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- Written by EJ Sweeney
As a volunteer firefighter, I’ve been to a number of fires where civilians have died. I’ve never been to a working fire where a brother firefighter has died. Once, however, we did come as close as you can to losing one of our own. Two of our members were operating on the first floor of a house. Fire was raging in the basement below. Without warning, the floor collapsed, plummeting them into the well-involved cellar. The firefighter who first witnessed them plunge into the fire below kept screaming: “They’re burning up! They’re burning up!”
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- Written by EJ Sweeney
In high school, my baseball coach loved making us do wind-sprints. For those who’ve never had the “pleasure”, a wind-sprint is when you run as hard as you can and just before you pass out, slow down to a jog until you catch your breath and repeat this insanity all over again for about fifteen more times. My coach would line up our team in pairs and then have us jog around the gym. The first two in line would then have to sprint as hard as they could around the gym until they caught up with the back of the line. When they did, they’d yell and the next two up front would go. We would do this over and over until we were delirious from exhaustion.
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- Written by EJ Sweeney
We recently bought our first Smart TV. While learning how to use it, I’ve run across several documentaries about 9-11 I had never seen before. They feature some incredibly gripping interviews, including one with the Captain of a Harlem ladder company who’s been on the Fire Department for nearly forty years.
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- Written by EJ Sweeney
Here’s a quick trivia question: on the animated TV show The Simpsons, who’s the only character who has five fingers? (Everybody else on the show has four.) It’s God, which includes Jesus, or as Homer calls Him, “Jebus”.
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- Written by EJ Sweeney
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” What did Socrates mean by this?
Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher who, along with Plato and Aristotle, is credited with founding western philosophy. Supposedly, he uttered these words right before he was sentenced to death for “corrupting youth” (with his philosophy). While people have interpreted these words a number of different ways, the most common is this: only when—like a philosopher—you vigorously pursue the answers to life’s ultimate questions (What is the meaning of life? How do you live a virtuous life? What happens when you die? Is there a God and, if so, what is God like?) can you reach your full potential as a human being; only then can you know the fullness of life.
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- Written by EJ Sweeney
There’s a great scene toward the end of the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Indiana comes to the edge of a huge abyss. Some one hundred feet straight across is the entrance to a cave that contains the Holy Grail—he needs to find the Grail quickly in order to save his father’s life. The entrance is cut into the flat rockface that drops hundreds of feet to the ground. Standing at the precipice of this great chasm, all he can see are the jagged rocks hundreds of feet below—one more step, and he will fall to his death.
