Introduction Recently, I attended my monthly men’s prayer group and made a comment about history books telling of the importance of highly educated men from warlord (sometimes royal) families in converting many of the German peoples to Christianity—some of those evangelists, such as Boniface (“Apostle to the Germans”), were themselves Germanic. The organizer of the … [Read more…]
I’m currently struggling, but joyfully at times, to finish my book, The Shape of Reality. Alas, it won’t be finished by year-end as I had hoped, which hope I’ve stated on my blog. The end of January or even during February is more likely. As I struggle to complete this book, I’m obsessed with questions … [Read more…]
There is much talk and many words being spoken or written about elites, those who are destroying what was once good in the West and who have concentrated much wealth in their hands. These are the famous 1% or even 0.1% or still smaller groups of the ultra-wealthy and ultra-powerful. Some serious thinkers in academia … [Read more…]
For nearly 30 years, I’ve been writing novels and nonfiction, having sacrificed much of a chance of a good life of the normal sort, largely while deluding myself that some modest, or even substantial, financial rewards were coming in six months or, at worst, a year. Though I had personal problems and inclinations that led … [Read more…]
Over the past few centuries or more, Western Christians have retreated from a proper engagement with God’s Creation. Many modern scientists and philosophers now work actively to sequester religious beliefs in the most general sense. Sometimes this is as crude and as juvenile as claiming that the success of the equations of modern physics prove … [Read more…]
Recently, I read The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia by James Bradley. In early chapters, Bradley describes the American role as junior member of Great Britain’s Opium Trade in China. The Americans were freeloaders of a sort, relying upon the British Navy and Army to prevent the Chinese government from … [Read more…]
Let me start by discussing war, a situation in which leaders of states often try to impose their will by wreaking havoc and unleashing forces of disorder, all the while thinking they can keep matters under control. Anthropologists, working with archaeologists and other pre-historians, now have strong evidence that the average level of violent killing … [Read more…]
I’m reading The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson and find it interesting that Isaacson sees matters in terms of individual effort vs collaboration, parallel to my efforts to deal with human being in its individual and communal forms. The research laboratories such as … [Read more…]
As I move forward on my project to make sense of human being as both individual and community, I’m reading in certain areas of mathematics (topology and differential geometry and abstract algebra and others) and also trying to keep up my readings in history and literature. The project threatens to swallow me at times, but … [Read more…]
I’ve been reading serious history books regularly over the past couple of years and a bit more infrequently for much of my reading life before that. My knowledge isn’t so broad as that of many scholars in the communities of academics or even the communities of commentators in the mass media or the alternative media … [Read more…]