At a bar sipping a wheat beer, I had time to consider something I wrote down twenty years ago. Words in the old note book seemed more truthful, more penetrating than when discovered long ago. I was younger, a different man then. Now, I hope I’m wiser, and more focused upon my one life….
Published in the LA Times, January 8, 2017 The following is a transcript of Meryl Streep’s speech at the 74th Golden Globes as she accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement. I love you all. You have to forgive me, I have lost my voice in screaming and lamentation this weekend and…
Just finished Chuck Klosterman’s book, But What If We’re Wrong? I recommend it. Here are some questions that are put forward in the concluding chapter. Is the downside of our species unparalleled cerebral evolution the ingrained propensity for self destruction? If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to…
The old book seemed to be a history text book. Appearing to be a 21st Century artifact, it had been overlooked in the bottom of a box in the dimly lit storage closet. It had to be a leftover from the old days before AI managed learning, and wireless implants linked almost everyone to…
The first sip of coffee, like a knife-cut of astringence, faintly sweet and bitter to the tongue: a metaphor for life. With practice some develop a taste for it,…. for life that is. I am a Christian monk and priest, and I am, therefore, accountable before God for the actions and deeds of every…
We are embedded in the day to day. We tend not to notice the exquisite design all around us, the product of our progenitors sweat, intelligence and passion. Reflecting upon this past Thanksgiving holiday, feeling some awe at the memory of a well appointed dining table. In the pleasant company of family, children and…
And yet he felt forebodings. Some nameless threat lurked just around the corner of the world for the sun to rise again. The feeling had been gnawing at him, as annoying as a swarm of hungry insects that buzzed about one’s face in the desert sun. There was a sense of the imminent, the…
How can a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely? “Perhaps,” said Apollo, “by being materially great and materially wise, and nothing else.” “Perhaps,” said Thon Taddeo, “but I doubt it.” “You reject all history, then, as a myth?” “Not ‘reject.’ But it must be questioned. Who wrote your histories?” “….a doubt…
A radical skepticism reduces reason to its own caricature: to a mere rationalization of positions that were actually predetermined by desire and were held– or secured– by force alone. Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch Meaning, Published 1975 Who was Michael Polanyi? Michael Polanyi, (11 March 1891 – 22 February 1976) was a Hungarian-British polymath,…
It will not do to say that every age has been like this, that man has always felt threatened and yet managed to survive. The point is precisely that every age is different: each time has been unique, both in what it promised and what it threatened; sometimes the catastrophe has occurred. Irrational Man…
