Addressing or dismissing the anxieties of conscience: is this the purview of medical science? Or of other therapy? In our time (this is truth, and it is significant for the Christianity of our time), in our time it is the physician who exercises the cure of souls. People have perhaps an unfounded dread of calling in [...]
Time and remembrance: recalling our place in the change of the year opens up new possibilities for us to commemorate the lives of others, to "preserve frail transitory fame," and also to acknowledge the source of what is lasting and eternal. To the Countess of Bedford, On New Year's Day THIS twilight of two years, not past, nor [...]
Do the humanities provide nothing? And if so, does this "nothingness" reveal more than does science or other fields of knowledge? The Yellow Emperor went wandering To the north of the Red Water To the Kwan Lun mountain. He looked around Over the edge of the world. On the way home He lost his night-colored pearl. [...]
Solitude, inwardness, and demands of life: how listening to the inner self, the poetic voice, offers freedom from conventions of work and society. I don’t want you to be without a greeting from me when Christmas comes and when you, in the midst of the holiday, are bearing your solitude more heavily than usual. But [...]
The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the loss of the "Titanic"): a poet meditates on the fateful meeting of science, ambition, and nature I In a solitude of the sea Deep from human vanity, And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she. II Steel chambers, late the pyres Of her [...]
Death by technology: how living with technology deprives us of silence, inwardness, and the ability to find the well-springs of life. And this condition has its own, overlooked history. From the article: The English Reformation began, one recalls, with an assault on the monasteries, and what silence the Protestants didn’t banish the philosophers of the Enlightenment [...]
Civilization's tricky situation: as we enter the autumnal season, the shadow self would be heard, as the gateway to introspection. Here history and imagination are in play. The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him [...]
Math and the Mayans: an archaeologist brings his engineering experience to bear in reinterpreting pre-Columbian calendars. From the article: Archaeologists have long looked to Venus to understand Maya calendars and tradition. But now, a fresh look at an ancient text called the Dresden Codex suggests that our understanding of how the Maya tracked Venus for their celestial calendars [...]
On Muslims living in Europe: the past not only informs the present, but also expands our sense of the politically and culturally possible. Then I reached the country of Hungary, where the people called Bashghird live. They are descended from the first tribes that came from the lands of the Turks and entered the lands of [...]
Public service and religious faith: a way that in life's darkest moments we may yet record the light of goodness. Hi little one, I only gave a hand to bring you out of that prison of rubble. Pardon us if we arrived late; unfortunately you had already stopped breathing. But I want you to know from up above that [...]
