Month: August 2006

• “THEORY” From “The Scheme of Things” by Allen Wheelis

  Note: Wheelis wrote an interesting little book called “How People Change”. I don’t share his apparent rejection of the Christian faith, of course, but he is an honest and thoughtful writer, as this excerpt of another of his books shows. Be patient, the first paragraph is the slowest. I have yet to conceive the relation…

• The Law of Moral Entropy

  Secularist parents have an insufficient base for a theory of goodness so they tend to produce amoral but socially competent adults, who feel little guilt. (Whenever anyone offers the seemingly pregnant observation that religious people are plagued by guilt, my secret response is something like “duh.” Of course they do.) By “amoral” I don’t mean…

• Joseph Epstein: on reading

  The intimate abstraction of Paul Valery by Joseph Epstein One of the keenest pleasures of reading derives from being in the close company of someone more thoughtful than you but whose thoughts, owing to the courtesy of clarity, are handsomely accessible to you.

• Epstein on Valery on politics: politics gets a portion of the contempt it deserves

  The intimate abstraction of Paul Valery by Joseph Epstein Add to this his intellectual contempt for politics, which he felt took on life en masse, or in its coarsest possible form. “I consider politics, political action, all forms of politics, as inferior values and inferior activities of the mind,” he wrote. Politics is the realm…

• Embarassment

  Embarrassment is the sign that the Holy has been transgressed by an outsider. It is not something to be grown out of, but rather is a gift to the conscience, worth the whole world. We must work to guard the child’s instinctual and congenital capacity to be embarrassed. In our television culture the damage starts…

• The White Stone

  Adam named Eve when she was found to be a companion just for him. Mary’s eyes were opened to the Resurrected Christ when He called her by name: “Mary!” Religious conversions of all kinds prompt the adoption of a new name to go along with the new identity. Saul becomes Paul, Simon becomes Peter, and…

• Meaning

  Either Start With a Person Or Do Without Them “Meaning” is our word for whatever from the future is sensed in the present. Or, said differently, whatever promises to outlive us. Nothing that has a visible end feels meaningful. Why are we so desperate to send somethng into the future? A son, a poem, a…

• “Pneuma” Became “Nous”

  Sometime around Constantine the Christian writers on the spiritual life adopted Greek Terminology to describe spiritual events, and in the process imbibed Greek metaphysics and corrupted native biblical anthropology. For example, “Nous” was substituted for the NT “pneuma”, because the nous, in late Greek anthropology, was the seat of the soul and the noblest part…

• Vladimir Lossky: “…an intellectual discipline of the non-opposition of opposites…”

  “…the dialectic which governs the game of negations and affirmations. One can define it as an intellectual discipline of the non-opposition of opposites…” p. 26, In the Image and Likeness of God.Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985. To which someone might well add this: “Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t…

• Shakespeare: on keeping promises

  “He was ever precise in promise-keeping.” William Shakespeare. Measure for Measure, Scene 2 (From the text of Clark and Wright.)