William Blake was, perhaps, more than a bit mad, but he knew beauty. He lived just when the ugliness of the Industrial Revolution was most obvious, but the benefits harder to see. He could see what was going wrong, dark Satanic mills like those of Dante, though he lacked the prophetic vision to see what good might come. Turmoil, revolutionary zeal, were opening up good possibilities for human dignity, but also being used to kill. Heads were rolling and hearts... Read more
In Charles Emerson Fosdick (Uncle to the famously fuzzy thinking theologian named Foskdick) did his bit to save the Union and then gave the lads of the Gilded Age some jolly books under the pen name Herry Castlemon. Be warned: he was a man of his time and the books must be read with that understanding. For good and bad, if you read his “Frank” series, you are getting what Gilded Age parents of a sort were buying for the boys to... Read more
Grad School: Fear Not! I had a lot to learn when I went to graduate school in philosophy at a secular university. Mostly, of course, I learned as much philosophy as I could from outstanding scholars and teachers. You hear a lot about bad teaching in graduate school, but (with rare exceptions) in my experience, professors who teach, teach well. What was best about graduate school? I met people dedicated to thinking well, interested in students, and excited about new... Read more
The meek will inherit the Earth, even if they do not often get elected to Congress. The humble triumph without triumphalism, win without creating losers, and inherit the Kingdom of Heaven without losing earthiness. How to be humble? Karen Swallow Prior (KSP) is here to help. First, she wants to teach us to read well. To read well is to grasp the book and in many works (almost all?) virtue is present. A great story is a... Read more
Some Tech is a Limited Good Reruns were once a thing. In an age when there were four networks, one given to showing Life of a Cumquat, new shows appeared when ABC, NBC, and CBS said they would appear: usually Fall. After the first few months, they simply replayed the shows until the Fall or you could poke around for old shows they were rerunning: reruns. Star Trek was just before my (viewing) time and so I found it in reruns. It came... Read more
Everyone God knows we need some kindness not now, not niceness, not weakness, but kindness. We should be kind, because everyone is fighting a hard battle. We should judge as little as possible, since nobody is righteous. We should show mercy as we would receive mercy. These are great ideas and over the course of my life many great ideas have been introduced to me by Plato. About once a month someone posts that... Read more
Patience is powerful and persuasive. Prince Albert grew in power under his wife Queen Victoria as he patiently waited for her to decide what his role should be. He was patient, loving, and decent, a persuasive combination. Albert ended up in one of the great love matches of the nineteenth century and helped preserve Britain as a stable constitutional monarchy in very unstable time. That’s the persuasive power of patience. Our guide in cultivating the virtues through literature, Karen Swallow Prior... Read more
Narnia. Middle Earth. Prydain. Over Sea and Under Stone. I loved them all as a boy, but except for Narnia, I read nothing as often as Pilgrim’s Progress. A good Saturday was spent mapping out the journey of Christiana and her children heading to the Celestial City. Just as Nancy Drew was much better than the Hardy Boys, so Christiana and her adventures were more excellent than the original with Christian. In this, I was in the global minority as our... Read more
Jane Eyre and my wife taught me chastity in my twenties. God knows I wish I had learned earlier. Karen Swallow Prior (KSP) arrives to help deepen what I know and (hopefully) to help others learn earlier what I learned later. After all, I must pray “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” and keep learning. One part of the mercy of God is that he sends others to help where we are weak. There is a... Read more
A home is to HGTV as a lady-wife is to a photoshop of a woman. The first is an ideal to which one might aspire, the second is a sales pitch for a product to consume. Making people a product is a great way to be miserable and a bad person. Kant built an ethics on the idea that people are ends, not means to ends. Tolstoy supported a similar idea creating stories, a virtual reality training program for virtue. A... Read more
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