This year, International Quitters Day, also known as Ditch New Year’s Resolution Day, fell on January 17. This is the date according to studies by which one in three people have given up on their New Year’s resolutions. If you are still hanging in there, go you!
If you have…
Greek mythology tells of three fates, sisters: Clotho (spinner), Lachesis (allotter) and Atropos (inflexible). You get the picture: one sister spins the thread; one sister measures the length; one sister cuts the thread.
That’s your life: spun, allotted, cut.
The Greeks weren’t the only ones. Once upon a time many…
The cliche that has come down to us is that Socrates once said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” That phrasing should not go unexamined . . .
ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ)
Anexetastos can mean “unexamined,” but also, “not searched out.”
Biōtos (where we get the prefix bio)…
The term schismogenesis was coined in 1935 by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Nowadays Bateson is best remembered as being married to the vastly more famous anthropologist Margaret Mead. …
Stoic philosophy is based on two assertions. First, you are telling yourself a story, whether you know it or not, and you probably don’t know it. Second, you think the sequence of events goes: stimulus — response. Actually, the sequence of events goes: stimulus — choice — response.
Let’s say…
The essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote about the “soul’s capacity to keep itself company,” as he called it. And he wrote that the “greatest thing in the world is to know how to be yourself.” …
One of the things that made James Baldwin a great writer — and makes him a continuing presence and guide for young writers — is Baldwin’s refusal to settle with or hide from the self. He underlines “the self one invents — the self one takes oneself as being, which…
The patience of Job. It’s an old saying. Time-tested, as it were. And probably the exactly wrong reading of the book called Job.
The Book of Job faces up to the ultimate question: if God is in charge, why do evil things happen to righteous people? …
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from bad.
But I have seen the beauty of the good, and the ugliness of the bad…
Last week I began reviewing the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
One of the most interesting claims in the book — and the one that will be the most controversial, I suspect — is their claim that the European…
Poet, Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a Humanist congregation. Amazon author's page amazon.com/author/davidbreeden
