Carvajal: Rash judgment
THE Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines’s (CBCP) latest exhortation of the faithful not to vote for politicians who are pro-Reproductive Health (RH) Bill would seem to be derived from this syllogism:
Major premise: To be anti-life is to have questionable moral values./ Minor...
Carvajal: Amen corner
IN GOLF, “amen corner” refers to a curve in the fairways of Augusta National Golf Club that is so fraught with peril a player has to be focused, technically perfect and courageous to survive it. Otherwise this is where many players say goodbye to their chances of winning and accept their fate...
Carvajal: Flesh-eating bacteria
THOSE who are trying to put President Benigno Aquino III down insist that he focuses his energies on solving poverty and not on going after corrupt personalities of the previous administration. They are absolutely right if they mean mass poverty is our main problem. They would be absolutely...
Carvajal: Unless...
HIS defense lawyers must think us Cebuanos are idiots. Otherwise, how could they have come to Cebu to swear to their client’s innocence? How could they brazenly tell us there was not enough evidence to compel the chief justice to testify? How could they dismiss as “fishing expedition” the...
Carvajal: Alternatives
IN AN ideal world, there is no question about raising wages to cover inflation on the short term but more importantly to create a self-sufficient economy on the long term.
Besides being socially just, empowering workers with higher wages not only creates a big local market but also...
Carvajal: Kasambahay Day
LAST Sunday, April 29, was National Kasambahay Day and I found the simple celebration I attended at the fourth floor session hall of Cebu City Hall quite encouraging and uplifting.
It was encouraging that although a Magna Carta for Kasambahays is still pending in Congress, a National...
Carvajal: Fundamentals
WHENEVER our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is on the up and up, as in the first quarter of 2012, government analysts readily conclude to sound economic fundamentals. Never mind that mass poverty continues quite obviously to be on the upswing in spite.
No, our economy is not sound and...
Carvajal: Lake Sebu
IN THE mid-seventies when I first visited it, Lake Sebu was essentially virgin territory. Getting there from Davao City was an eight-hour ordeal through rough roads which got rougher as one neared the lake area. In fact, they were impassable during the rainy season. Anyway, once there, rain or...
Carvajal: Do we...
OR DON'T we want more tourists to come? Of course, we do because indeed tourism is a potential big-time money earner and we are lagging far behind our Asian neighbors in tourist arrivals.
Carvajal: Water under the bridge
SOME people have asked me why I haven’t said anything about the St. Theresa’s College (STC) case when just about everybody else has. My reason then was I did not want to add to the emotional conflagration with one more knee-jerk reaction. I used to teach at STC and I thought a quick take on the...
Carvajal: Honoring heroes
FOR a long time now, March 16, 1521 has been to me the day we discovered the Spaniards. Not the other way around as I was taught in school. On that fateful and inglorious day we started losing our land (to the colonizers), our freedom and worst of all our cultural identity. Today, after all the...
Carvajal: Death and life
AS I WISH my readers a new life this Easter, I am nevertheless constrained to talk about imminent death. Holy Week rightly assured us that Jesus has obtained forgiveness for our sins through His suffering and death. I just wonder, however, from what sins have we been forgiven and what new life...
Carvajal: Who is this man?
BECAUSE we have faith, we see in the events of Holy Week a God who suffers and dies for sinful man. We examine ourselves for sins, confess them, obtain forgiveness and make atonement. On Easter Sunday, the same faith makes us hope to be resurrected to new life with Jesus.
Carvajal: Two workers
I WAS about to construct a piece about Pacman’s tax woes when I learned of Maria in Cebu Archbishop Jose Palma’s Pastoral “Letter on Kasambahays” issued on March 19, the feast of St. Joseph the Worker. Both are workers that stand on opposite ends of the politico-economic spectrum.
Carvajal: Education
WITH the school year at its end, the question of how qualified our graduates are to cope with present-day life’s challenges comes to the fore. The bottom-line issue is the quality of the education students are getting.
Often, educational standards are set in terms of the knowledge and...
Carvajal: Negative politics
WHEN a leftist group threw in their lot with Manny Villar in the last elections, I was more than a little surprised and disappointed.
I probably did not suffer half as much as one of their leaders did in the hands of former president Ferdinand Marcos but I will never stand for the...
Carvajal: Friendship
THEY are my “crazy Americans” and I am their “stupid Filipino.” Terms of endearment really, because John Richard “Dick” Sokol, John Gremer Jr. and Orlando Carvajal are the best of friends. We are together now to celebrate a friendship that has transcended time, distance, race and ideology....
Carvajal: OMG
MY reaction to what happened at the resumption of the Renato Corona impeachment trial was: “Oh my God, we are in deep shit.” Pardon the language but I can’t seem to find an apt word to describe the trouble we would be in if the Chief Justice succeeded in using the Supreme Court to suppress the...
Carvajal: Travel woes
I AM writing this on my sister’s computer in Simi Valley, California because my American “mom,” Lillian Gremer, sent me a round trip ticket to attend a family reunion. The Gremers took me in as one of their own when I was a student at St. John’s Seminary in nearby Camarillo in the mid sixties....
Carvajal: Best medium
IT IS indisputable that the best medium for communication is the language or dialect both the sender and receiver understand best. Using a foreign language forces both of them to do simultaneous translation and we know just how much is lost in translation.
For instance, “Gago” insults...
Carvajal: Work of the devil
AT FIRST, I thought the child, obviously a minor, was just having fun driving the trisikad of his father while the latter was taking a needed break. But soon, I saw another one and they were stopping for passengers, dropping them off and getting paid.
Carvajal: Outfoxed
CHINESE general Sun Tzu in “The Art of War” considers as a good military strategist one who wins a war without fighting. The prosecution panel might have thought of this when they decided to disengage from the politico-legal war raging in the Senate impeachment court.
It was smart of...
Carvajal: Moving as one
TECHNOLOGY and climate change have shrunk the world into a global village where positive developments, natural calamities and man-made disasters make not an insignificant impact on most if not all parts of the village. The world has become that small, forcing its inhabitants to move as one in...
Carvajal: Sword of Damocles
FILIPINOS taught the world what people power can do. It can oust a dictator. Today, however, on its 26th anniversary, Filipinos might have to realize that Edsa I was not the great success story they fancied it to be. It did not return power to the people and it failed to liberate us from an...
Carvajal: Saint as model
I HAVE always held the position that the Son of God became human so we could feel both the spiritual and physical warmth of God’s love for man.
Moreover, by stepping down from His divinity, God also became imitable, His way of life achievable on earth. When a Christian, therefore, is...
