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…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
Today’s One-Liner (#312)
[Y]ou know the greatest of all Balzac’s novels is Cousin Bette. –Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg, The Letters, 392
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
Today’s One-Liner (#310)
Everyone should read at one point in his life Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. –James Schall, S.J., A Student’s Guide to Liberal Learning, 34
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….