Culture

As I write this, the world is in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic. Life has been deeply altered and one wonders if things will ever return to the way they were. Read more

As a boy growing up in the 1950’s, Popeye the Sailorman was a major cultural influence. Read more

(This essay is dedicated to Gary Crispell who taught me everything I know about music.) “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Read more

Most of us are familiar with the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1-9). Superficially, its meaning seems obvious. Read more

Who Knows Where the Time Goes? Written by English folk-rock singer and songwriter Sandy Denny, this late ‘60s anthem was popularized by American folk singer, Judy Collins. Read more

The terms, ‘communism’ and ‘socialism’ are often used interchangeably. Yet in some respects, they are more like antonyms than synonyms. Most Americans abhor communism. Read more

In 2012, renowned physicist and cosmologist, Lawrence Krauss, published A Universe from Nothing. The purpose of the book was to debunk the idea that some sort of transcendent entity (e.g. Read more

We all love to gamble, most of us anyway; but why? Unless we have a “gambling problem”, or don’t know the rules of the games, most of us gamble for the fun of it. Read more

(Note to high school and college students: If you are surfing the web, looking for an essay to plagiarize, I don’t recommend this one…at least not if you want to get a passing grade. Read more

Being Good Beauty            Truth             Justice Love Presence Every important branch of philosophy focuses on one or more of these seven words and/or on the relations... Read more

Science and religion – complementary disciplines or mutually exclusive world views? Prior to 1700, science and religion for the most part complemented each other: Parmenides (5th century BC), s... Read more

Fifty years before the birth of Jesus, an anonymous member of the Jewish community at Alexandria wrote The Book of Wisdom. Read more

A 5 year old grandson of mine explained the difference between immortality and eternity in a way that would have made Augustine of Hippo cry. Read more

Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialist philosopher, prolific from 1938 to 1980, is not often linked with Leo XIII, Pope of the Roman Catholic Church from 1878 to 1903. Read more

“Anamnesis”; it’s a mouthful…but a very important mouthful. Read more

According to a popular conception of intellectual history, mythology is characteristic of human pre-history. Read more

The Old Testament Book of Job is thought to be a meditation on the so-called problem of evil: “Why do bad things happen to good people?” (Rabbi Harold Kushner) It is odd then that the book prov... Read more

Reading Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is a bit like going down a rabbit hole or passing through the looking glass. Nothing is as it should be; everything is turned around or upside down. Read more

For most of us, our first encounter with “morality” comes through our parents (or parent figures). Read more

The fall of 2016 saw a new comedy series, This is Us, added to the NBC line-up. Read more

No two national political systems are ever the same, but in our era at least they all do have one thing in common: they all want to be thought of as ‘democratic’. Read more

Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Duchamp, Camus, Ionesco, Beckett – these are names that come to mind when one thinks about nihilism... Read more

We are good parents. From infancy we teach our children ‘the facts of life’ –how the world came to be the way it is and how it works. We certainly mean well. But do we do well? Let's see. Read more

Relax. This isn’t an article about the practice of Kundalini Yoga. (Even I know my limits. Read more

Have you ever been in a fun house? If so, you probably visited the Hall of Mirrors. You enter and all around you are mirrors. Read more

The Nicene Creed is the foundational statement of belief for most Christian churches. To the casual reader, some of its assertions may seem difficult and, well, in-credible. Read more

A very, very long time ago, when I was young, our favorite days of the year were Christmas and Halloween, not necessarily in that order. Read more

Lewis Carroll’s second novel about his young heroine, Alice (you know Alice…of Wonderland fame), is titled Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Read more

Growing up, we all learned the Golden Rule (all of us, that is, except Peter Pan): “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Read more

In the intellectual tradition of the Western world, no theme is more ubiquitous, or enigmatic, than that of the Grail. Read more

In a previous article in this collection (“One Party Rule”), we discovered that there is really only one true political party in the United States today, the Democratic Party. Read more

Did you ever say to yourself, “If only I had known then what I know now?” Say it’s Tuesday night and you have an English test coming up Wednesday morning. Read more

Ask most any American high school student to describe the political system in the United States and she’ll almost certainly mention our “two party system”. Read more

Ask anyone passingly acquainted with American poetry to tell you the title of his favorite Robert Frost poem and you might expect to hear, “Two roads diverged in a wood”. Read more

Robert Frost’s 1916 poem, The Road Not Taken, appears to be a comment on existential angst and the human condition; and on one level it is no doubt just exactly that. Read more

  (The text of this one act play is taken from Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Encyclical on The Condition of the Working Classes, Rerum Novarum. Read more

It begins as a typical children’s cartoon movie: a struggle between good and evil, mildly interesting characters trying to overcome personal insecurities to ‘be all that they can be’, a love tri... Read more

(Note: Toward the end of the movie, Finn explains to his dad that Legos are for kids ages 8 to 14. It says so on the box. But Dad says, “That’s just a suggestion!” Same here. Read more

No, our title does not refer to a pub in London…though if it did, I would certainly be having a pint there. Read more

Beyond the works of Wagner (The Ring),Tolkien (Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit) and, of course, Marvel Comics, most of what we know about Norse Mythology comes from just two sources: The Elder Edda, ... Read more

Language, the principal medium of human reason, comes in three voices: systematic, poetic and mythic. Read more

In the late 1980’s, cult television brought us Max Headroom, a futuristic series whose eponymous hero, an artificial intelligence, a dissipitive bundle of code, lived in cyberspace and interacted wi... Read more

What is real…and what isn’t? It seems at times that this question defines the entire project of our lives. As very young children, we accept everything as real. Read more

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all Ye know on earth and all ye need to know. Read more

"You do not dip twice in the river/Beneath the same tree's shadow/Without bonds in some other life." Heraclitus? No. Read more

How does one come to know the mind of God? From reading a children’s story? Maybe! In 1934, P.L. Travers, an Australian, wrote one of the most famous children’s books of all time, Mary Poppins. Read more

It’s 1920. The glow of the Russian Revolution is everywhere and dialectical materialism is the philosophy de jour. Every aspect of life in Russian society is undergoing radical transformation. Read more

If you want to understand what’s special about the Christian world view, travel to London and visit St. Paul’s Cathedral. Read more

In his master work, I and Thou, the existentialist philosopher, Martin Buber, wrote “In the beginning is the relation.” This was not a new idea. Read more

From the dawn of philosophy, thinkers have speculated that the world of space & time, matter & energy, objects & sense perceptions, the world in which we seem to live, may not be the only ... Read more