Every so often, my wife tells me that I’m living in the wrong times. Because of my old-fashioned beliefs, she claims that I would have been better off living during the 1800s. Whenever she comments about this, I remind her that I spent the better part of my early years at my grandfather’s (Tom Williams’s) house, and since he was born in 1898, that’s probably where I picked up a lot of my beliefs.
I recently filed a chapter 7 bankruptcy case for a client who owed a significant amount of money to some local loan shark companies. (I call payday and title loan companies “loan shark companies” because they routinely charge up to 300% interest per year on money that is loaned to customers.) My client also had several thousand dollars in accumulated debt that he owed to credit card companies and medical providers. For the purpose of this article, I’m going to call my client “Jim.”
Last week, I wrote about how an adorer (“Tony”) had criticized me because of an article that I had written about Amazon.com and its founder, Jeff Bezos. Tony provided several reasons why I (and other Catholics) should refuse to do business with Amazon, one of which is that “Amazon distributes pornography.” Here’s how I responded to the comment about the pornography issue:
There’s a new trend that’s been developing among couples who are getting married. They are signing prenuptial agreements that prohibit their partners from posting nude or embarrassing photos on the Internet. A prenuptial agreement has been traditionally defined as a written contract that is signed by a couple prior to marriage. The agreement provides that in the event of a divorce, the couple will be allowed to retain the property that each of them acquired during the marriage.
On Christmas morning, my wife sent a text message to me and our children with a link to a YouTube video. The beginning of the video showed images from the first Christmas. The audio that played in the background was from the segment of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” where Linus recited the famous passage from the Gospel of Luke: “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them….”