Why Weak Fools Can Dominate
The medieval fool was a powerful character. In the nineteenth century, another powerful fool, Nietzsche, emerged. They were both powerful because they both sacrificed all.
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Do You Have a Totalitarian Impulse?
Take the Diocletian Test to find out.
The Minotaur: Five Short Lessons About the Modern State
The modern state is ready to flex its power. It's a good time to revisit de Jouvenel's "On Power" and its dissection of modern democracy.
How I Use the Gardening Blockchain Crypto-Johnson Rod Algorithm to Deal with the Modern World
How gardening helps us live happily in a world we don't understand
We Either Flee Devils or Fight Them
Remembering St. Antony on his feast day: St. Macarius fought the devils. Holden Caulfield fled them.
What’s That Twitter Imp Up To?
Is Jack Dorsey a leftist libertarian who doesn't like Twitter's hegemony?
Do You Want to Be a Writer?
Revisiting a 1938 classic about the art of writing. It's a bit artsy, but edifying and even spiritual.
Three Lesser-Known Figures in the Zen Tradition
Getting to know Chuang-Tzu, Lin-Chi, and Dogen's kitchen-worker friend. . . with Catholic asides.
How to Live Like a Zen Master
Zen, Christ, St. Therese Lisieux, C.S. Lewis: they all taught a similar thing. Cultivate the eyes of a child.
Five Dispositions that Can Make Your Life More Productive and Happy
The philosophy of focusing on a slow and loving existence in the quiet now
Pulling Thomas Aquinas Kicking and Screaming into the Twentieth Century
You can’t get through a Pieper book quickly any more than you can fly through poetry, or run through an art museum, or gulp fine wine. All such things …
Five Things You Didn’t Know About Your Community
There’s a localism movement afoot. People seem to sense, and perhaps even understand at some level, that it's important to be a part of a thriving local community.
Dostoyevsky and Flannery O’Connor Reveal Something Ironic about Our Modern World
Essences become meaningless in both a perfect and marred world.
Listening to Podcasts at Oxford in 1374 and Kansas in 1974
Do you like those conversational podcasts? It's no surprise they're so popular. People have been enjoying the conversational approach to learning for thousands of years. We just lost the …
Parliament Created the 18th-Century’s Great Gin Craze
And then, in 1720, Parliament passed the Mutiny Act, which exempted distillers from the requirement to accept billeted troops. Every father who didn’t want soldiers living in his house …