The Doors released their first single in 1967: “Break on Through (to the Other Side),” a tribute of sorts to Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. Huxley had been trying to break on through to the other side for years. He put together a splendid book in the 1940s called…

The left hemisphere gets things done. The Tao isn’t concerned about getting things done. Let your left hemisphere dominate: you’ll never be bothered by the Tao again. A focus on money is the best tool for accomplishing this. — Since its publication in 2010, Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary has pretty much ensconced itself as a modern classic and an intellectually landscape-shifting work.

My daughter runs. She runs in the morning, she runs at night. Runs, runs, runs. People around town see her and go, “Look at that girl! She’s a runner.” But I know she’s more than that. My daughter breathes. She breathes in the morning, she breathes at night. Breathes, breathes…

You Need to Deal with the Survival Paradox — The man who invented the calculator, you might imagine, was pretty freakin’ smart. But he apparently didn’t understand some really freakin’ fundamental things. He one time wrote: “I know not what is good or bad in anything. I know not which is more profitable to me, health or sickness, wealth…

A Micro-Review/Essay “What is self-evident is not discussed.” Few things slap a person in the face like St. Thomas’s silence. It’s a stunning rebuke to everyone, everywhere. Do you, writer, hope to create something as great as The Summa? Do you, reader, think you’ll gain any insight that Thomas didn’t glean? Do…

World War I shook European society. The first 15 years of the 20th century were la belle epoque — the banquet years. Society was more optimistic about its prospects than Harvey Weinstein at a cocaine-fueled casting session. And then came the genocide against English, French, and German youth that occurred…

A Micro-Review/Essay — “[W]e must either not argue with a man at all, or we must argue on his grounds and not ours.” I read this book, while a Lutheran, sitting in a convent garden. It’s no wonder I became Catholic. There’s too much common sense in those two men — and this…

Clarification for a Confused Reader A reader asks if the “Mystical Erections” title means that the Brethren of the Free Spirit were hitting people over the head with their erections. It’s one of those questions that immediately clog the brain with so many responses, you’re left speechless. I’ve had time to sort it through a…

“Whatever the eye sees and covets, let the hand grasp it.” No, that isn’t a passage above the front door of Jeffrey Epstein’s residence on Little Saint James. It’s a popular saying of a medieval sect known as the “Brethren of the Free Spirit,” which has long been regarded, according…