Arthur Guinness wasn’t fooling around. He was mad as a hornet and wielding a pickaxe. Stand back. The year was 1771 and Guinness needed more water for his brewery. So he opened up a new watercourse and swapped out the pipes running to his shop from the River Liffey with larger ones. In addition to the increased flow, he increased the ire of his neighbors. The city of Dublin insisted he stop. Nothing doing, he responded. He “would defend [the... Read more
History is the story of God’s past providence in the lives of people. This is true for major events: Constantine battling at Milvian Bridge, Luther protesting at Wittenberg, King James commissioning the Bible that bears his name, Whitefield going on tour in America, Revere sending out the alarm en route to Lexington, and Patton storming the coasts of Sicily. It’s also true for the humbler moments: Jane Austen quietly revolutionizing English literature, Gen. Robert E. Lee writing tender letters to... Read more
The so-called Prosperity Gospel uses a catchphrase that rankles its naysayers: “Name it and claim it.” But what if you could steal the line, stuff it with a different and better meaning, and turn it into something more useful to personal growth and sanctification? Writing to make sure his monks were on their best behavior, St. Benedict formulated the Rule that bears his name. One of the chapters concerns singing in church services: “Therefore, let us consider in what manner... Read more
Read this quote from C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity: “You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act—that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let everyone see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of... Read more
Last Wednesday Pope Benedict talked a bit about the spill he took earlier in July and the broken wrist he suffered. “Unfortunately, my own guardian angel did not prevent my injury,” he said. The angel didn’t fall down on the job. He was “certainly following superior orders.” The upbeat pope added, “Perhaps the Lord wanted to teach me more patience and humility, give me more time for prayer and meditation.” I’ve not really thought much about guardian angels since I... Read more
The Financial Times recently ran a piece on the value of meditation in the workplace. The article quotes several corporate managers discussing why and how they and their companies incorporate meditation at the office. “It helps you to get perspective and organise your thoughts,” says Jon Jagielski of Medtronic in an opinion echoed throughout the piece. “There’s a need to reduce stress in the workplace and meditation is the best technique I know,” says Richard Geller of MedWorks, a company... Read more
Last week Amazon deleted copies of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm from some of their customers’ Kindles. This has happened before. In June, Amazon deleted some Ayn Rand titles. And it’s happened with Harry Potter titles as well. Amazon’s defense is pretty believable; they said the copies were pirated and that they were only acting to protect intellectual property. But as Farhad Manjoo at Slate says, “The Orwell incident was too rich with irony to escape criticism….” Then... Read more
“The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness,” said Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in his book Mission of the University: “it is always urgent, ‘here and now’ without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.” Another philosopher and artist, Wyndham Lewis, saw the problem this way: “Everything in our life today conspires to thrust most people into . . . a sort of trance of action,” he said in the 1957 preface to his book... Read more
Mike Hyatt is fond of saying that good marketing makes bad books fail fast. The logic is pretty straightforward: If the marketing works and people swarm to a book only to discover it’s lousy, what happens? Blog posts, email chatter, coffee-shop eyerolls — scads of people saying that the book stinks. The better the marketing, the faster they find out, and the quicker the book goes down like the Hindenburg. But most authors whose books bomb don’t see it that... Read more
Jane Fonda popularized the phrase “no pain, no gain” in her exercise videos of the 1980s. But we all know Fonda nicked it from Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard. “There are no Gains without Pains,” runs just one of a thousand aphorisms in Franklin’s 1758 essay, “The Way to Wealth.” And Ben pinched it from seventeenth century poet Robert Herrick: “If little labour, little are our gains/Man’s fortunes are according to his pains” (Hesperides 752). Did Herrick filch it from even... Read more
Joel J. Miller
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In