Sunday Night Journal
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Discovering Traherne (3): On the Cross Improperly excerpted, Traherne might appear to be a proto-romantic heretic, viewing the soul as naturally good and pure until corrupted by the world, and “saved” by recovery of the primeval innocent vision. (Of course one can be a romantic and a Christian, but not a Romantic, in the sense
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I’m going to let further discussion of Traherne wait for a week, or maybe two. A topic more appropriate for Palm Sunday occupies my mind today. Pontius Pilate and the Infinitely Thin Line This sentence, a brief aside in the Passion according to St. Luke which was read today at Mass, strikes me as one
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Som Great Thing: Discovering Traherne When the encounter with a single sentence sends you looking for more of a writer’s work, it must be a pretty striking sentence. And naturally you wonder if his other work is going to live up to the hopes produced by the one sample. My Lenten reading involves just such
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Nap Time It’s late Sunday afternoon, and I just woke up from a nap. I never thought I would say such a thing with such pleasure. I recall reading Blondie as a child, and wondering why Dagwood Bumstead was always trying to take a nap. What was the matter with him? What was the point?
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A Glimpse of Moral Common Sense This will be brief, as we’ve been busy visiting family this weekend. I may have mentioned before that I’m fascinated by the American southwest. Not surprisingly, I’m a big fan of Tony Hillerman’s mysteries, which are set in the Navajo and Hopi country of New Mexico and Arizona and
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Chickens, Eggs, and Spirits I’ve thought for many years that Jung was onto something with his idea of a collective unconscious, a subterranean movement of thought and sentiment that affects many people at once and may produce similar manifestations simultaneously in different places. There are a number of examples of this in the history of
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Atheistic Evolution: The Plausible Myth In a discussion here a couple of weeks ago, I bemoaned the influence of the theory of evolution with some scattershot comments that never quite said what I meant. I’m going to try to clarify that now. In my title I mean “myth” in the sense of a story that
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Joseph Pearce’s Small Is Still Beautiful I’ve never considered myself an official movement conservative; “conservative for lack of a better word” is my favored description. (I’d like to have a catchy abbreviation for it, but can’t come up with any pronounceable variation of CFLOABW, the “W” being both essential and intractable.) Therefore I tend to
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The Liberal Conservative (4) This is probably the last in the series, at least for a while. I wanted to add one more note to my list of reasons for wishing to preserve the institutions of liberalism—meaning, of course, the philosophical liberalism that goes back at least to the Enlightenment, not contemporary political liberalism. In
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Mr. Martins, From The Other Side I had planned to write about something else this evening, but this afternoon my wife and I sat down to watch our latest NetFlix arrival, The Third Man. As I may have mentioned here before, I don’t, in general, take movies all that seriously as art. In particular, I
Light On Dark Water 