How to Live Like a Zen Master
Lessons from spiritual adepts from various traditions tell us the same thing: Cultivate the eyes of a child
Philosophy
I Don't Love the Nightlife and I Don't Got to Boogie (Published in 2020)
But I miss the bars: An Ode During COVID
"There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn." Samuel Johnson
Like Samuel Johnson and Alicia Bridges (see title), I like a good bar.
The Architecture of Speed
Thoughts build your everyday existence. Technology affects your thoughts. The implications? Ask Marshall McLuhan.
Sometimes I’m Gothic. Other times, Tudor-ish. In the morning I might be Romanesque, but by the afternoon I’m Bauhaus.
The architecture of my mind changes day-to-day, hour-to-hour, sometimes minute-to-minute. I generally want to live
Brews You Can Use, Philosophy Corner, and a Short Story for Halloween
"The Necessities," E. Studs MulliganBooze Coke
I don't know if I'm surprised because it's Coke or because it's the first Coke
product with alcohol: Coca-Cola launching its first alcoholic beverage next year
[https://nypost.com/2020/09/29/coca-cola-enters-alcoholic-drinks-market-with-molson-coors/?utm_
Thursday
I've long been fascinated by Nietzsche, in the sense that I've always found him
wildly wrong and wildly right, wildly reckless and wildly insightful. That being
said, he's enough of a nut that I've taken the time to read only one of
De Lubac and Nietzsche
"God is dead." Anyone who graduated eighth grade has heard that famous Nietzsche
pronouncement. It makes Christians cringe, but Nietzsche meant nothing by it. He
was merely pronouncing what the rest of Western civilization had impliedly
concluded. He needed to slam shut the book on Christianity so he
James the Existentialist
I've written a bit about existentialism. In all my reading on the subject (ample
for a layman, little for a scholar), I've never seen William James referred to
as an existentialist thinker. But that's how Jacques Barzun refers to him in
this passage from
Ralph McInerny
I went to Mass once with Ralph McInerny. Well, that's an exaggeration. My family
and I were sitting in Sacred Heart Basilica at Notre Dame, just as Mass was
starting. An older man slipped into the empty spot next to one of my kids. After
about twenty minutes,
On Deliberate Barbarism
We need myths. They're irrational signposts in our strange spiritual land: they
guide us even when we don't know we're being guided. We don't even necessarily
understand them, but only a shallow rationalism (a "defecated rationality" is
how Russell Kirk
PoS
Look Homewrad, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch
Anarchists by Bill Kauffman. If there's been a better book for promoting the
Principle of Subsidiarity in the past twenty years, I don't know of it. I put
Kauffman in the same league as John Zmirak: