Guest Columns

At my church we talk a lot about beauty.
The ancient Greeks and the early Christians elevated three prime virtues: truth, goodness and beauty, and as Russian novelist Dostoevsky wrote, “Beauty will save the world.”
A longing for beauty is primal. A lack of it brings despair.

A few weeks ago, I watched a movie on TV called “The Perfect Family.”

Right away, just by the title, you know they’re not perfect.

The main character is Eileen, the mother of the family. A devout Catholic, she attends Mass every day, and at confession she confesses every sin she can think of down to her gossipy thoughts.

She serves communion and delivers food to the homebound. She’s careful to pray before meals and keeps a family altar in her home.

Kentucky is blessed to have not one but several “signature” industries, those areas of the economy where few if any states have a bigger impact.

Since last summer, we’ve gotten a much clearer picture of just how extensive some of these industries are.

The latest news about two of them, in fact, came last week.  First, we learned that Kentucky churned out more than a million cars and trucks last year, the most our four assembly plants have built since 2007.  Only three states produced more.

Twenty years ago this year we had a devastating storm blow through our area that we call the No-Name Storm.

I hadn’t thought about it in a while, but the other day a woman came into the newspaper office and mentioned it. She still lives in one of the hardest hit areas.

When she left, I started thinking about that storm and its aftermath. For many people around here it was our area’s Hurricane Sandy or a mini Hurricane Katrina, blowing in and surprising everyone, wreaking havoc.