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…
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? …
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…
It’s a familiar story: In the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia, traditional hunting and gathering groups began to settle in agricultural communities.
The gathered communities produced a multiplayer effect, and soon knowledge led to innovation: metallurgy; agricultural advances; architecture; writing; mathematics; and differentiation of labor, until soon there were kings and…
Book 4 verse 22: Think about the times of Vespasian (emperor 69–79 CE). People married, raised children, got sick, died, fought wars, feasted, traveled from here to there, farmed, flattered, acted arrogantly, got suspicious, plotted, wished others dead, grumbled at the state of things, loved, accumulated stuff, sought power. …
The worlds of philosophy. theology, and religion are not for the faint of heart, to say the least. As a pragmatist, I try to boil the concepts down, and I try to see the smoke and mirrors for what they are. …
In theological circles it’s referred to as the “personalization” of religion. Simply put, one manifestation of personalization occurs when we keep our religion to ourselves. In a secular society, we would, therefore, separate religion and politics, even, presumably, somehow, in our own minds.
But how might that actually work? We…
Note: Below is my adaptation of Marcus Aurelius’ words, Book 8:1–8:
Observe what nature requires and allow nothing to distract you.
You have searched and searched, but the good life has eluded you. You have not found the good life in logic, wealth, fame, or pleasures. Not anywhere. …
But the Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. (Jonah 1:17)
The British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch once said, “Bad writing is almost always full of the fumes of personality.”
David Breeden
Poet, Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a Humanist congregation. Amazon author's page amazon.com/author/davidbreeden
