In a recent essay, Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality?, I wrote: Reduce reality to its various components and aspects but stop reducing when you reach components or aspects which cannot be used to fully explain or to `reconstruct’ each other. At that point in the process of … [Read more…]
I was fascinated by a claim Jacob Neusner quietly made in Death and Birth of Judaism: The Impact of Christianity, Secularism, and the Holocaust on Jewish Faith. The assumption is found in this quote: [M]y view is that when, in the late eighteenth century with the French and American revolutions, Christianity lost its status as … [Read more…]
Some write down scales or perhaps compose etudes. Some write simple tunes or even multi-part tunes. Others compose concertos and sonatas and symphonies which can’t be fully understood unless fully held in mind, if only for an instant. A section in the third movement might well play off a section in the first movement. Of … [Read more…]
Those who have been following the Obamacare mandate mess will know of the prayers of American-Catholics, led by their bishops, for religious liberty. Apparently, the religious liberty, even the very lives, of Syrian Christians is of little interest, nor were the liberties and lives of the Christians living in other ancient communities which have been … [Read more…]
While making plans for my more serious reading over the next month or two, I happened to read the opening pages of a book I’ll be perusing before long — Sociobiology, The Abridged Edition by Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard professor who learned a lot about social insects and found that he could apply some … [Read more…]
I’ve just started to read Hans Reichenbach’s The Direction of Time and lines of thought came to life before I’d even finished Hilary Putnam’s foreword for the 1991 reprinting of an English translation by the University of California Press. I’ll probably write multiple essays on this subject of the direction of time, though it doesn’t … [Read more…]
In my last posted essay, “Leisure, the Basis of Culture”: Ends and Means., I tried to distinguish between ends of shorter- or longer-term. I came to a humbling conclusion that we can’t shape the future but only “intend towards the goals of a good human life and also good communal lives, morally well-ordered lives with … [Read more…]
Josef Pieper makes this qualification to the separation of leisure and culture from the pursuance of (mostly practical) goods: [T]his is not to say that there is no sort of connection between the fulfilment of the `common good’ and the philosophy taught in a country! Only the relationship can never be established or regulated from … [Read more…]
Just yesterday, I finished reading a history of the Middle Ages. The book ended with these wise words: In the last century of the medieval era, the peoples of Europe had to cope with an unprecedented combination of plague, war, schism, and economic decline, all occurring simultaneously and all interacting with one another. In the … [Read more…]
A few weeks back, Michael S. Greve published a discussion of one of our fundamental problems in these troubled times, as opposed to the secondary problems discussed by the better technical experts in financing, investment, etc. Greve’s essay, in three parts, can be found at: The Constitution of Affluence, Part I, The Constitution of Affluence, … [Read more…]