A Personal Bible
Tolstoy wrote little in 1910 but considerable effort went into completing For Every Day, the compilation of quotations from great authors arranged so as to illustrate the development of his own philosophy of life, a…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
Today’s One-Liner (#299)
The distance we have gone is less important than the direction in which we are going. –Leo Tolstoy, Spiritual Writings, edited Charles E. Moore
Today’s One-Liner (#298)
Philothea, since you wish to live a devout life you must not only cease to sin but you must also purify your heart of all affection for sin. –Saint Francis de Sales, Introduction to the…
Edith Stein at the Westerbork Camp, Destination: Auschwitz
Amongst the prisoners who were brought in on the 5th of August, Sister Benedicta stood out on account of her calmness and composure. The distress in the barracks and the stir caused by the new…
Today’s One-Liner (#297)
I take it for granted that we read what are rightly called “great books”—Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, the Greek tragedians, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, the Bible, St. Augustine, some Church fathers, St. Thomas, Shakespeare, and into the…
Things Have Changed
The Bible has profound things to tell us, things we clearly ought to know. We now have students in class, even those who have gone to church or synagogue all their lives, who have not…
Seeing
I found there was great bliss in just watching Ma. Her simple movements and actions displayed a freedom, dignity and beauty that cannot be described in words, and filled the beholder with a strange, inexplicable…
Today’s One-Liner (#296)
Worry is probably the most energy-inefficient activity the mind is prone to. –Eknath Easwaran, Seeing with the Eyes of Love: Reflections on a Classic of Christian Mysticism, 159
The Bliss with Books
Back and forth from my desk to my shelves, ten, twenty, thirty times a day. The sources swirl around me. I am drugged by books. The sweet savor rises from the pages. A delirium of…
Today’s One-Liner (#295)
Studying Torah day and night means positioning oneself at every moment to acquire Torah, which is itself a function of bearing the burden of another. –Ira F. Stone, A Responsible Life: The Spiritual Path of…