Monday, December 23, 2013

cognitive potential in a dark time






...Thinking should be like musical meditation.
Has any philosopher pursued a thought to its limits
 the way Bach or Beethoven
develop and exhaust a musical theme?
Even after having read the most profound thinkers,
one still feels the need to begin anew.
Only music gives definitive answers.

                                
                                      E. M. Cioran
 
 
 
 
 
 
...

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

the way out








Before God I am a human being.... But I am caught in a situation from which there is truly and radically no escape, in a spider's web I cannot break. If I am to continue to be a living human being, someone must come to free me. In other words, God is not trying to humiliate me. What is mortally affronted in this situation is not my humanity or my dignity. It is my pride, the vainglorious declaration that I can do it all myself. This we cannot accept..
 In our own eyes we have to declare ourselves to be righteous and free. We do not want grace. Fundamentally what we want is self-justification. There thus commences the patient work of reinterpreting revelation so as to make of it a Christianity that will glorify humanity and in which humanity will be able to take credit for its own righteousness.


       -  Jacques Ellul







....

Monday, December 9, 2013

love and marriage








“There is an immeasurability in happiness
      that only feels at home
           in the breadth of silence.
       Happiness and silence belong together
                          just as do profit and noise.”





                                                    Max Picard








.....

Friday, December 6, 2013

from the mouth of gold










from:   De Lazaro Concio II


          


            “Not to share one’s wealth with the poor
                          is to steal from them
                       and to take away their livelihood.
                           It is not our own goods which we hold,
                                                   but theirs”.



                                             



                                                  st. john chrysostom





                                    in the recent apostolic exhortation of Francis I



...

Monday, November 4, 2013

Veritably

 
 
 
 
 


I think the majority of musicians are interested in truth, you know—they’ve got to be because a musical thing is a truth. If you play and make a statement, a musical statement, and it’s a valid statement, that’s a truth right there in itself, you know. If you play something phony you know that’s phony. All musicians are striving to get as near perfection as they can get. That’s truth there, you know. So in order to play those kind of things, to play truth, you’ve got to live with as much truth as you possibly can, you know.
 
 
`St. John Coltrane






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Saturday, October 26, 2013

today's indictment












 I think
 that one of the mistakes
that we have made with so many problems —
 including drugs, poverty, illegal immigration, sexual conduct
that we don’t agree with —
is that there is a technocratic solution,
or even a one size fits all solution.

Alcohol is clearly bad and it’s addictive. It’s dangerous. Fine.
 Let’s prohibit alcohol.
Well, that didn’t work so well.
 And of course it didn’t stop people from doing
 the exact same thing with drugs
 and we’re just beginning to sense that
 maybe that’s not going to work so well either.

  It’s not working so well with immigration.
And we haven’t made a lot of progress with poverty either.
 And one of the reasons is that people talk about
some kind of objective solution.
 We throw a certain amount of money at the problem.

 If people are in bad housing projects,
let’s tear them down and put them into new housing projects.
 Maybe some of those things might have useful effects.
 Maybe not.
But they’ll only go a certain degree in addressing the problem.
 Because poverty is a state of being. It’s the way somebody feels.
And if somebody feels that he doesn’t have enough.

Maybe
 he has enough to eat, enough to sleep on, whatever.
 But he has so much less than the people around him
 that he feels humiliation and rage,
and yet
he’s above the minimal monetary standard for poverty,
let’s say,
 then what solution do we have for him?
  So it’s a problem
 like so many of these social problems
that involve communication skills
 and particularly require the ability to listen
and individualize on the part of the prospective benefactor.
  And that’s something that we’re not good at.




                                                                                   William T. Vollmann






.







...

Monday, October 21, 2013

particle physics








              we come spinning out of nothingness,

                                                     scattering stars like dust






....Rumi

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

St. Teresa's Bookmark

              








                         Let nothing disturb you,
                                 Let nothing frighten you,
                 All things are passing;
                         God only is changeless.
          Patience gains all things.
                  Who has God wants nothing.
                           God alone suffices.





                                            Teresa of Avila







..

Monday, October 14, 2013

the new meritocracy








in india....



          without going to jail,
             you cannot be a big politician
                                                                      -- Babban  Kumar





        perhaps we could switch to this method in place of election campaigns





...

Thursday, October 3, 2013

CANTICUM LAUDIS

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
“The purpose
    of the Divine Office
         is to sanctify the day
                 and all human activity.”

“The Office is...
    the prayer 
         not only of the clergy
             but of the whole People of God.”
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
.

Monday, September 30, 2013

with respect to fiction







let me recite what history teaches.

history teaches.




                     Gertrude Stein







.

Monday, September 23, 2013

from the angelic doctor

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
                   Sorrow can be alleviated by
                            good sleep,
                             a bath
                              and a glass of wine”
 
 
 
                                       St. Thomas Aquinas OP








.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

new wine, new skins









I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life.
 God is in everyone’s life.
Even if the life of a person has been a disaster,
even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else—
God is in this person’s life.
You can, you must try to seek God in every human life.
Although the life of a person is a land full of thorns and weeds,
 there is always a space in which the good seed can grow.
You have to trust God.

                          POPE FRANCIS I






.

Friday, September 13, 2013

niels bohr said









an expert is someone who has made
all the possible mistakes
that can be made
in a very narrow field







seems there's actually a dearth of these folks





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Monday, August 26, 2013

how to earn the right










the difficulty with christianity is linked to
the difficulty of living out the 9th beatitude
of matthew's gospel
it places inflicted hardship or human abuse
 in the context of something
not so much to be avoided or even
something to be quickly transcended
rather
this invitation to happiness suggests
we are in  position for a great deal of joy
when the storms of negativity advance upon us
we need not fear
rather we should lift up our hearts in praise

or so it would seem







.

Thursday, August 22, 2013

sinocapital








To be a successful businessman
                      in China
                   you need to play the game,
                    and even corrupt an official,
                       which makes you very vulnerable.



                 chen zhiwu







this of course does not happen in civilized free market societies in the west








Sunday, August 18, 2013

organic anatomic reading {sic}








“It’s lucky vaginas can’t read,
          or mine would be cringing in embarrassment.”





  


               - katha pollit responding to naomi wolf's book:
                               VAGINA: A NEW BIOGRAPHY












Wednesday, August 14, 2013

then there are facts








we've turned the garden of eden
into an industrial zone


 



          
           - directly stated by my neighbor
                 br.  paul jasmer osb












.

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

on insight and ambiguity






I remain profoundly puzzled by what I have said,
despite the fact that I think I am correct.





Stuart Kauffman






.

Monday, July 29, 2013

imperative of the day








       The military needs
      

to be

      taught a        lesson.

    At

        this point

 it's                      a     

                                  zero-sum game:

it's   
                      either

          the Brotherhood

                       or

                                    the old regime.



                            Gehad el-Haddad  from  Egypt





Thursday, June 20, 2013

little ways of promoting insanity







It is said
the way to drive a Metis crazy
is to nail his moccasins to the floor
and play
THE RED RIVER JIG
 
 
 
 
 
.

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

stop to consider
























http://www.landinstitute.org/library-post/wendell-berry-interview-pbs/






yes
prophecy is still an active force in the cosmos








if you don't have anything else to do give a look


































.

Monday, June 3, 2013

words to bring back in










Curglaff:    The shock felt in bathing
                             when one first plunges
                               into the cold water

             — John Jamieson’s Etymological Scottish Dictionary, 1808










the title of my new textbook












.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

commencement address 2013










 






“We should judge teaching not
by the amount of knowledge it passes on,
 but by the enduring excitement it generates.
 Knowledge, when it comes, is a later arrival,
flaring up, when the time is right,
from the sparks good teachers have implanted
in their students’ souls.”





                            Gary Gutting











.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

rhyme of the day











                           






                                

                               yesterday,  upon the stair
                               i met a man who wasn't there
                                he wasn't there again today
                                 i wish,  i wish he'd go away



       







maybe i should start something new

























.

Friday, May 17, 2013

metaphysics is endemic









"In an age of change and uncertainty,
people ask profound questions,
about life itself, about suffering,
about death, about love and what makes life worthwhile.
 People seek assurance and light. 
They respond if they are presented with a unifying reality
which is in every way good, true and beautiful. ...
Without question there is a yearning
for unity among peoples,
 a rejection of whatever discriminates
or marginalizes others."








                                          -- Cardinal Basil Hume, A Turning to God














.







Thursday, April 25, 2013

another haiku

                                









                                 Forgiveness a gift
                                 It is a gift to myself
                                 When I forgive you.





                                               

                                                        Rachel Marco-Havens


                    (daughter of    Richie Havens      +   4/24/2013)











                                              freedom indeed!







.

Friday, April 19, 2013

more cosmos haiku










                                          great blue heron
                                           flapping across a white landscape
                                            my eyes did see












.

Monday, April 15, 2013

cosmic lessons

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 you do not have a guitar in order to sing songs


      songs make you play the guitar so they can be heard
 
 
 
 
 
                                                       anonymous
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Friday, April 12, 2013

other echoes







         It's remarkable.
               You can't turn a corner in the Capitol this week
                    without meeting a family of a gun violence victim.
                                        It's hard to say no to these families.


                                                                  -Connecticut senator











.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

the Prophet speaks

 
 
 
 
 
 
----political anthropology at its finest
 
 
 
 
 
 

Right-wing conservative Christians live
 in monogamous pairs
 in lifelong heterosexual bonds along a very tiny strip
of the American habitat,
often choosing to live outside of cities in rural areas
where they can easily get to a river in order
to baptize themselves.
  Eating a variety of foods they trend
toward pizza and hamburgers
with potato salad or French fries
(which they point to as evidence of their broadmindedness)
and for a beverage they choose Coors beer.
 About 100,000,000 copies of the animal
remain in the wild.
 Another 50,000,000 have lapsed
 from their lifestyle
 and have gone awol,
moving into the inner cities where they choose
instead of churches
to visit art museums and to become promiscuous
 and instead of raising their young
they instead raise monuments to themselves
 in the form of artwork
 with their names scribbled large
in the bottom righthand corner.

While they still have large enough numbers

to pass legislation
 such as Proposition 8,
which would seem to preference their lifestyle,
it is now the case that single judges
overturn their massive numbers,
while thumbing their nose at them.

The pressure of capital continues to destroy

what remains of right-wing Christian habitat.
 In blue state areas such people are told to keep silent
or they will lose their jobs.
 At universities
 they are encouraged
to shut up about their opinions.
  Many rightwing Christians continue to believe
 in the Protestant work ethic
 and working to get ahead.
This outright form of capitalism doesn't get them very far.
They are also encouraged to shut up about the Bible,
and what their preachers have told them,
 if they intend to hold jobs.
  Atheistic socialism redistributes the money
 of the right-wing Christian population
to the lazybones who'd prefer to watch Reality TV
and live instead as if they are on Reality Tv,
 but some rightwing Christians continue to exist
on jobs in auto parts stores,
in furniture factories,
and working behind lunch counters.
 Rightwing Christian conservatives can
often be spotted by their imperviousness to fashion.
For instance,
 a rightwing Christian conservative may be found
wearing knee-high white socks instead of ankle socks.
When they are told that they really should get with it,
they shrug,
as if their mind is on something else.

The rightwing Christian male has a mane like a lion,

but is rather gentle.
He likes his hair long
and dreams that he is Samson or Jesus.
 Some rightwing Christians crop their hair
in the style of the Puritans.
They never fight one another,
and spend their time in trees, eating, dreaming,
 and completely clueless as to their nearly extinct status,
and unable to tell us whether they prefer communism
 or laissez-faire capitalism,
or some kind of socialist blend of the two,
but they go to church and they make up the people
 who live beneath the steeple.
When they pass the plate they are generous,
 imagining that the money will go
to convert the savage heathens of Africa
and to institute laissez-faire capitalism with voting.
The rightwing Christian female pays very little attention to fashion,
and is often found in church basements
all over America
 making green jello.

It
 would
 seem that
somewhere
 in the rightwing
Christian conservative
philosophy is an approach
to identity politics
 that
 would
preclude the
 demographics
of gender and race,
and instead frame
an all-inclusiveness
that would allow them
 to reclaim their shrinking habitat
against the fiercely shrieking advocates
 of political correctness.
However,
since the advocates of political correctness have seized
 the White House,
and much of the political power,
as well as the Universities,
there is very little the rightwing Christian conservative can do
to guard either his or her heritage or to argue
for the validity of their culture.
 They are in essence a species or variety of human
that is going to shortly become extinct,
a massive cultural genocide that
may yet take another generation to complete,
 but which at this point seems almost certainly to be on its way.

It is often pointed out
that America was founded
by rightwing Conservative Christians
in the colony of Massachusetts in about 1620.
They were predominant until about the year 1920
when their habitat began to shrink.
At first they were no longer found along the coasts.
Then as the farms began to disappear
 in the interior of the country
they melted into the cities and began
 to live like animals just like the others.
Very few true
upright rightwing Conservative Christians
can now be found.
While inner city people now dance
with their hands on the floors,
 the rightwing Conservative Christians continue
to do a different dance altogether.
It consists of eating chips before the television set
 and occasionally crossing the leg.
Sometimes they go down on their knees,
raise their eyes toward the ceiling,
and close their hands
 
 in prayer.


     -kirby olson
























,

Saturday, March 23, 2013

earth wisdom of chinua achebe








when suffering knocks at your door and
you say there is no seat for him,
 he tells you not to worry
because he has brought his own stool.








.

Friday, March 15, 2013

prayer of unravelling

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Dearest Holy Mother, Most Holy Mary,
you undo the knots that suffocate your children,
extend your merciful hands to me.
I entrust to You today this knot....
and all the negative consequences that it provokes in my life.
I give you this knot that torments me
and makes me unhappy
 and so impedes me
from uniting myself to You and Your Son Jesus, my Savior. 
            I run to You, Mary, Undoer of Knots
 because I trust you and I know that you never despise a sinning child
 who comes to ask you for help.
 I believe that you can undo this knot because Jesus grants you everything.
 I believe that you want to undo this knot because you are my Mother.
I believe that You will do this because you love me with eternal love.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
.

Thursday, March 14, 2013

it's about time








habemus papam franciscum

hosanna






.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

cataclysms like paroxysms

                               
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
                                         "There's no
                                              government,
                                           there's no pope.
                                           And now
                                          it is snowing
                                           in Rome."
 
 
 
 
                                                     -Adrianna R.















.

Friday, March 1, 2013

i paraphrase chesterton

       









 the catholic church is not meant to move with the world
                       no
               it is meant to move the world









.

Thursday, February 28, 2013

wisdom of GKChesterton








“The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.”









.

Sunday, February 24, 2013

point well taken



        


"There's something to be said
            for stabbing people in the front
                 in a town
                      where everybody goes around all day
                            stabbing each other in the back."


       - ben smith










.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

listen to desiderius erasmus








                       I doubt if a single individual can be found
                        from the whole of mankind
                        free from some form of insanity.
               The only difference is one of degree.
                   A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife
                    is called insane because
                         this happens to very few people.











.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

last light shining

                   




                 “Lifting one's gaze to the living God,   the guarantor of our freedom and of truth,
               is a premise for arriving at a new humanity.     Nowadays, in a special way,
           the world needs people capable of proclaiming and bearing witness to God who is love,
      and consequently the one light which in the end,   illumines the darkness of the world
 and gives us strength to live and work”




                - Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est. 2006

Saturday, February 16, 2013

epistemological constraint










We are learning a great many clever things.
 The next great task will be to learn not to do them.




             -- G.K. Chesterton













.

Monday, February 4, 2013

fallacy all dressed up












There is no female mind.
The brain is not an organ of sex.
Might as well speak of a female liver.


                - Charlotte Perkins Gilman









.

Friday, February 1, 2013

nobody said this would be easy







while the fullness of faith can be said to subsist
within the Roman Catholic Church
the Church herself subsists largely
in a sea of hatred and blindness







.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

a little ignatian exercise







That we may be altogether of the same mind and in conformity with the Church herself,   if she shall have defined anything to be black which appears to our eyes to be white,   we ought in like manner to pronounce it to be black.    For we must undoubtingly believe,   that the Spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ,    and the Spirit of the Orthodox Church His Spouse,   by which Spirit we are governed and directed to Salvation,   is the same; ....

           Ignatius Loyola  SJ  (founder of the Society of Jesus)










.

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

nyt blues







Breaking News: Senate Backs Legislation to Raise Taxes on Wealthiest Americans

Breaking News: Talks on Fiscal Crisis Face Setback That Threatens Deal

Today's Headlines: Senate Leaders Set to Work on a Last-Minute Tax Agreement

Today's Headlines: Summoned Back to Work, Senators Chafe at Inaction

Today's Headlines: Real and Virtual Firearms Nurture a Marketing Link

Today's Headlines: Search for Way Through Fiscal Impasse Turns to the Senate

Today's Headlines: For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall









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