Alaska photos 2021
Read more...Category: Beauty
Overton Window
The Mind Friday’s (11/22/10) Wall Street Journal article by Robert Lee Holtz: Music’s Universal Pull Studied by Algorithm. Turns out there are some “universal patterns” in music, even correcting for biases of culture, perception, and the findings appearing in Western scholarship. Music apparently has “bedeviled” Darwinian biologists. Luke Glowacki of Pennsylvania State University […]
Read more...Beauty and Art
A few years ago I commented on a book by philosopher Edward Feser titled The Last Superstition. Feser laid out the reasoning of ancient philosophers, emphasizing Aristotle, showing how the existence of physical things pointed unmistakeably to a non-physical reality behind it. Feser’s book ended with a saying attributed to Confuscious: when the finger points […]
Read more...Sonoran Rhapsody
Yes, I’m capitalizing on the similarly-titled movie playing now, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but the story I’ll tell is quite the opposite of that one. Imagine a little boy of barely eight, who I’ll call “David” because that’s his name. The year is 2001. We take a trip out west, from our home in Georgia. Just […]
Read more...Yearning
Love In Imagine a Boy, we considered the love between a father and son, illustrating how it stems at least from a feeling of unity; of oneness; something deeper than mere kinship. What the boy and his father desire is not mere proximity. Not merely comfortable companionship. Not just mutually entertaining company. Rather, they experience […]
Read more...New York Public Library
We’ve talked a lot about “transcendence” on this site. “Transcendent” is from the Latin transcendere, “climb over, surpass.” We’ve used it often here in its usual sense of the supernatural “transcending” the natural, such as by experience of an interior contact with a numinous realm: the felt experience of God. This is being written in […]
Read more...Beauty from Ashes
The Ashes As a society we are far past the general disaffection of Europe in the 20’s, following the Great War, when repudiation of religious sensibility was traceable to eye-opening atrocity joined to soul-deadening ideology. Now a similar disaffection from great questions exists, but seems to be more the result of a wide-scale spiritual listlessness. […]
Read more...Review (Part Five): The Experience of God — Being Consciousness Bliss, by David Bentley Hart
Bliss Mind over matter There is a mystery at the base of all of our ruminations about consciousness, and that sense of mystery resists reduction to material causes. Reality is one, embraced within the totality of being. “[P]erhaps we really should look elsewhere for the source and sustaining principle of that unity.” And Hart does: […]
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