Ghosts

Imbolc                                                                          Valentine Moon Today, a bit tired due to early rising, moving books put a weight on my shoulders. […]

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Humanism

Fall                                                      Waxing Autumn Moon Spiritual Resources for Humanists.  Been thinking about this from an odd perspective.  Humanism is often characterized as anti- or post-Christian.  It is, of course, easy to see why this should be so in such Christian marinated cultures as those of the United States and Europe.  Easy, yes.  But accurate? Think about […]

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Breaching the Walled Garden of the Self

Fall                                               Waning Harvest Moon Prepping for a presentation on Spiritual Resources for Humanists.  Reading books, articles, letting ideas slip past as I get ready to sleep, keeping my antennae out for what feeds me now. The book I mentioned before, All Things Shining, has convinced me of one thing.  It’s important to know why we […]

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How Are We?

Lughnasa                                     Waning Harvest Moon In preparation for my presentation, Spiritual Resources for Humanists, I have come across two mentions of a critique of Enlightenment thought’s emphasis on individualism.  In one instance the critique compares Western individualism with the more integrated person of Taoist thought, one with the Tao, or with the more communal sensibility of […]

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Spiritual Resources for the Humanist

Lughnasa                                                                Waning Honey Extraction Moon More butting my head against a language that any 4 year old in ancient Rome could speak and a reasonably intelligent 5 year old could read.  I guess there is a plateau affect here and I’m standing on one right now.  I can see the path I’ve taken to get […]

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Midwest Radicals

Samhain                                          Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice Worked on learning the ablative absolute and the passive periphrastic.  This last one is also the name of a colon problem.  Not really.  But this is strange about it, periphrastic is a latin derivative from the Greek.  The actual latin equivalent is circumlocutio, to talk around something.  Do […]

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More on Liberalism. Not there yet.

Lughnasa                              Waxing Harvest Moon Another day spent happily with my nose in The Contested Enlightenment, parsing out threads of intellectual history that I can then weave together into a new tale, one that clarifies liberalism in the United States today and, also, the place Unitarian-Universalism, a liberal faith, has in that larger context. Liberalism proceeds […]

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What Does It Mean to Be Human?

85  bar falls 29.79  3mph NE dew-point 55  Summer, hot and unpleasant Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon The Woodrow Wilson Quarterly has an interesting article titled, The Burden of the Humanities.   I want to add a cadenza, a riff of my own to this Big Band music of the intellectual sort. The first part of this […]

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