Author: Mark J. Chmiel

Today’s One-Liner (#85)

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done:  and there is no new thing under the sun. –Koheleth, 1:9, King James…

Russian Reflections on Kindness

1. When nineteenth-­century novelists exposed the hy­poc­risy of cruel ­people pretending to be kind, observed Nadezhda Mandelstam, they testified to the unquestioned ac­cep­tance of kindness as a virtue. As La Rochefoucauld observed, hy­poc­risy is the…

Reading “Job”

There were ample precedents in Dostoevsky’s work for his thematic focus on the problem of theodicy raised by Ivan—the problem of the existence of evil and suffering in a world presumably created by a God…

Today’s One-Liner (#82)

The rules of the Kingdom of God are not at all utopian: if you want to put an end to mimetic rivalry, give way completely to your rival.  –Rene Girard, Maxim #158, in All Desire…

Today’s One-Liner (#81)

“He did a multitude of good deeds as secretly as bad ones are usually done.” Said about Jean Valjean, in Victor Hugo,  Les Misérables, translated by Charles E. Wilbour