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 [...]
God unequally bestows gifts to us that are to be used for the common good. The wise can guide others; the well-organized can administer businesses that provide employment; the strong can protect the weak. With such an understanding, equality and a hierarchical social structure are not incompatible, but complement each other. My three children grew [...]
If scientists were to look inward with the same seriousness with which they look outward, they would be forced to reflect upon the interior life, upon the creature who seeks truth, desires to know everything, delights in beauty, experiences joy when the truth is encountered, and wonders about why nature can be known at all. [...]
Food is a way to enjoy being alive. Drink wine and dance around the kitchen; kiss your beloved. Life can be beautiful… Experts with scientific credentials tell us the best way to resolve interpersonal conflicts, how to raise children, and what food to eat. These new gurus maintain that in principle scientific truths can guide [...]
Members of democratic nations, especially Americans, have almost unlimited personal freedom because the constraints of class, local communities, and family have been greatly weakened. But we are also free to choose to step off the consumer treadmill, refuse to seek material success for us alone, and attempt to serve others, materially, emotionally, and spiritually. In [...]
To engage in dialogue, we must be good listeners, seeking to hear an insight, perhaps fuzzily formulated and unclear even to the speaker, but nevertheless worthy of exploration. Every culture has its own conversational style that often inhibits genuine dialogue. In Japan, for instance, the division of scholars and scientists at universities and research institutes [...]