After I was done writing the Russian monk piece last week, I pulled Sergius Bolshakoff’s Russian Mystics off the shelf. It’d been years since I read it, but I remembered loving it.
I quickly remembered why, though I was a bit surprised to see that I read only half of…
I woke up yesterday morning to the gales of November, the same that brought down the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975, according to meteorologists who said the atmospheric mix that dumped a few inches on my town is the same that brought down the mighty freighter.
I could hear a collective…
Merely by thinking about certain sorts of people at all . . . we become objectively, measurably, more like them, in how we behave, think and feel. Iain McGilchrist
Ask a college professor this question:
“Did Moses write the Torah or did the Torah write Moses?” …
So why am I excited about the surge in meditation?
Because I believe it’s the first time since the dawn of modern science that the scientist has been humiliated.
Listen to that Joe Rogan interview with Amishi Jha. At the beginning, she describes a lecture she attended, in which the…
Except for my garden, which is a blend of hobby and post-apocalyptic planning, I don’t have any hobbies.
I have a lot of things I do occasionally, like travel, watch football, and drink at a bar. I also exercise and pray regularly. …
I took my advice and decided to finish Cal Newport’s Deep Work, which I had started twice but abandoned because it’s written at a sophomoric reading level.
I’m glad I did. I’m almost halfway through it and learning a lot.
Perhaps the biggest thing: It’s necessary to carve out time…
“I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.’” The man with owl-eyed spectacles, The Great Gatsby.
I sit, in a battered, leather chair. It affords me a view of all three ceiling-to-floor bookcases in my study.
My…
I had a Sertillanges sighting recently.
As in, “A.G. Sertillanges, O.P.,” author of that classic work, The Intellectual Life.
My last sighting was about 15 years ago, when I was reading from Merton’s journals. If memory serves, he was mocking the book. If not mocking, criticizing. If I had to…
“When drinking is made a sin, the only point in drinking is to get drunk.”
Michigan Week. It starts on the third Saturday of May, the prettiest week of the year in Michigan: flowers blooming, grass green, weather temperate.
Michigan Week had been going on for 50 years. My hometown…
I don’t collect things anymore. I don’t know when I stopped, but in my youth, I would start more collections than a wino starts bottles.
Baseball cards, beer cans, football pennants, foreign currency, coins, postcards, seashells, marbles, even rocks (those polished stones featured in souvenir shops).
Even as an adult…
