Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Although the social structures in the contemporary world are less rigid than in ancient cultures, there are still many pre-established functions or roles that people readily identify with and which thus become part of the ego. This causes human interactions to become inauthentic, dehumanized, alienating. Those pre-established roles may give you a somewhat comforting sense…
“Then, having overcome this awkwardness, they [Jesus and friends] are confronted with another: a man ‘possessed’ by a demon, chained and living among the tombs, to represent both his affinity with death and his uncleaness. But nothing had the power to restrain him. And he speaks, or rather the spirit within him speaks: ‘My…
“By studying records of Scottish soldiers, he [Adolphe Quetelet] was able to make averages of height, weight, and so forth to understand and predict the nature of the typical Scotsman. Based on this, Quetlet argued that the concept of the average man would be helpful for understanding the ‘normal state’ of health. This is perhaps…
More and more teachers and college professors seem to be worried about the decline of reading habits in young people, and I tend to agree with Dr. Bridgeman (the Dean and VP of Academic Affairs at Methodist Theological Seminary) here about it being a serious problem. Being the father to a tail-end-of-Gen Z middle schooler,…
“When we say that habit is a contraction we are speaking not of instantaneous action which combines with another to form an element of repetition, but rather of the fusion of that repetition in the contemplating mind. A soul must be attributed to the heart, to the muscles, nerves and cells, but a contemplative soul…
“Nobody is spared from the logic of a mode of production built on exploitation. As Lacan put it, capitalism is the discourse or algorithm in which, instead of communicating to another person as a person, we are forced to negotiate through cloudy signifiers. We are workers relating to other workers in an environment mediated by…
”In a broad sense, the Old Testament [sic] can be read as the story of empire, and the inevitable corrupting harms that royal, religious power does to people. In this schema, the New Testament is God’s denouement: the most godly thing God can do is to become human and to die. In the Mass, in…
“Emmanuel Daniel (ED): Now, how would you apply your book, when you open the newspaper in the morning, and you read some of these issues coming out? What would you like to see China do? What would you like to see the West do? It shouldn’t be just capitulating that China owns the South China…
It has become a habit of mine over the years to make gifts for friends and family for Christmas, and this year my spouse, Erin, and I wrote, designed, illustrated, and produced home made Christmas chapbooks. This was a wonderful process! I thoroughly enjoyed writing the story and, astonishingly, the writing part came together rather…
“Notably, tech giants today are able to wield the law against interoperators: new technologies that plug into their services, systems and platforms. That’s a privilege that none of yesterday’s easily toppled tech giants had—if IBM wanted to prevent its competitors (the “seven dwarfs” of the mainframe era) from making software, printers, keyboards and storage for…