Category: Wisdom Traditions

Take Your Pick

What is the essence of Christ’s ministry? He teaches men “not to commit stupidities.” All of Tolstoy’s brutal empiricism and aristocratic impatience resound in that extraordinary answer. The Dostoevskyan Christ, on the contrary, teaches men…

The Crown of the Blessed

Moreover, if you do not steadily set your heart on Me, with a firm will to suffer everything for My sake, you will not be able to bear the heat of this battle or to…

Today’s One-Liner (#317)

[I]n my work, the “bad” mimesis is always dominant, but the “good” one is of course even more important.  –Cynthia Haven, Conversations with Rene Girard:  Prophet of Envy, 131

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