constitutional order.
What would happen, however, if the contending giants of big government and big publishing and broadcasting ever joined hands? Ever saw eye to eye in putting the public's need for news second to free-market economics? That's exactly what's happening now under the ideological banner of "deregulation." Giant mega media conglomerates that our founders could not possibly have envisioned are finding common cause with an imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce not the sons and daughters of liberty but the very kind of bastards that issued from the old arranged marriage of church and state. Consider where we are today.
Never has there been an administration so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and - in defiance of the Constitution - from their representatives in Congress. Never has the so powerful a media oligopoly - the word is Barry Diller's, not mine - been so unabashed in reaching like Caesar for still more wealth and power. Never have hand and glove fitted together so comfortably to manipulate free political debate, sow contempt for the idea of government itself, and trivialize the people's need to know. When the journalist-historian Richard Reeves was once asked by a college student to define "real news", he answered: "The news you and I need to keep our freedoms." When journalism throws in with power that's the first news marched by censors to the guillotine. The greatest moments in the history of the press came not when journalists made common cause with the state but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.
Which brings me to the third powerful force - beyond governmental secrecy and mega media conglomerates - that is shaping what Americans see, read, and hear. I am talking now about that quasi-official partisan press ideologically linked to an authoritarian administration that in turn is the ally and agent of the most powerful interests in the world. This convergence dominates the marketplace of political ideas today in a phenomenon unique in our history. You need not harbor the notion of a vast, right wing conspiracy to think this more collusion more than pure coincidence. Conspiracy is unnecessary when ideology hungers for power and its many adherents swarm of their own accord to the same pot of honey. Stretching from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to the faux news of Rupert Murdoch's empire to the nattering nabobs of no-nothing radio to a legion of think tanks paid for and bought by conglomerates - the religious, partisan and corporate right have raised a mighty megaphone for sectarian, economic, and political forces that aim to transform the egalitarian and democratic ideals embodied in our founding documents. Authoritarianism. With no strong opposition party to challenge such triumphalist hegemony, it is left to journalism to be democracy's best friend. That is why so many journalists joined with you in questioning Michael Powell's bid - blessed by the White House - to permit further concentration of media ownership. If free and independent journalism committed to telling the truth without fear or favor is suffocated, the oxygen goes out of democracy. And there is a surer way to intimidate and then silence mainstream journalism than to be the boss.
If you doubt me, read Jane Kramer's chilling account in the current New Yorker of Silvio Berlusconi. The Prime Minister of Italy is its richest citizen. He is also its first media mogul. The list of media that he or his relatives or his proxies own, or directly or indirectly control, includes the state television networks and radio stations, three of Italy's four commercial television networks, two big publishing houses, two national newspapers, fifty magazines, the country's largest movie production-and-distribution company, and a chunk of its Internet services. Even now he is pressing upon parliament a law that would enable him to purchase more media properties, including the most influential paper in the country. Kramer quotes one critic who says that half the reporters in Italy work for Berlusconi, and the other half think they might have to. Small wonder he has managed to put the Italian State to work to guarantee his fortune - or that his name is commonly attached to such unpleasant things as contempt for the law, conflict of interest, bribery, and money laundering. Nonetheless, "his power over what other Italians see, read, buy, and, above all, think, is overwhelming." The editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, was asked recently why a British magazine was devoting so much space to an Italian Prime Minister. He replied that Berlusconi had betrayed the two things the magazine stood for: capitalism and democracy. Can it happen here? It can happen here. By the way, Berlusconi's close friend is Rupert Murdoch. On July 3lst this year, writes Jane Kramer, programming on nearly all the satellite hookups in Italy was switched automatically to Murdoch's Sky Italia.
So the issues bringing us here tonight are bigger and far more critical than simply "media reform." That's why, before I go on, I want to ask you to look around you. I'm serious: Look to your left and now to your right. You are looking at your allies in one of the great ongoing struggles of the American experience - the struggle for the soul of democracy, for government "of, by, and for the people."
It's a battle we can win only if we work together. We've seen that this year. Just a few months ago the FCC, heavily influenced by lobbyists for the newspaper, broadcasting and cable interests, prepared a relaxation of the rules governing ownership of media outlets that would allow still more diversity-killing mergers among media giants. The proceedings were conducted in virtual secrecy, and generally ignored by all the major media, who were of course interested parties. In June Chairman Powell and his two Republican colleagues on the FCC announced the revised regulations as a done deal.
But they didn't count on the voice of independent journalists and citizens like you. Because of coverage in independent outlets - including PBS, which was the only broadcasting system that encouraged its journalists to report what was really happening - and because citizens like you took quick action, this largely invisible issue burst out as a major political cause and ignited a crackling public debate. You exposed Powell's failure to conduct an open discussion of the rule changes save for a single hearing in Richmond, Virginia. Your efforts led to a real participatory discussion, with open meetings in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Atlanta. Then the organizing that followed generated millions of letters and "filings"at the FCC opposing the change. Finally, the outcry mobilized unexpected support for bi-partisan legislation to reverse the new rules that cleared the Senate - although House Majority Leader Tom De Lay still holds it prisoner in the House. But who would have thought six months ago that the cause would win support from such allies as Senator Trent Lott or Kay Bailey Hutchinson, from my own Texas. You have moved "media reform" to center-stage, where it may even now become a catalyst for a new era of democratic renewal.
We working journalists have something special to bring to this work. This weekend at your conference there will be plenty of good talk about the mechanics of reform. What laws are needed? What advocacy programs and strategies? How can we protect and extend the reach of those tools that give us some countervailing power against media monopoly - instruments like the Internet, cable TV, community-based radio and public broadcasting systems, alternative journals of news and opinion.
But without passion, without a message that has a beating heart, these won't be enough. There's where journalism comes in. It isn't the only agent of freedom, obviously; in fact, journalism is a deeply human and therefore deeply flawed craft - yours truly being a conspicuous example. But at times it has risen to great occasions, and at times it has made other freedoms possible. That's what the draftsmen of the First Amendment knew and it's what we can't afford to forget. So to remind us of what our free press has been at its best and can be again, I will call on the help of unseen presences, men and women of journalism's often checkered but sometimes courageous past.
Think with me for a moment on the reasons behind the establishment of press freedom. It wasn't ordained to protect hucksters, and it didn't drop like the gentle rain from heaven. It was fought and sacrificed for by unpretentious but feisty craftsmen who got their hands inky at their own hand presses and called themselves simply "printers." The very first American newspaper was a little three-page affair put out in Boston in September of 1690. Its name was 'Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick' and its editor was Benjamin Harris, who said he simply wanted "to give an account of such considerable things as have come to my attention." The government shut it down after one issue - just one issue! - for the official reason that printer Ben Harris hadn't applied for the required government license to publish. But I wonder if some Massachusetts pooh-bah didn't take personally one of Harris's proclaimed motives for starting the paper - "to cure the spirit of Lying much among us"?
No one seems to have objected when Harris and his paper disappeared - that was the way things were. But some forty-odd years later when printer John Peter Zenger was jailed in New York for criticizing its royal governor, things were different. The colony brought Zenger to trial on a charge of "seditious libel," and since it didn't matter whether the libel was true or not, the case seemed open and shut. But the jury ignored the judge's charge and freed Zenger, not only because the governor was widely disliked, but because of the closing appeal of Zenger's lawyer, Andrew Hamilton. Just hear him! His client's case was: Not the cause of the poor Printer, nor of New York alone, [but] the cause of Liberty, and. . . every Man who prefers Freedom to a Life of Slavery will bless and honour You, as Men who. . .by an impartial and uncorrupt Verdict, [will] have laid a Noble Foundation for securing to ourselves, our Posterity and our Neighbors, That, to which Nature and the Laws of our Country have given us a Right, – the Liberty – both of exposing and opposing arbitrary Power…by speaking and writing – Truth.
Still a pretty good mission statement!
During the War for Independence itself most of the three dozen little weekly newspapers in the colonies took the Patriot side and mobilized resistance by giving space to anti-British letters, news of Parliament's latest outrages, and calls to action. But the clarion journalistic voice of the Revolution was the onetime editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, Tom Paine, a penniless recent immigrant from England where he left a trail of failure as a businessman and husband. In 1776 - just before enlisting in Washington's army - he published Common Sense, a hard-hitting pamphlet that slashed through legalisms and doubts to make an uncompromising case for an independent and republican America. It's been called the first best seller, with as many as 100,000 copies bought by a small literate population. Paine followed it up with another convincing collection of essays written in the field and given another punchy title, The Crisis. Passed from hand to hand and reprinted in other papers, they spread the gospel of freedom to thousands of doubters. And why I bring Paine up here is because he had something we need to restore - an unwavering concentration to reach ordinary people with the message that they mattered and could stand up for themselves. He couched his gospel of human rights and equality in a popular style that any working writer can envy. "As it is my design," he said, "to make those that can scarcely read understand, I shall therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in language as plain as the alphabet."
That plain language spun off memorable one-liners that we're still quoting. "These are the times that try men's souls." "Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered." "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly." "Virtue is not hereditary." And this: "Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived." I don't know what Paine would have thought of political debate by bumper sticker and sound bite but he could have held his own in any modern campaign.
There were also editors who felt responsible to audiences that would dive deep. In 1787 and '88 the little New-York Independent Advertiser ran all eighty-five numbers of The Federalist , those serious essays in favor of ratifying the Constitution. They still shine as clear arguments, but they are, and they were, unforgiving in their demand for concentrated attention. Nonetheless, The Advertiser felt that it owed the best to its readers, and the readers knew that the issues of self-government deserved their best attention. I pray your goal of "media reform" includes a press as conscientious as the New-York Advertiser, as pungent as Common Sense, and as public-spirited as both. Because it takes those qualities to fight against the relentless pressure of authority and avarice. Remember, back in l79l, when the First Amendment was ratified, the idea of a free press seemed safely sheltered in law. It wasn't. Only seven years later, in the midst of a war scare with France, Congress passed and John Adams signed the infamous Sedition Act. The act made it a crime - just listen to how broad a brush the government could swing - to circulate opinions "tending to induce a belief" that lawmakers might have unconstitutional or repressive motives, or "directly or indirectly tending" to justify France or to "criminate," whatever that meant, the President or other Federal officials. No wonder that opponents called it a scheme to "excite a fervor against foreign aggression only to establish tyranny at home." John Ashcroft would have loved it.
But here's what happened. At least a dozen editors refused to be frightened and went defiantly to prison, some under state prosecutions. One of them, Matthew Lyon, who also held a seat in the House of Representatives, languished for four months in an unheated cell during a Vermont winter. But such was the spirit of liberty abroad in the land that admirers chipped in to pay his thousand-dollar fine, and when he emerged his district re-elected him by a landslide. Luckily, the Sedition Act had a built-in expiration date of 1801, at which time President Jefferson - who hated it from the first - pardoned those remaining under indictment. So the story has an upbeat ending, and so can ours, but it will take the kind of courage that those early printers and their readers showed.
Courage is a timeless quality and surfaces when the government is tempted to hit the bottle of censorship again during national emergencies, real or manufactured. As so many of you will recall, in 1971, during the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration resurrected the doctrine of "prior restraint" from the crypt and tried to ban the publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times and the Washington Post - even though the documents themselves were a classified history of events during four earlier Presidencies. Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, and Katherine Graham of the Post were both warned by their lawyers that they and their top managers could face criminal prosecution under espionage laws if they printed the material that Daniel Ellsberg had leaked - and, by the way, offered without success to the three major television networks. Or at the least, punitive lawsuits or whatever political reprisals a furious Nixon team could devise. But after internal debates - and the threats of some of their best-known editors to resign rather than fold under pressure - both owners gave the green light - and were vindicated by the Supreme Court. Score a round for democracy.
Bi-partisan fairness requires me to note that the Carter administration, in 1979, tried to prevent the Progressive magazine, published right here in Madison, from running an article called "How to Make an H-Bomb." The grounds were a supposed threat to "national security." But Howard Morland had compiled the piece entirely from sources open to the public, mainly to show that much of the classification system was Wizard of Oz smoke and mirrors. The courts again rejected the government's claim, but it's noteworthy that the journalism of defiance by that time had retreated to a small left-wing publication like the Progressive. In all three of those cases, confronted with a clear and present danger of punishment, none of the owners flinched. Can we think of a single executive of today's big media conglomerates showing the kind of resistance that Sulzberger, Graham, and Erwin Knoll did? Certainly not Michael Eisner. He said he didn't even want ABC News reporting on its parent company, Disney. Certainly not General Electric/NBC's Robert Wright. He took Phil Donahue off MNBC because the network didn't want to offend conservatives with a liberal sensibility during the invasion of Iraq. Instead, NBC brought to its cable channel one Michael Savage whose diatribes on radio had described non-white countries as "turd-world nations" and who characterized gay men and women as part of "the grand plan to cut down on the white race." I am not sure what it says that the GE/NBC executives calculated that while Donahue was offensive to conservatives, Savage was not.
And then there's Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS. In the very week that the once-Tiffany Network was celebrating its 75th anniversary - and taking kudos for its glory days when it was unafraid to broadcast "The Harvest of Shame" and "The Selling of the Pentagon" - the network's famous eye blinked. Pressured by a vociferous and relentless right wing campaign and bullied by the Republican National Committee - and at a time when its parent company has billions resting on whether the White House, Congress, and the FCC will allow it to own even more stations than currently permissible - CBS caved in and pulled the miniseries about Ronald Reagan that conservatives thought insufficiently worshipful. The chief honcho at CBS, Les Moonves, says taste, not politics, dictated his decision. But earlier this year, explaining why CBS intended to air a series about Adolf Hitler, Moonves sang a different tune: “If you want to play it safe and put on milquetoast then you get criticized…There are times when as a broadcaster when you take chances.” This obviously wasn't one of those times. Granted, made-for-television movies about living figures are about as vital as the wax figures at Madame Tussaud's - and even less authentic - granted that the canonizers of Ronald Reagan hadn't even seen the film before they set to howling; granted, on the surface it's a silly tempest in a teapot; still, when a once-great network falls obsequiously to the ground at the feet of a partisan mob over a cheesy mini-series that practically no one would have taken seriously as history, you have to wonder if the slight tremor that just ran through the First Amendment could be the harbinger of greater earthquakes to come, when the stakes are really high. And you have to wonder what concessions the media tycoons-cum-supplicants are making when no one is looking.
So what must we devise to make the media safe for individuals stubborn about protecting freedom and serving the truth? And what do we all - educators, administrators, legislators and agitators - need to do to restore the disappearing diversity of media opinions? America had plenty of that in the early days when the republic and the press were growing up together. It took no great amount of capital and credit - just a few hundred dollars - to start a paper, especially with a little political sponsorship and help. There were well over a thousand of them by 1840, mostly small-town weeklies. And they weren't objective by any stretch. Here's William Cobbett, another Anglo-American hell-raiser like Paine, shouting his creed in the opening number of his 1790s paper, Porcupine's Gazette. "Peter Porcupine," Cobbett's self-bestowed nickname, declared: Professions of impartiality I shall make none. They are always useless, and are besides perfect nonsense, when used by a newsmonger; for, he that does not relate news as he finds it, is something worse than partial; and . . . he that does not exercise his own judgment, either in admitting or rejecting what is sent him, is a poor passive tool, and not an editor.
In Cobbett's day you could flaunt your partisan banners as you cut and thrust, and not inflict serious damage on open public discussion because there were plenty of competitors. It didn't matter if the local gazette presented the day's events entirely through a Democratic lens. There was always an alternate Whig or Republican choice handy - there were, in other words, choices. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted, these many blooming journals kept even rural Americans amazingly well informed. They also made it possible for Americans to exercise one of their most democratic habits - that of forming associations to carry out civic enterprises. And they operated against the dreaded tyranny of the majority by letting lonely thinkers know that they had allies elsewhere. Here's how de Tocqueville put it in his own words: “It often happens in democratic countries that many men who have the desire or directed toward that light, and those wandering spirits who had long sought each other the need to associate cannot do it, because all being very small and lost in the crowd, they do not see each other and do not know where to find each other. Up comes a newspaper that exposes to their view the sentiment or the idea that had been presented to each of them simultaneously but separately. All are immediately in the shadows finally meet each other and unite.”
No wandering spirit could fail to find a voice in print. And so in that pre-Civil War explosion of humanitarian reform movements, it was a diverse press that put the yeast in freedom's ferment. Of course there were plenty of papers that spoke for Indian-haters, immigrant-bashers, bigots, jingoes and land-grabbers proclaiming America's Manifest Destiny to dominate North America. But one way or another, journalism mattered, and had purpose and direction.
Past and present are never as separate as we think. Horace Greeley, the reform-loving editor of the New York Tribune, not only kept his pages "ever open to the plaints of the wronged and suffering," but said that whoever sat in an editor's chair and didn't work to promote human progress hadn't tasted "the luxury" of journalism. I liken that to the words of a kindred spirit closer to our own time, I.F. Stone. In his four-page little I.F. Stone's Weekly, "Izzy" loved to catch the government's lies and contradictions in the government's own official documents. And amid the thunder of battle with the reactionaries, he said: "I have so much fun I ought to be arrested." Think about that. Two newsmen, a century apart, believing that being in a position to fight the good fight isn't a burden but a lucky break. How can our work here bring that attitude back into the newsrooms?
That era of a wide-open and crowded newspaper playing field began to fade as the old hand-presses gave way to giant machines with press runs and readerships in the hundreds of thousands and costs in the millions. But that didn't necessarily or immediately kill public spirited journalism. Not so long as the new owners were still strong-minded individuals with big professional egos to match their thick pocketbooks. When Joseph Pulitzer, a one-time immigrant reporter for a German-language paper in St. Louis, took over the New York World in 1883 he was already a millionaire in the making. But here's his recommended short platform for politicians:
1. Tax luxuries
2. Tax Inheritances
3. Tax Large Incomes
4. Tax monopolies
5. Tax the Privileged Corporation
6. A Tariff for Revenue
7. Reform the Civil Service
8. Punish Corrupt Officers
9. Punish Vote Buying.
10. Punish Employers who Coerce their Employees in Elections
~Also not a bad mission statement. Can you imagine one of today's huge newspaper chains taking that on as an agenda? Don't get me wrong. The World certainly offered people plenty of the spice that they wanted - entertainment, sensation, earthy advice on living - but not at the expense of news that let them know who was on their side against the boodlers and bosses. Nor did big-time, big-town, big bucks journalism extinguish the possibility of a reform-minded investigative journalism that took the name of muckraking during the Progressive Era. Those days of early last century saw a second great awakening of the democratic impulse. What brought it into being was a reaction against the Social Darwinism and unrestrained capitalistic exploitation that is back in full force today. Certain popular magazines made space for - and profited by - the work of such journalists - to name only a few - as Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Samuel Hopkins Adams and David Graham Phillips. They ripped the veils from - among other things - the shame of the cities, the crimes of the trusts, the treason of the Senate and the villainies of those who sold tainted meat and poisonous medicines. And why were they given those opportunities? Because, in the words of Samuel S. McClure, owner of McClure's Magazine, when special interests defied the law and flouted the general welfare, there was a social debt incurred. And, as he put it: “We have to pay in the end, every one of us. And in the end, the sum total of the debt will be our liberty.”
Muckraking lingers on today, but alas, a good deal of it consists of raking personal and sexual scandal in high and celebrated places. Surely, if democracy is to be served, we have to get back to putting the rake where the important dirt lies, in the fleecing of the public and the abuse of its faith in good government.
When that landmark Communications Act of 1934 was under consideration a vigorous public movement of educators, labor officials, and religious and institutional leaders emerged to argue for a broadcast system that would serve the interests of citizens and communities. A movement like that is coming to life again and we now have to build on this momentum.
It won't be easy, because the tide's been flowing the other way for a long time. The deregulation pressure began during the Reagan era, when then-FCC chairman Mark Fowler, who said that TV didn't need much regulation because it was just a "toaster with pictures," eliminated many public-interest rules. That opened the door for networks to cut their news staffs, scuttle their documentary units (goodbye to "The Harvest of Shame" and "The Selling of the Pentagon"), and exile investigative producers and reporters to the under-funded hinterlands of independent production. It was like turning out searchlights on dark and dangerous corners. A crowning achievement of that drive was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the largest corporate welfare program ever for the most powerful media and entertainment conglomerates in the world - passed, I must add, with support from both parties. And the beat of "convergence" between once-distinct forms of media goes on at increased tempo, with the communications conglomerates and the advertisers calling the tune. As safeguards to competition fall, an octopus like GE-NBC-Vivendi-Universal will be able to secure cable channels that can deliver interactive multimedia content - text, sound and images - to digital TVs, home computers, personal video recorders and portable wireless devices like cell phones. The goal? To corner the market on new ways of selling more things to more people for more hours in the day. And in the long run, to fill the airwaves with customized pitches to you and your children. That will melt down the surviving boundaries between editorial and marketing divisions and create a hybrid known to the new-media hucksters as "branded entertainment."
Let's consider what's happening to newspapers. A study by Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America reports that two-thirds of today's newspaper markets are monopolies. And now most of the country's powerful newspaper chains are lobbying for co-ownership of newspaper and broadcast outlets in the same market, increasing their grip on community after community. And are they up-front about it? Hear this: Last December 3 such media giants as The New York Times, Gannett, Cox, and Tribune, along with the trade group representing almost all the country's broadcasting stations, filed a petition to the FCC making the case for that cross ownership the owners so desperately seek. They actually told the FCC that lifting the regulation on cross ownership would strengthen local journalism. But did those same news organizations tell their readers what they were doing? Not all. None of them on that day believed they had an obligation to report in their own news pages what their parent companies were asking of the FCC. As these huge media conglomerates increase their control over what we see, read, and hear, they rarely report on how they are themselves are using their power to further their own interests and power as big business, including their influence over the political process.
Take a look at a new book called Leaving 'Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering' published as part of the Project on the State of the American Newspaper under the auspices of the Pew Charitable Trusts. The people who produced the book all love newspapers - Gene Roberts, former managing editor of The New York Times; Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism; Charles Layton, a veteran wire service reporter and news and feature editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as contributors such as Ken Auletta, Geneva Overholser, and Roy Reed. Their conclusion: the newspaper industry is in the middle of the most momentous change in its three hundred year history - a change that is diminishing the amount of real news available to the consumer. A generation of relentless corporatization is now culminating in a furious, unprecedented blitz of buying, selling and consolidating of newspapers, from the mightiest dailies to the humblest weeklies. It is a world where "small hometown dailies in particular are being bought and sold like hog futures. Where chains, once content to grow one property at a time, now devour other chains whole. Where they are effectively ceding whole regions of the country to one another, further minimizing competition. Where money is pouring into the business from interests with little knowledge and even less concern about the special obligations newspapers have to democracy." They go on to describe the toll that the never-ending drive for profits is taking on the news. In Cumberland, Maryland, for example, the police reporter had so many duties piled upon him he no longer had time to go to the police station for the daily reports. But newspaper management had a cost-saving solution: put a fax machine in the police station and let the cops send over the news they thought the paper should have. In New Jersey, the Gannett chain bought the Asbury Park Press, then sent in a publisher who slashed fifty five people from the staff and cut the space for news, and was rewarded by being named Gannett's Manager of the Year. In New Jersey, by the way, the Newhouse and Gannett chains between them now own thirteen of the state's nineteen dailies, or seventy three percent of all the circulation of New Jersey-based papers. Then there is The Northwestern in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with a circulation of 23,500. Here, the authors report, is a paper that prided itself on being in hometown hands since the Johnson administration - the Andrew Johnson administration. But in 1998 it was sold not once but twice, within the space of two months. Two years later it was sold again: four owners in less than three years.
You'd better get used to it, concluded Leaving Readers Behind, because the real momentum of consolidation is just beginning - it won't be long now before America is reduced to half a dozen major print conglomerates.
You can see the results even now in the waning of robust journalism. In the dearth of in-depth reporting as news organizations try to do more with fewer resources. In the failure of the major news organizations to cover their own corporate deals and lobbying as well as other forms of "crime in the suites" such as Enron story. And in helping people understand what their government is up to. The report by the Roberts team includes a survey in l999 that showed a wholesale retreat in coverage of nineteen key departments and agencies in Washington. Regular reporting of the Supreme Court and State Department dropped off considerably through the decade. At the Social Security Administration, whose activities literally affect every American, only the New York Times was maintaining a full-time reporter and, incredibly, at the Interior Department, which controls five to six hundred million acres of public land and looks after everything from the National Park Service to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, there were no full-time reporters around.
That's in Washington, our nation's capital. Out across the country there is simultaneously a near blackout of local politics by broadcasters. The public interest group Alliance for Better Campaigns studied forty-five stations in six cities in one week in October. Out of 7,560 hours of programming analyzed, only 13 were devoted to local public affairs - less than one-half of 1% of local programming nationwide. Mayors, town councils, school boards, civic leaders get no time from broadcasters who have filled their coffers by looting the public airwaves over which they were placed as stewards. Last year, when a movement sprang up in the House of Representatives to require these broadcasters to obey the law that says they must sell campaign advertising to candidates for office at the lowest commercial rate, the powerful broadcast lobby brought the Congress to heel. So much for the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.”
So what do we do? What is our strategy for taking on what seems a hopeless fight for a media system that serves as effectively as it sells - one that holds all the institutions of society, itself included, accountable?
There's plenty we can do. Here's one journalist's list of some of the overlapping and connected goals that a vital media reform movement might pursue.
First, we have to take Tom Paine's example - and Danny Schecter's advice - and reach out to regular citizens. We have to raise an even bigger tent than you have here. Those of us in this place speak a common language about the "media." We must reach the audience that's not here - carry the fight to radio talk shows, local television, and the letters columns of our newspapers. As Danny says, we must engage the mainstream, not retreat from it. We have to get our fellow citizens to understand that what they see, hear, and read is not only the taste of programmers and producers but also a set of policy decisions made by the people we vote for.
We have to fight to keep the gates to the Internet open to all. The web has enabled many new voices in our democracy - and globally - to be heard: advocacy groups, artists, individuals, non-profit organizations. Just about anyone can speak online, and often with an impact greater than in the days when orators had to climb on soap box in a park. The media industry lobbyists point to the Internet and say it's why concerns about media concentration are ill founded in an environment where anyone can speak and where there are literally hundreds of competing channels. What those lobbyists for big media don't tell you is that the traffic patterns of the online world are beginning to resemble those of television and radio. In one study, for example, AOL Time Warner (as it was then known) accounted for nearly a third of all user time spent online. And two others companies - Yahoo and Microsoft - bring that figure to fully 50%. As for the growing number of channels available on today's cable systems, most are owned by a small handful of companies. Of the ninety-one major networks that appear on most cable systems, 79 are part of such multiple network groups such as Time Warner, Viacom, Liberty Media, NBC, and Disney. In order to program a channel on cable today, you must either be owned by or affiliated with one of the giants. If we're not vigilant the wide-open spaces of the Internet could be transformed into a system in which a handful of companies use their control over high-speed access to ensure they remain at the top of the digital heap in the broadband era at the expense of the democratic potential of this amazing technology. So we must fight to make sure the Internet remains open to all as the present-day analogue of that many-tongued world of small newspapers so admired by de Tocqueville.
We must fight for a regulatory, market and public opinion environment that lets local and community-based content be heard rather than drowned out by nationwide commercial programming.
We must fight to limit conglomerate swallowing of media outlets by sensible limits on multiple and cross-ownership of TV and radio stations, newspapers, magazines, publishing companies and other information sources. Let the message go forth: No Berlusconis in America!
We must fight to expand a noncommercial media system - something made possible in part by new digital spectrum awarded to PBS stations - and fight off attempts to privatize what's left of public broadcasting. Commercial speech must not be the only free speech in America!
We must fight to create new opportunities, through public policies and private agreements, to let historically marginalized media players into more ownership of channels and control of content.
Let us encourage traditional mainstream journalism to get tougher about keeping a critical eye on those in public and private power and keeping us all informed of what's important - not necessarily simple or entertaining or good for the bottom line. Not all news is "Entertainment Tonight." And news departments are trustees of the public, not the corporate media's stockholders In that last job, schools of journalism and professional news associations have their work cut out. We need journalism graduates who are not only better informed in a whole spectrum of special fields - and the schools do a competent job there - but who take from their training a strong sense of public service. And also graduates who are perhaps a little more hard-boiled and street-smart than the present crop, though that's hard to teach. Thanks to the high cost of education, we get very few recruits from the ranks of those who do the world's unglamorous and low-paid work. But as a onetime "cub" in a very different kind of setting, I cherish H.L. Mencken's description of what being a young Baltimore reporter a hundred years ago meant to him. "I was at large," he wrote, in a wicked seaport of half a million people with a front seat at every public . . [B]y all orthodox cultural standards I probably reached my all-time low, for the heavy reading of my teens had been abandoned in favor of life itself. . .But it would be an exaggeration to say I was ignorant, for if I neglected the humanities I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer or a midwife.
We need some of that worldly wisdom in our newsrooms. Let's figure out how to attract youngsters who have acquired it. And as for those professional associations of editors they might remember that in union there is strength. One journalist alone can't extract from an employer a commitment to let editors and not accountants choose the appropriate subject matter for coverage. But what if news councils blew the whistle on shoddy or cowardly managements? What if foundations gave magazines such as the Columbia Journalism Review sufficient resources to spread their stories of journalistic bias, failure or incompetence? What if entire editorial departments simply refused any longer to quote anonymous sources - or give Kobe Bryant's trial more than the minimal space it rates by any reasonable standard - or to run stories planted by the Defense Department and impossible, for alleged security reasons, to verify? What if a professional association backed them to the hilt? Or required the same stance from all its members? It would take courage to confront powerful ownerships that way. But not as much courage as is asked of those brave journalists in some countries who face the dungeon, the executioner or the secret assassin for speaking out. All this may be in the domain of fantasy. And then again, maybe not. What I know to be real is that we are in for the fight of our lives. I am not a romantic about democracy or journalism; the writer Andre Gide may have been right when he said that all things human, given time, go badly. But I know journalism and democracy are deeply linked in whatever chance we human beings have to redress our grievances, renew our politics, and reclaim our revolutionary ideals. Those are difficult tasks at any time, and they are even more difficult in a cynical age as this, when a deep and pervasive corruption has settled upon the republic. But too much is at stake for our spirits to flag. Earlier this week the Library of Congress gave the first Kluge Lifetime Award in the Humanities to the Polish philosopher Leslie Kolakowski. In an interview Kolakowski said: “There is one freedom on which all other liberties depend - and that is freedom of expression, freedom of speech, of print. If this is taken away, no other freedom can exist, or at least it would be soon suppressed.”
That's the flame of truth your movement must carry forward. I am older than almost all of you and am not likely to be around for the duration; I have said for several years now that I will retire from active journalism when I turn 70 next year. But I take heart from the presence in this room, unseen, of Peter Zenger, Thomas Paine, the muckrakers, I.F. Stone and all those heroes and heroines, celebrated or forgotten, who faced odds no less than ours and did not flinch. I take heart in your presence here. It's your fight now. Look around. You are not alone.”

The Harry Potter Retreat, March 1-3, 2002

“An Adult Response to the Magical World of Harry Potter”

Father Noël approached his subject as a literary critic - His degree is in English Literature. He was quite aware of the hostile reaction to Harry Potter but approached his subject in a very positive manner with the assurance that his subject could be approached from the vantage of goodness. His primary resource was Connie Neal's book, What's a Christian To Do With Harry Potter which is very helpful in sharing HP with children and making sense of the magic/witchcraft in HP. All but two of the some 60 participants had read all four books, most more than once and many three and four times along with seeing the movie and/or listening to the taped recordings of each book. Father commented on the quality of the soundtrack CD which he played excerpts from. Excellent instrumental music. He approached his subject with a sense of God's presence.

CONFERENCE I: "The Magical World of Harry Potter"
Begin at the beginning - the first book begins with a sense of what is normal or flawed; he mentioned the element of nonsense and the gossip, the supremely spoiled child; the uncle and aunt's disowning HPs parents who were their dirty "little secret"; Harry was "different" and they disapproved of HP and every thing about him and subjected Harry to constant ridicule and scorn.
Father cited the 'Inklings' writings and the series of fantasy worlds where the battle of good and evil prevailed, v.g., Starwars, western cowboy movies and the like. These touch an archetypal myth which comes from the heart. Myths and mythology are stories expressing the human.

GETTING IN TOUCH WITH THE HEART IS GETTING IN TOUCH WITH HUMANITY.
It is necessary to reflect cultural beliefs expressing life and what it is to be human. He cited the experience of stargazing in Peru, that though it was a frigid experience he could see so many more stars in the southern skies from the extreme elevation he lived at while working in Peru. He related his experience of living through an 8.8 earthquake which killed 81,000 people of whom his prior was one. Grief is a universal experience.
Father listed some 20 different types of characters to be found in the HP books and explained what they represented and said that the subconscious created all of these. In order cited they are: Cerebus, Sphinx, Phoenix, unicorns, troves, giants, centaurs, dragons, pixies, elves, lepracorns, mehr(?) people, nyads, dyads, triads , ghosts (5 for each house), gnomes, ghouls, witches, and sorcerers.
In these books of fantasy which reflect our world there are two references to satan: a devil, and a devil's plant; the truly magical teaches us much resourcefulness. Cf. the Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis - these contain the theology of our own fall. Martin's book about C. S. Lewis explains how the 'Christ Event' fulfills all of life events.
DEFINITION: MYTH IS AN UNFOCUSED GLEAM OF DIVINE TRUTH WHICH SPEAKS TO OUR UNCONSCIOUS.
*** Rowling invents and fills stories with creatures --- extremely creative --- the reason they appeal.

The character Lupin (Lupus - werewolf) and Serious Black (the brightest star in Book 4 follows Orion) and ties us into traditional myths.

FAIRY TALES are oral traditions going back forever; magicones, spells, incantations can be called "LITERARY MAGIC" which is the context of a fantasy story that speaks to our human ways.

Porkey(?) (a trophy) in the 4th book attempts to tie us into traditional passages to mythical world. Quest - events of passage; white, the once and future King Arthur --- conflict of good and evil with a happy ending.

IN GENERAL: GOOD EVIL Relational - orientation to others dominates - needs control The power of good arrogant Harry's qualities: selfish, self-centered Humble, shares, generous (giving)
Myths teach us there is a constant warfare within - requires that we make choices. This is a reality and requires Christ. All cultures have these stories --- children see the truth in them–it is truly Christian that allows the struggle and thus the growth.

CONFERENCE II: "Ms. J. W. Rowling talks about her works"
Some of the influences the author represents. She was a compulsive writer from an early age. In the conversations with J. K. Rowling the interviewer learned she had a younger sibling with whom she compared herself. She considered herself very plain and her sister very beautiful. Once set of grandparents, Ernie and Stanley, Stanley, a dreamer. The influence of her family shows in the naming of the characters. She lived in Bristol, England and in South Wales. Her parents were city parents who dreamed of living in the country. J. K. lives in the country. A teacher, Mrs. Shepherd, became her mentor, was a feminist and a great teacher and was instrumental in nurturing authors great love of language and literary structure. The author does not write 'down' to kids or adults so adults enjoy her books as well. Her least favorite teacher was a bully. She personifies integrity - example, the turquoise colored Anglia.

Good is relational. FRIENDSHIP IS A KEY THEME THROUGH OUT - indomitable good will toward others. Greeks have four words for LOVE - our language is poverty stricken.

storgê - very natural;
eros - physical attraction, physical passion;
philein - love of friendship, should choose filial love;
agape - the supernatural is a divine gift; there is no evidence of this kind of love in the first four books.

J. K. had read all of Jane Austin's books by the age of 12. She read Elizabeth Lange's book, The Little White Horse, a wonderful story. She had a blind spot about poetry but loved novels and biographies. Jessica Medford was a tremendous example of moral courage and very influential for J. K. She finds doing rough drafts of her work very difficult as her writing is too personal to reveal. She loved Cardivagio's 'Supper at Emmaus' which is to be found in the St. Louis City museum. She loved Watership Dawn, and Michael Caine, cartoons. Her high school was at Exeter and graduated in languages. Then she took a bilingual course in secretarial and learned to type - she is a great editor. She writes out all of her work in longhand first then types the material. She has a serious social justice side - worked for Amnesty International - short term. She did much of her writing in cafe's.
** She first conceived HP as she was traveling on a train from Manchester - it has stalled for 4 hours - to London. It was then that she conceived all 7 books. As she had no pen, she used the opportunity to think through the framework --- Hogwarts was the first image she visualized; Lupin was her favorite character, a very wounded person.

Source for FOUR INTERVIEWS WITH J. K. ROWLING: http://www.scholastic.com/hp/jkrowling/
He recalled references to: David Colbert's Magical Worlds of Harry Potter and Sorcerers Companion

With children we can teach mythology.

CONFERENCE III: "The Question of EVIL: myth reveals the truth"

TYPES OF EVIL:

Natural (physical) - upheavals, disease, WHY? ME?
Father experienced first hand the 1970 earthquake in Peru, 81,000 perished - an expression of our broken world contrasts with Eden existence.
Moral Suffering (conscious) - cruelty, alienation, breakdowns, total lack of respect --- we are bound together: INDIVIDUALLY and COMMUNALLY.

Christians are in the middle of Hindu's and Moslim's - baffled to explain wars as they can never be won – resolved maybe but can never be won. Cruelty in organization ignorance - napalm bombings and forces which seek to kill our vitality is a great mystery – EVIL IS NOT ABSTRACT as it summons forth involvement, all this can be a cause for growth – the question is, “Do we become better? Or bitter?”.
We Americans seek comfort - a very serious drawback to recognizing the greatest good.
Starting point is the realization of its existence; a full obstacle is asking "WHY?" FREE WILL IS THE BEGINNING. These books treat the battle of 'good' and 'evil'. In the Hebrew sense there is power in a name. Lord Voldemort is an excellent personification of evil and wants his power back. He personifies evil --- murderous, self-centered, cruel, a sadist, creates confusion, dissention, divides, opposes good. His power against goodness was broken when he couldn't kill Harry. Goodness preserves life --- relational, Harry saved by his mother's love (power to serve). Distinguish Voldemort from Christian vantage.

HERE WE NEED TO CONSIDER THE MEANING OF DUALISM.
In the 11th century before Christ, Zoroaster, stayed in a cave for seven years and was enlightened by good thought. It taught him there is a constant struggle going on - equal forces of good and evil. The force of life and cosmic order (ahura mazda ?) is opposed by the force of death and chaos (ahrimar ?) We find this dualism in the Koran. This tension always going on - all life comes from this dualism:
Good thought, Correct Action, Immortality VS. Evil thought, deceit, perdition.

This is seen again in Aztec culture - the personification of evil.

IN NO WAY DO WE BELIEVE IN EVIL AS AN EQUAL POWER TO GOOD.
Jung, in treating the shadow side, sees the projection of evil on others, personal as well as communal and warns that this divides.
Myths recognize that humans face limitations.

CHRISTIANITY IS NOT DUALISTIC. Dualism is in us not out there. We don't believe in two equal forces but believe we have a choice in choosing life and strengthening will power. There is not TWO FORCES but GOD and the deceiver. It is a sin to go beyond oneself and disobedience taught by Christ. Pride is identified in Philippians Chapter two.
MYTHS TELL US WHAT WE ARE.
LOVE UNITES --- VERY IMPORTANT TO LOOK AT OUR OWN TRADITION.

READINGS FROM THE FOUR BOOKS AS CHOSEN BY VOLUNTEERS:
BOOK I – contains J. K. Rowlings favorite section - the restricted section - HP's close escape from being found out by Filch and Snape. HP's experience with the magnificent mirror and inscription – seeing his father, mother and relatives in the mirror, his first vision of his family – representing the deepest desire of our hearts. The Hat began to sing – Hogwarts sorting hat – his choice to opt out of Slithering group.

BOOK II - selection: – Hello, said Harry nervously, who are you? (Dobbe – The house elf)… "sit down"? Dobbe had never been asked to sit down. Bad Dobbe … must punish himself. Dobbe, can't I help you? HP humble and modest. HP escaped the evil one again; warned not to go back to Hogwarts. Chapter 13 – Dumbledore rewarded Ron, Lockhart and HP; Riddle said, I am like him… our choices show us what we truly are…. Griffindore's Sword.

BOOK III – selection – a scenario in the Tower room with HP and Prof Trilowney before her crystal ball - HP looked into it an pretended….the dark shape a hippogriff! It will happen tonite; HP in a panic - it foretold the evil one's assistant would escape and rejoin the dark lord. Walking Willow planning to be at Hogwarts because HP was going to be there. They had friends now.

BOOK IV - Fred, George and Hermione at the two feasts in two days; HP wanting to know who had been chosen champions; Goblet ready to make a decision - The Goblet of Fire in darkness.
Last Chapters of Book IV – Voldemort has returned and planned steps to remove the dementors – send envoys to the giants – the self-concern of Cornelius was based on purity of blood assumptions.

Regards names – example: Erised is desire spelled backwards.

Father quoted an article taken from the Premiere Magazine.
Scholastic, Inc. had refused to publish the first book initially because of the title reference to the "Sorcerer's Stone".

How did they find the actor for HP's part - story told about a film critic taking his son to a performance and the two casting directors spotted the film critic and his son - interviewed son --- son had acting experience, acted in David Copper -field.
INSCRIPTION ON THE MIRROR: Spelled backward and reconstructed produced: "I SHOW NOT YOUR FACE, BUT YOUR HEART'S DESIRE."

CONFERENCE IV: "The Christian responds to Harry's world"
Father referred to Neal's book giving the pros and cons of HP for Chrisitans.

Quoted Charles Colson's comment in Neal's book - Chapter 1, along with all the other pros and cons to HP.

The author is tremendously inventive – the elements of magic used were PHYSICAL and not occult; Violence theme runs through on the framework of the battle between good and evil – evil MUST BE confronted in a self- centered world. Help children contrast physical evil of HP with the occult or Supernatural evil.

On Page 198 - 1 see article – missing the opportunity to be soft; HP's popularity touches on the reality of choosing not reaction but the responsibility to be proactive – WHAT WE DO WITH CURIOSITY IS OUR RESPONSIBILITY !!

SUMMATION:
Key to Father's presentation is summed up in the Letter to the Romans 12:21: "DO NOT BE OVERCOME BY EVIL, BUT OVERCOME EVIL WITH GOOD."

There is so much in these books that can be used to touch valuable lessons.
Refer to the end of Chapter One of Neal's book for the following points:

SPIRITUAL WARFARE – the battle of good and evil both within us and among us. Jesus won the war by total abandonment to the will of the Father, The Good.
FAITHFUL FRIENDS – we need to choose our friends very carefully.
SELF-SACRIFICING LOVE – We have the example of Christ, sans the Book I, page 294. … never ! (word of HP's mother).
ULTIMATE VICTORY has been won; good over evil with suffering & good; The War is over, we are now playing out the battles in our individual lives and in the world we live with its pertinent challenges.
CHOICES - determine who we are & what we do with ourselves. V.g., the Sorting Hat - HP chooses not to be in Slithering. HP makes mostly good Choices.
SLOW TO JUDGMENT - Reserve judgment until we meet the individual examples: Serious Black; the race issue; cf. 4th Book, example of Bulgaria.
NO VENGEANCE - Forgiveness if of the highest importance.
ENEMIES can provoke me; I need to let them while testing them with my truth.
LISTEN TO THE DEEPEST DESIRES OF MY HEART. Cf., the mirrors great desire to belong.

Children become avid readers ---- !!!! 730 pages in Book IV. Author's vocabulary stretches children and adults.

The writings of the 'Inklings' also stretch children in the same way. These books have a well developed understanding of majesty and mystery ( AWE & WONDER ).

Meet people where they are. Under superstition there is a deep layer of faith.

Meet them where they are and share oneself - model Christianity before I preach it. . AVOID SLANDER. ! ! ! Greek for slander is 'diabolus' (the liar).

Father found no occult (supernatural) references (the physical vs. psychological paradigms comes into play here.)

READ from Neal's book for Christian quotes. Key difficulty lay with the fact that parents haven't read these books. The books give many examples of slander. The books do warn against witchcraft which demands control, which in essence, is a substitute for affirming feelings by accepting them and not by intellectualizing them.

These books contain true literary/mechanical magic.

Ephesians 6:10-22 – In fighting the good battle draw our strength from the Lord and the Spirit of God, the Spirit of LOVE.

“Stand fast … in truth; clothed with integrity, (the good of truth); shod with the gospel of peace; Faith to quench ignorance and all flaming arrows of the evil one and salvation in the words of God. Give yourselves to prayer and entreaty in the power of the Spirit; keep watch and persevere, interceding for all God's people.”

Neal tells us it is not up to us. We need to go where we can begin. How is the Spirit working - dispelling ignorance ! I need to educate myself and broaden my horizon.

An interesting note: J. R. R. Tolkien, one of the contributing editors of the Jerusalem Bible has also written books on myth and fantasy, best known is the Lord of The Rings.

Welcome To Readings

Table of Contents, This Page

2007 NAIA II National Champions

1952 Carroll College Football Team

Installing Love On The Computer

Dan and Jacque Reilly with Olivia Belle

Our Democracy Is in Danger of Being Paralyzed By Bill Moyers

The Harry Potter Retreat, March 1-3, 2002

“An Adult Response to the Magical World of Harry Potter”

Prayer For Peace
To Mary, The Light of Hope
Pope John Paul II

Muslim, Jewish, Christian Prayer for Peace

Prayer to Christ the Healer

Claim Your Vote, Be Informed about Legislation:

For More,

MILLENNIUM III,
Year XI, 2011

Thanks for Visiting

Welcome To Readings

Table of Contents, This Page

Dan and Jacque Reilly with Olivia Belle

The Harry Potter Retreat, March 1-3, 2002

“An Adult Response to the Magical World of Harry Potter”

For More,

MILLENNIUM III, Year XI, 2011

Thanks for Visiting

MILLENNIUM III,
Year XI, 2011