http://dearmckenzie.com/wp-includes/images/css.php Andrew Sullivan quotes a University Bookman piece which quotes a lecture by Santayana on the effect that nature as – or can have, if we let it in – on the American mind. When you are in nature: Everywhere is beauty and nowhere permanence, everywhere an incipient harmony, nowhere an intention, nor a responsibility, nor […]
Category Archives: The Inner Life.
The Effect of Nature on the Mind.
30-Oct-13The Atlantic seems to have discovered that we moderns have an insatiable appetite for anything plausibly scientific on the topic of love and marriage (or our lack thereof), and out comes another article, centering on the neurological experience of love. Despite the attempt to headline this article with “there’s no such thing as everlasting love” […]
Marie-Louise von Franz, Jung, Death.
20-Dec-12I had the sudden conviction that I should finally more fully explore the writings of Marie-Louise von Franz, a second-generation Jungian whose writings I have been impressed by in the past. I am in general always partial to people who have some kind of redemptive salvific Messianic purpose in their work: ‘Like all of us, […]
In monotheistic folklore – meaning the folktales of Christians and Muslims, and I bet in Talmudic Judaism as well, though I have not seen it for myself – there is a persistent theme of a powerful king persecuting a good, peaceful believer. Among the Christians the persecutors are typically Nero and Diocletian, and their victims […]
I was born Catholic, and I remain so, but I do not believe I became a real Christian until four years ago, when I had what we may as well call my conversion. It happened as follows. Some young men have difficulty measuring up to their fathers. My brother and I have had something of […]
The Catholic Sex Problem, Ctd.
29-Jun-12I just finished The Body and Society, Peter Brown’s stupendously excellent book on early Christian views of the body. The book is filled with interesting excerpts from the saints. Here’s one of them: “The human ideal of continence, I mean that which is set forth by the Greek philosophers, teaches one to resist passion, so […]
Dream.
21-Jun-12I dreamt that I went to mass and was the last person to come up for communion, and there was no bread or wine for me. But the priest had a drop of water in the cup and he gave that to me, saying it was enough. As I took the cup on my knees […]
Night in the Desert.
05-Feb-12Feeling horribly contained by urban life here, I drove out of the city not really knowing where I was going and pulled my truck to the side of the road by a small shrine about fifty miles into the desert. I pulled out my sleeping bag and found a spot where the rocks were a […]
I still find Sullivan good on most topics beside religion, but his defense of religion as transcending tenet is worth a look. It contains the nugget “fundamentalism is rationalism in religion.” Moralism and rationalism don’t wash too well with a God conceived of as a union of is and is not. The transcendent God tends […]
God.
07-Nov-13http://woosterglass.com/lake-buckhorn/ Everything godlike is weak and defenseless.