Month: November 2025

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…

Today’s One-Liner (#309)

In the same way, I tell you, there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner repenting than over ninety-nine upright people who have no need of repentance. –The Gospel according to Luke, 15:7

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…

Today’s One-Liner (#308)

We boast that we are the descendants of the Prophets, but we are really the descendants of the Jews who stoned the Prophets. –Amos Oz, in Robert Alter, Amos Oz: Writer, Activist, Icon

Riveting

It’s good for me to be the citizen of a state in which there are eight and a half million prime ministers, eight and a half million prophets, and eight and a half million messiahs….

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. …

Never Out-of-Date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…