Writing can simultaneously take a lot out of you—you feel pleasantly exhausted after firing off a big piece of work—and make you feel wondrously light and buoyant. How is this? I think it is because writing is simultaneously work and leisure, a mental strain and a contemplative joy. We are used to dividing our waking [...]
It’s usually only the rationalists and skeptics who find their way into the great surveys of thought. But religion always rises from the ashes. This is thanks in no small part to the imaginative thinkers who revealed Christianity as what it always was, although not always ideally expressed by us: a thing of mystery, romance, [...]
Blaise Pascal’s argument in favor of Christianity was simple: Faith is so perceptible, even so palpable, to the intuition that man needs only to be in the world to realize that there must be more. Christianity has a direct connection to the heart; as Pascal said, “the heart has its reasons, which reason does not [...]
Blaise Pascal wrote that men hate religion and “are afraid it is true.” But can we agree with him? Some have made clear a hatred for it, but do they fear it? And what about the wider culture? Do people today, generally speaking, fear religion? The renowned physicist Stephen Hawking once heckled that the idea [...]
In a world calling our students to distraction, Blaise Pascal is willing to shout at them about what is at stake. How might you avoid being a fool? Start by thinking about the hard things, then seek understanding with everything you’ve got. I’m not sure there’s a more important author for teenagers right now than [...]