Historians have noted that approaching crises typically take longer to arrive than the more prescient of the victims-to-be would expect. And then they are typically far worse than the more pessimistic of the victims-to-be would expect. I fear the truth that might lie in the above claims because we of the West, and many in … [Read more…]
I realize there are a multitude of good books out there I’ll never so much as open but sometimes I feel an urge to re-read a particularly good book. So it is that I’ve picked up The House of Intellect copyrighted by Jacques Barzun in 1959. In the first essay, he makes a nice distinction … [Read more…]
In an earlier posting, The Liberal Mind: What is politics?, I addressed the obvious question, “What is Politics?”. I covered a lot of ground to start off a line of reasoning tightly tied to my current goal of enriching our store of words and concepts for discussing our moral and social lives. While it’s true … [Read more…]
In The Liberal Mind, I think Professor Minogue dismisses the query “What is the essence of Liberalism?” for reasons which are proper, but I’ll discuss it anyway because I think it to be one of those ultimately futile lines of inquiry which can lead us to better ways of understanding human nature, especially in its … [Read more…]
The so-called World War I, was actually the beginning of a war not yet over in this year of 2011, though now consisting of the hugely expensive American military bumbling about in a number of countries as our political leaders dance and speak their chosen roles of blood-soaked buffoons. That first phase of the ongoing … [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…]
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…]
I speak of my own mind moving in and out of active formation. I’ve reached a point where I wish to deal with issues that I can’t wrap my mind around. And, so, I’m trying to expand and reshape my mind in the appropriate ways, acquiring more of the contents which will become the container … [Read more…]
I’m in the midst of revived efforts to explore modern knowledge of time, space, and matter to create an enriched and enlarged Christian understanding of Creation. My patterns of learning, contemplating, and writing are often interrupted by the horrifying spectacle of the United States decaying at a rapid rate and dragging with it a world … [Read more…]
On Tuesday, 2010/11/09, I posted an article Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict: The Promise and Comedy of Modernity commenting on a talk he gave while in Spain to consecrate the basilica of the Sagrada FamÃlia in Barcelona, though I mistakenly implied it was in Santiago de Compostela which was his other stop. (I made … [Read more…]