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…]
I’m re-reading Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper. As Pieper plausibly, and I think correctly, discusses matters, the loss of leisure and the consequent loss of culture is bound up, at least in this age of men, with the process of proletarianization, that is, the limitation of men to their laboring aspects. Pieper … [Read more…]
I’ve written in the past that we can think, with proper qualifications and definitions, of physical matter including our bodies as being frozen soul: see Frozen Soul and Other Delicacies for a recent essay discussing that claim. This language of “frozen soul” is another way of thinking about the spectrum of created being: God manifested … [Read more…]
I have uploaded another small sampler of essays from my weblog writings. This small collection deals with the subject of the human mind. The new sampler can be downloaded at The Human Mind. I have also made some minor changes to the first sampler: Making Peace With Empirical Reality and consequently uploaded a new file.
This article hardly surprises me: Belief in Hell, According to International Data, Is Associated With Reduced Crime. The findings summarized in the article also don’t make me happy. I would advise against any major effort to scare sinners away from Hell because that doesn’t mean they will necessarily go to Heaven. If they do go … [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…]
One of the problems with a good understanding of some domain is that we adopt such understandings as rigid habits of thought even when they deal with empirical matters and should be rethought as we learn more or as new possibilities emerge as a result of human activities. We forget we’re mortal creatures in a … [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…]
While examining samples of moon-dust, scientists discovered the stuff is a bit unusual, even by the standards of those who study ethereal stuff and relationships on a regular basis. Moon-dust, seemingly macroscopic stuff, shows quantum properties of the sort usually found only in such entities as individual atoms or subatomic particles. It seems that some … [Read more…]