Power mowers, power blowers, power edgers. Chain saws and weed whippers. Pervasive, pushing, penetrating noise. “Silence is not just the absence of noise any more than peace is the absence of war. It is rather a positive and difficult accomplishment, a state of justice in the soul in which according to the classical formulation stretching [...]
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Sunday, May 30th, 2004
“Many of us feel remorse for our sins, yet we gladly accept their causes.” “Blessed is the monk who looks with great joy on everyone’s salvation and progress as if they were his own.”Mark the Ascetic”There is scarcely any other virtue that the demons fear as much as gentleness.” Evagrius
Miscellaneous snippets about one of the greatest literary post men of the twentieth centuryIn those early years of the twentieth century, a quick-moving age that was experiencing the fruits of industrialization and new trends, he pushed for tradition. He argued for the need to preserve the family and to honor women’s domestic role. He bashed [...]
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Friday, May 28th, 2004
“A great division among the American people has begun–gradually, slowly–to take shape: not between Republicans and Democrats, and not between ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals,’ but between people who are still unthinking believers in technology and in economic determinism and people who are not.” John Lukacs, At the End of an Age (2002)Later in the same book: [...]
Dogma ManA few years ago, I was talking with an acquaintance about George Roche’s resignation as president of Hillsdale College in light of allegations that he’d been engaged in an affair with his daughter-in-law. My acquaintance was outraged by the idea that Hillsdale College may have dismissed him if he hadn’t resigned. It was none [...]
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Wednesday, May 26th, 2004
Good Christians are many, if it weren’t for all those maddening people: the whiners, the manipulators, the crooks, the liars, the heretics, the greedy. But Christ put up with all of them and remained sinless. The Bible recounts disciple buffoonery and selfishness, yet Christ communed with them, loved them, confided in them—chose them. Maybe the [...]
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Tuesday, May 25th, 2004
Essayist Joseph Epstein once described reading as a “lovely, antisocial, splendidly selfish habit.” Selfish? I suppose so, but could one be so unselfish as to deny himself the pleasures of the mind and strengthening of the soul that come from reading? I’m reminded of Josef Pieper’s concluding words of Divine Madness: “To be so ‘unselfish’ [...]
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Monday, May 24th, 2004
“As soon as a man satisfies his desire by obtaining what he wants, he starts to desire something else and finds himself empty again; and if he satisfies his desire with this, he becomes empty once again and ready for still another. And this never stops until we depart from this material world.” Gregory of [...]
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Sunday, May 23rd, 2004
“When man’s irrational passions are thriving he is not free to pray and to seek the word of God.” Evagrius. Many others, including Augustine, would say that, when a man’s irrational passions are thriving, he is not free, period.
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Sunday, May 23rd, 2004
Thoughts are serious. Don’t entertain them, unless you want to be them.
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Saturday, May 22nd, 2004
“I used to believe, with regard to any problem whatever, that to know was to solve the problem; now I realize that it means to know how the problem concerns me.” Simone Weil
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Friday, May 21st, 2004
You ever wonder why people on vacation often have a bad time? I do, and I’ve concluded that—absent obvious things, like flat tires, or missing one’s plane, or getting abducted like that family in Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find—it often stems from a hell-bent intent to have a good time and [...]
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