Experience and Expectation
Let me also recall Samuel Johnson, whose famous biography by his devotee Boswell is, I think, something along with the Bible that you should read a bit every day, if only for the delight of…
Category: Commonplace book
Choices Make Habits
St. Thomas, as usual, is the apostle of common sense. Virtue, like reason and language, is in us by nature potentially—we are designed for it—but since the actualization of this potentiality depends on our free…
Chaos of the Now
Yet of Plutarch, the Ancilla to Classical Reading says, “He has indubitably had more European readers than any other pagan Greek and has been the greatest single channel communicating to Europe a general sense of…
Clarity
One ought to be clear about at least a few matters — war, capital killing, aborting the unborn! Isaiah invites such clarity, and in a sense, leaves to us the conclusions, the details, the issues. …
Today’s One-Liner (#307)
[Isaiah] lived the word, endured it, and paid for it. –Daniel Berrigan, S.J., Isaiah: Spirit of Courage, Gift of Tears, 2
Never Out-of-Date
Cicero lived some five hundred years before Augustine. He himself sent his own son to Greece to study philosophy. Cicero wrote to his son a famous letter, the famous On Duties, which attempted to explain…
Today’s One-Liner (#306)
The best place to begin for any young man or woman today can be stated in two steps: 1) the step of self-discipline and 2) the step of a personal library; both of these together…
Avoiding and Embracing
Any line of behavior that fails to quicken the divine in man should be eschewed, no matter how enticing it might appear; but any that helps to awaken man’s inherent divinity must be resolutely adopted,…
Today’s One-Liner (#305)
Whoever, on the other hand, frees himself of all attachment to temporal goods attains to magnanimity, liberty of spirit, clarity of reason, deep rest, peaceful confidence in God, true homage of God, and genuine submission…
Engagingly Readable
Dostoevsky is not a writer to struggle through or with, but one who tries to make his work as interesting and exciting—and as readable—as possible. His works raise some of the deepest moral and philosophic…