Tag: Jesus

The Teachings

However little education a man may have, he cannot but know that Christ did not sanction murder, but taught kindness, meekness, forgiveness of injuries, love of one’s enemies—and therefore he cannot help seeing that on…

Harvard Joke about Jesus

“A fine teacher, but didn’t publish.” –Quoted by George Steiner, in Lessons of the Masters, p. 33. Steiner observes, “A cardinal definition of genius points, I believe, to the capacity to originate myths, to devise…

Moving toward Perfection

When Turgenev pleaded with him to return to the literary art that had first won him fame, he did not understand that for Tolstoy the measure of true greatness was not what we were but…

He Knew His Books

Jesus’ education in the Hebrew Bible is so extraordinary that he is able to quote a wide variety of texts with ease—and to interpret them with great depth. His knowledge of Moses’ Torah in particular…

Precepts and Parables

Of all the gospels, the Sermon on the Mount was the portion that impressed me most, and I studied it more often than any other part. Nowhere else does Christ speak with such solemnity; nowhere…

The Canon in the Canon

Of all the gospels, the Sermon on the Mount was the portion that impressed me most, and I studied it more often than any other part. Nowhere else does Christ speak with such solemnity; nowhere…

When Life Starts to Improve

Leo Tolstoy, Spiritual Writings, edited by Charles E. Moore Prophetic witness consists of human deeds of justice and kindness that attend to the unjust sources of human hurt and misery. It calls attention to the…

Poets/2

I Am by Laura Aranda I am on my way I am haven’t yet arrived and the in the in-between I am that bliss you find in a mountain rainstorm in a solitary blade of…

Why Do They Come to Hinder Us?

Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (La Trahison des Clercs) [1927] Julien Benda’s Treason of the Intellectuals can be read as a gloss on the Dreyfus Affair. In this polemic against intellectuals who have…