Present Moment, Awesome Moment

Goethe once said that during eighty years of life he had known eleven happy days. I imagine that everyone, in the course of their life, must have seen many hundreds of sunrises and sunsets; they…

Two Kinds of People

Go back to Socrates: “Know thyself.” For Socrates, there are only two kinds of people: the wise, who know they are fools; and fools, who think they are wise. Similarly, for Christ and all the…

Today’s One-Liner (#314)

When your relationships become strained we can ask ourselves what Jesus would have done—or, when that seems too lofty, what Saint Teresa or Saint Francis would have done.  –Eknath Easwaran, Original Goodness: On the Beatitudes,…

Time Management

The famous author of western stories, Louis L’Amour, wrote a very marvelous memoir called The Education of a Wandering Man. No book is better than this one for telling us how to find the time…

Essential and Limited

And there, indeed, is one of the great and marvelous features of beautiful books (and one which will make us understand the role, at once essential and limited, that reading can play in our spiritual…

A Personal Summa

The Summae of old were the Bibles of knowledge: we have now no Summae, and no one among us is capable of writing one. Everything is in chaos. But at least, if a collective Summa…

Today’s One-Liner (#311)

Reflect that in this world nothing but virtue and devotion can satisfy your soul. –Saint Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, trans. John K. Ryan, 270