The New American has published an interesting article written by Sam Blumenfeld and dealing with the American transistion into our current state of dumbness defined by just enough literacy to read advertisements and to struggle through textbooks written to the purposes of the leadership of the day — Looking Backward 123 Years Later I knew … [Read more…]
In The Liberal Mind, Kenneth Minogue speaks of misguided political and social reformers in the line of modern liberal thought: How many visionaries have unwittingly prepared a hell on earth because their gaze was stubbornly fixed on heaven? And when hell comes — well, there is always some ad hoc theory of sinister interests or … [Read more…]
[This article is reposted from my other blog, To See a World in a Grain of Sand. It was originally published on 2007/04/11. I hope it will mean something to some as we approach the day of the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.] In this modern age, we maintain constant levels of activity and … [Read more…]
Dear governments of the United States and other countries, I see by this article, Psychologists Say Well-Being Is More Than ‘Happiness’, that some of your academic helpers are hard at work figuring out how you can increase our well-being. I have a suggestion: Please go away and leave us alone. While there is truth underlying … [Read more…]
Are we determined by our genes or by our environments? Yes. But, it’s not so simple as that. Those genes are us and we are part of those environments which are hardly independent of human technology — culture in general — these days. But the complications are still more than that. We are what’s shaped … [Read more…]
As I’ve noted in a couple of essays on this blog, schizophrenia is a terrible disease, even by the standards of psychiatric diseases. Yet, there’s something odd about even calling it a disease. See A Thomistic Take on Madness and Modernism for a discussion of schizophrenia in light of modern thought and aesthetic styles, which … [Read more…]
This article, How Do Neurons in the Retina Encode What We ‘See’?, points to the great effort our nervous system puts into the effort to make sense of perceptual input. One surprise is that the eyes don’t pick up some of the more complex patterns which change over time even though complex spatial patterns, say, … [Read more…]
Flannery O’Connor was a devout Catholic Christian who no mercy on those who preached what she once labeled “Pious Crap.” Sometimes, that might even mean poking fun at the ways in which a truth is held or rejected. One truth she clearly held is: The body is the temple of the Holy Ghost. She wrote … [Read more…]
King David and other ancient Semitic poets, at least those I know of from inclusion in the Bible (some of the Semitic poetry in various works was non-Hebraic), would use repetition in various ways, not always exact duplication of the lines but perhaps providing more examples or even saying the opposite in an ironic tone. … [Read more…]
Or rather, our moral disorder lies outside of us because we inhabit morally disordered human communities. But let me start from a ways back… Recently, I posted an article about some hormonal matters which work from our insides to shape our personality characteristics — The Resurrected Will Need to Be Flooded With Oxytocin and Vasopresin. … [Read more…]