Category: Wisdom Traditions

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,…

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

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…

Avoiding and Embracing

Any line of behavior that fails to quicken the divine in man should be eschewed, no matter how enticing it might appear; but any that helps to awaken man’s inherent divinity must be resolutely adopted,…

Today’s One-Liner (#305)

Whoever, on the other hand, frees himself of all attachment to temporal goods attains to magnanimity, liberty of spirit, clarity of reason, deep rest, peaceful confidence in God, true homage of God, and genuine submission…