An Exchange on America
The following arrived in my in-box today as I am a subscriber to journalist Matt Taibbi‘s Substack. Monty Python’s “What Have the Romans… Reader Paul E.–Are you a card-carrying Exceptionalist, Matt, that you believe this…
Category: USA
Catholic Jack
As Kerouac aged, he reclaimed the Catholic identity he had inherited from his devout parents, although to the reader, the influence was often muffled under the Benzedrine and booze-fueled bacchanalia of his youth, especially when…
Choose
We must decide whether our top priority is to smite the wicked or to advance the less fortunate, whether we are looking for visions and rhetoric that make us feel good for the moment or…
Today’s One-Liner (#279)
And while it’s nice to feel virtuous, it’s worth considering whether feeling virtuous and being virtuous are actually the same thing. –Bret Easton Ellis, White, 89
Today’s One-Liner (#251)
I contain multitudes. –Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Today’s One-Liner (#243)
We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. –William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals
Soulwork
“One big thing is to develop a strenuous accountability (you see it’s moral, no gadgets invade man’s true necessity), and the habit, the daily labor of writing en passant, keep a vast and cosmic diary….
Today’s One-Liner (#171)
My life is botched-up because, at 26, I’ve yet to earn a steady income, I’ve yet to really help anyone in the world, including really taking care of myself, and I’ve yet to love a…
Life in the United States of Amnesia
So we plod along, more or less in the dark, more or less humiliated by the dreary quality of our prayer, our worship by turns inane and trivial, our sense of the holy vitiated, distracted,…
More Recent Reading
Dear L., Here is a list of some books I’ve read in the past few years. Given my pretty rigid leftist mindset, Simone Weil’s maxim was often on my mind in reading the following……