I feel like a child who has been playing in the woods not far from home, who has suddenly stumbled upon a giant, abandoned candy store. Something grand, from the 1950s perhaps, with tall, white-washed wooden walls and glimmering glass through which the delicacies within could not only be enticingly seen, but also smelled. I’ve always read Genesis as an archaic myth, a story about humanity which is so out of date as to have lost all value. “People didn’t... Read more

I came across a fairly obscure essay by Kant today, entitled “You must Be Well Occupied To Be Happy.” It is extracted from his Lectures on Ethics, a book of notes of Kant’s students published after his lifetime. It represents courses in ethics that he gave from 1775 to 1781, some of the crucial years leading up the publication of his Critique of Pure Reason. They represent his sometimes beguilingly abstract mind at work on very practical, even folky, matters.... Read more

I’m back at it: teaching again, taking classes again, trying to figure out what it’s all about (again). The ‘break’ (December 16-January 21) turned out to be no break at all with grading for my autumn class and then jumping into Philosophy of Religion (a course mainly on Biblical hermeneutics, i.e. reading it as a book where God is a character, not a fuzzy thing/being ‘out there’ somewhere). Everything for my intro to Buddhism course did go well; I checked... Read more

“I have no hope for the future,” says Lhasang Tsering, one of Tibet’s most famous activists. We are speaking in his home in Dharamsala, where he has lived in exile since fleeing Tibet more than two decades ago. “Time is running out,” he tells me. “Every day, while we’re sitting here praying for world peace, truckloads of Chinese are coming in, and trainloads of Tibetan resources are coming out. Once the Chinese have the land for themselves, they might have... Read more

Learn onlyTo beContent. Read more

Any idea about God, when pursued to its extreme, becomes insanity. – Stephen Mitchell (introduction to The Book of Job) One of the central difficulties people have with a Christian God is the idea of omniscience (most often presented along with omnipotence and benevolence, cf. theodicy). We’ve covered this in my Philosophy of Religion class recently and noticed that in reading Genesis and Exodus, there is absolutely nothing to suggest that God is omniscient. Quite the opposite seems to be... Read more

Ok, so I’m a little slow to join the ’07 celebration in the blog-world. I did manage to kick it off well on New Year’s night though. Wii play and wine, countdown at the Union Club with beer and champagne, and a nightcap of whiskey at a friend’s house. So for me ’07 started properly on the 2nd. On the first I was lazy and hung-over, I ate dry toast and watched “The Ghost and the Darkness” with roommates. But... Read more

It’s been six years since I went to a Catholic mass (then with my super Catholic first love) and it was probably another six years before then that I was at another mass. My father hasn’t been ‘religious’ for some time. He was raised Catholic and was even an alter boy as a youth, but life had driven him away from the Church and toward the conclusion that what’s important is treating people well and that we don’t really know... Read more

I shouldn’t be blogging on pain killers, but there are a lot of worse things I could be doing now, so bear with me. This summer I caught wind of a Buddhism professor who is compiling a book on “Buddhist perspectives on Teaching” and I contacted her about possibly submitting an essay. She seemed interested and now I’m to get something together in the coming month. The topic, to be more specific, looks something like this: If you teach and... Read more

Oh what sweet relief today brings. ‘Tis an end, and what joy comes with ends. If only it were the end of my time apart from Ana, my lovely Ana. Or even the end of my life in the bardo between student and professor. Yet, alas, any Buddhist knows that there are no true ends, nor true beginnings. This semester started long, long ago and will live on in the lives of everyone effected. And, of course, anyone who knows... Read more