Interesting (to me) quote from an 1853 book by John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice: And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, — that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, […]
Read more...Blog
Metaphysical Vibration
I’ve often said that modern culture is essentially materialistic, in the philosophical sense that material (physical) things are deemed to be all there is. And yet, materialists routinely invoke language of the transcendental to explain what’s going on around them, including the word “transcendent” itself. It’s confusing. It has the effect of masking the absence of […]
Read more...Margin Thinking
A couple of nights ago I woke up in the middle of the night and sent myself an email, and then went back to sleep. The next morning I found an email from myself which only said, in the subject line: “we are margin thinkers.” I had this whole constellation of understanding the night before. […]
Read more...Pollution and Purification
You may not know of Mark Steyn, a political and cultural commentator. He’s got a blog that I commend to you, here. I get his weekly summaries, usually on Sunday. In last Sunday’s, he wrote about Tucker Carlson, a commentator on Fox and author of Ship of Fools/How A Selfish Ruling Class is Bringing America to the […]
Read more...But A Vapor
I recently attended a memorial service for the son of family friends. There must have been 500 people there. The family’s community centers on their church, and many braved the rain and cold to get there on a Saturday morning whether they knew the son or not. It put me in an Ecclesiastes frame of mind, […]
Read more...Like Lightning
I finished Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life/An Antidote to Chaos. I’m not big on self-help books, normally, but I like listening to Peterson’s debates and interviews, and I especially liked the series he did on old testament stories. I actually downloaded the transcripts of those and pored over them. Very insightful. In fact, I […]
Read more...New Year
Happy New Year. No single theme, in this post, but a few observations. Hell You may have figured out I’ve not presented a linear theme development from post to post lately. Just before Christmas I was working on a writing project and the topic of hell naturally came up. What a topic for the holidays. I didn’t […]
Read more...Hell
Here I am right at the height of the holidays, and I’m thinking about hell. A few months ago I started re-reading Dante’s Inferno. I got about a third through and it wasn’t clicking very well, I felt I must be missing something. So I paused, did a little reading about the book instead of […]
Read more...Martyr
A few days ago I saw in one of my news feeds an odd story about an American who approached North Sentinel Island by himself and was killed by the natives. Almost nothing is known about the natives, but “the Sentinelese keep to themselves and are known to act hostile to outsiders,” read the report, […]
Read more...Folksy Automatons
I heard a strangely interesting monologue on NPR on Sunday, November 18, 2018. I tried, but I couldn’t find a reference to it online anywhere. Either google failed me or I imagined the whole thing. The pre-announcement was that the writer was going to explain why he didn’t believe in free will. I thought […]
Read more...