I’m rereading Jerome Kagan’s Galen’s Prophecy about the struggle to make sense of such matters as temperament vs. character and the very nature of temperament. This is part of an effort to gear myself up to write the sections on heart in my upcoming book on human nature (mind and heart and hands). Since our … [Read more…]
Some readers might access this blog in ways that don’t display the main page and might not be aware that I have a variety of books, nonfiction and fiction, available for free download. I’m planning to put this message up every 2 or 3 months or so until I can determine if it’s of some … [Read more…]
There is a good possibility for interesting science in the field of astrophysics and the closely related field of physical cosmology. It seems that something exists that couldn’t possibly exist under current theories: a structure of quasars that extends to distances which seem far greater than possible under current understandings of the expansion of this … [Read more…]
I’ve uploaded an update to the collection of my weblog writings: Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings From 2006 to 2012. Here is the text from the Preface for this new edition: I’ve added about 80 chapters to this Third Edition. Nearly all of those chapters are reformatted essays from my writings during 2012 which … [Read more…]
This is a very good discussion of some important aspects of our national political mess in the United States: Liberal Constitutionalism and Us. At the same time, something is missing and that something is a more general understanding of our world, in fact, of Creation as a whole. Until we have that understanding, one which … [Read more…]
In my soon-to-be updated collection of weblog writings, Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings From 2006 to 2011, I separated those essays into seven categories including Love and Stuff and, the largest of the seven by a good margin, The Narrative We Know as a World. I’ll not slight the other five sections in their … [Read more…]
A Non-dummy’s Guide to Understanding God’s Creation I’ve written before of Ortega y Gasset’s prophecies of the collapse of modern Western man into a condition of barbarian childhood. See Civilization for Dummies for a fairly recent essay on the subject. In that essay, I spoke about the importance of books to Western Civilization in particular … [Read more…]
Something strange happens in the minds of many men as they go about their work, whether that of research in particle physics or removing cancerous tumors or running a machine milling a component of a jet-engine or, maybe especially, in those who’ve studied the evolution of human beings, individuals and species and cultures. Having established … [Read more…]
E.O. Wilson is often a fount of common-sense bordering on wisdom; I don’t have to fully agree with a thinker to consider him sane and insightful. Wilson is a bit of a biological Calvinist but Jean Calvin and Jonathon Edwards were certainly sane if, in my opinion, quite wrong about some important matters. Oddly enough, … [Read more…]
Man and Community In recent years, I’ve been dealing a lot with the issue of man’s true nature, as an individual and as a community member. There has been a lot of groundwork to do before I make an effort to provide a more `scientific’ or more `exact’ description of human moral narratives including those … [Read more…]