A few decades ago, even a few years ago, to say that “the end is near” marked you as an unstable person. A melodramatic alarmist, if not a lunatic. But with the political/ environmental crises compounding at a frenetic pace,…
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For my father “human progress” was an article of faith. He didn’t talk philosophically very often, but he had his couple of points he liked to pound. Driving the family to town on a Friday night, looking straight ahead at…
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I have a big love for Augustine’s “Confessions,” which is often referred to as the world’s first autobiography. From the opening pages, when Augustine talks about observing infants in order to better know who he was as an infant, it…
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“The Wall! The Wall! Build the wall!” The wall along the Mexico border. It used to be “Tear down the wall.” The Berlin wall. The Iron Curtain. The Christian ideal is to tear down walls. Between peoples. Between people. Forgive…
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The world is a big, often harsh school from which you never graduate. Not in a single lifetime anyway. Early lessons are mostly on how things rarely go just the way you want them to. Accepting that truth is what…
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Near the end of Living an Examined Life, author James Hollis talks about the importance of gratitude, then names and expands on a dozen or so things he’s thankful for. One of them is that he has been blessed with…
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