It’s national poetry day in the UK and I’m joining in! Here is a poem I wrote recently. All The Shiny Things Why do we wait along the damp street? The sirens wail while birds hover and people stop to stare. Our attempt is forlorn, our hope abandoned. Despair is our dress and sadness our…
Category
Art
Stefan Sagmeister on ‘talent’ and ‘graphic design’
Q: When did you realize you had design talent? A: I feel that talent is the implemented desire to excel at something. I had a strong desire to be good at design… Q: How would you define the term “graphic design”? A: Surely you must be joking. Smarter people have shot their little toe off…
The Rumors are True…
Yup, I’ve been taking bridge lessons. Wanna make somethin’ of it!?!
I Get Lost
When I say ‘I am a Christian’ I’m not shouting ‘I’m saved.’ I’m whispering ‘I get lost,’ That is why I chose this way… When I say… “I am a Christian” I’m not shouting “I’m clean livin’.” I’m whispering “I was lost, Now I ‘m found and forgiven.” When I say… “I am a Christian”…
The Man Who Loves Beautiful Things
Consider a man who loves beautiful things, who makes a point of being present at new tragedies, seeing new pictures, and hearing new music. Such a man is not a philosopher, because he loves only beautiful things, whereas the philosopher loves beauty in itself. The man who only loves beautiful things is dreaming, whereas the…
Food Not Bombs
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. –Martin Luther King Jr. www.foodnotbombs.net
Is Religion a ‘Virus of the Mind?’
[I]t seems I was wrong and the idea of religions as “viruses of the mind” may have had its day. … [U]nless we twist the concept of a “virus” to include something helpful and adaptive to its host as well as something harmful, it simply does not apply. … This is how science (unlike religion)…
Tolerating Tolerance
Tolerance costs me nothing. Loving others — seeking their good, willing their prosperity and happiness, genuinely desiring their companionship — this is the hazardous business of community, of relationship-building, of making and sustaining friendships for the long haul. Tolerance is all too happy to avoid all this. Tolerance turns out to be a means for…
The Pax Romana
As Klaus Wengst writes: “That Pilate had Jesus executed on the cross shows that the death of Jesus is indissolubly bound up with the political peace that there was at that time, the Pax Romana, produced and guaranteed by Roman power. In the view of the procurator this execution, like many others, was virtually an…