For modern Westerners, nature is opaque, mute, transmits no message, and holds no key to existence. But in reality, nature reveals the supernatural; a rock is never merely a rock, or a bird just a flying machine, or a human being an animal that appears between one nothingness and another. Nature always expresses the transcendent. [...]
Through language, humans bring out the full potentiality hidden in matter, advance the building of bird nests and beaver dams to architecture and engineering, the gathering of nuts to farming, squawks and barks to music, and limited animal perception to the intellectual jewels of modern Western culture… In the history of science, the only event [...]
The storytelling of a tribe gives each member a common remote past, communal heroes to emulate, shared social rules, and an answer to “Who am I?” Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a series dedicated to Senior Contributor Dr. Eva Brann of St. John’s College, Annapolis, in the year of her 90th birthday. The [...]
“Why can’t we eat normal food?” Frank moved the fried tempeh, steamed broccoli, and brown rice around on his plate with his dinner fork, much like the eight-year-old boy he was forty years ago. His wife’s jaw stiffened, and she said, “This is normal food.” “Yeah, if we lived in Jakarta or Calcutta.” Alice refused [...]
Because of intense fear, we refuse to acknowledge that nothing in this world is permanent, that everything perishes, that soon we will be no more. Lodged within every human heart is the blind hope that death comes to others, not to us... Prometheus was the one Olympian god to rebel against Zeus’ plan to wipe [...]
Maybe because I am particularly dense, I learned nothing of value for human living from all the brilliant mathematicians, esteemed physicists, and distinguished academics I have known. Instead, my mentor was a "curandero," a traditional healer from Northern New Mexico. Even his death taught me a profound lesson about life. When I moved to Santa [...]
We find joy when we lose the self in activity, in those good things that are outside ourselves: making art, doing science, playing sports, educating the young, or caring for the old and disabled. Joy is nature’s way of telling us that we are fulfilling our nature… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords [...]
Except for mystics, the goal of Western philosophers and theologians has been to find the right ideas, whereas Eastern thinkers seek the direct grasping of the first principles and the inner essences of natural things. I wish to suggest that the Western and Eastern paths to the true, the good, and the beautiful can be [...]
Tradition, philosophy, and religion long ago succumbed to science as the sole arbiter of truth, but now science too has been dethroned. What rules today is a different form of ideology—ideas and images replace concrete experience. Can we escape the Screen with its hollow images and counterfeit emotions and experience the human way of life?… At [...]
The narratives of science and Christianity are obviously not novels, nor works of fiction, for both claim to tell the true story of humankind—where we came from, what we are, and where we are going. To determine if either of these narratives is true, we must assess the plot… In 1882, Nietzsche’s madman ran to [...]
Over the course of several hundred years, Americans, as well as Europeans, freed themselves from the past, transformed nature into a commodity, centralized political power, and instituted bureaucracies, all with the aim of making themselves happy in this world. Unlike Eve eating fruit from the forbidden tree, the beginning of the Second Fall can be [...]
Much of suffering is an impenetrable mystery. But to a limited degree, we are able to understand suffering if we can come to understand what love is. Pope John Paul II, in Salvifici Doloris, writes, “Sacred Scripture is a great book about suffering.”[1] He then quotes the Old Testament to illustrate the spectrum of human suffering: the [...]
Although the potential range of emotional experience is essentially the same in all human beings, each culture exhibits its own patterns, inculcating certain feelings while discouraging others, promoting either expression or restraint, and defining variously the place of the emotions in everyday life. Americans believe that every person’s interior life is unique; consequently, an individual’s [...]
In the modern world of American politics, special-interest money is displacing voters. Wealth is highly concentrated in a few hands, with corporations wielding enormous power. More and more families patch together two or more paychecks to meet the widening income, healthcare, and pension gaps that are threatening the middle class… After a disastrous defeat in [...]