“If you don’t buy this timeshare now,” he said to us, “then you will regret it the rest of your life.” He was persuasive and we had experienced a wonderful free weekend at his property. “Wouldn’t we like to visit again?” Surely. “What of these other places? We could use “points” there and visit. Wouldn’t that be great?” Yes, maybe. I responded: ‘We better go home and think about this. . .” He shook his head. His look was all... Read more
University education, financed by debt, without a coherent center, has lost the unified vision that kept it from being a multiversity. The trouble with a multiversity is that it presents the world as if there are “truths” over in the literature department at odds with the “truths” found in the engineering department. There is no center, no commonality, no shared values between the two. We could do job or skills training cheaply through apprenticeships. The university was to give us a unified... Read more
Most change, like most things, is good. I was reading a story about how younger adults no longer buy fine china . . . and suddenly realized that people cared. There are many reasons that china is no longer a thing and those are sometimes sad, often interesting, sometimes virtuous, but never discouraging. If younger adults wished they could live in space large enough for a dining room, and the choices of my generation have made that impossible, this is sad. If young... Read more
God loves animals, declaring them good, saving them from cataclysm, bringing them forward to paradise. He created one kind of animal, mankind, in His image, but we have used God’s gift of free will badly. This put a bit of grit in the fine-tuned cosmic machine and we have not stopped harming nature. What of pain in the higher animals? These play fellows, as CS Lewis called them, may lack reason, but they appear to experience pain. While we cannot imagine... Read more
Animal suffering has always bothered me and cruelty to animals was viewed as a barbaric, utterly unjustifiable evil by my parents. I was raised with Black Beauty and my first summer camp gave us a big dose of Saint Francis (with a trippy film). As a result, when Steve Baughman, lawyer and social critic, asked some Christians what we thought of God’s tolerating thousands of animals suffering in the Australian fires, I thought he deserved an answer. My answer did not... Read more
Well done, good friend. God sits in Heaven and brings everything to goodness, truth, and beauty. To do so in a cosmos with free will beings, where consent is necessary for love, and almost endless combinations of interconnected objects are possible, is hard for us to discern. Recently, someone I know was rewarded for making a series of choices that were right, hard, but good. This most beautiful soul had to make some choices against seeming interest to do what... Read more
Animals hurt. Thousands of animals are being burned alive in Australia. This has always deeply disturbed me. Bad things happen to people. Some because people do bad things misusing our free will. Often bad things happen because nature is broken. We are cut off from nature’s God so in many cultures we ignore nature’s rhythms. In all cases, the school for souls can teach us in this life how to live for eternity. There are other responses to the problem of pain... Read more
Dard’s eyes were on the painted cliffs but inwardly he saw beyond—across the wide and waiting land. Alliance with the merpeople—taming of the land—building a new civilization—his breath came faster. Why a lifetime was not going to be time enough to do everything that even he could see had to be done. Could their breed be defeated? He gave his answer to the uncertain future with a single word: “NO!”* That is how the secularism of my childhood looked at... Read more
The Stars are Ours was a set of slogans for life in the 1960’s if you wanted to do engineering and not drop out and drop acid. At the very end of the book, the hero looked into the future as heroes of a certain kind of book do: Dard’s eyes were on the painted cliffs but inwardly he saw beyond—across the wide and waiting land. Alliance with the merpeople—taming of the land—building a new civilization—his breath came faster. Why... Read more
The message is barely legible—- as if he wanted you to struggle a bit to read it. As if he wanted to make you look twice. And I do. Bless the poor. homeless god is a series of poems by Phillip Aijian and published in the Californios Chapbook Series No. 3. What if a poet reflected on the words of Jesus at Matthew 25? There Jesus tells what the King will do at the end of... Read more
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