Month: May 2011

• May 14, 2011

  Go down, sweet Moses… On the spiritual exercise of letting go

  Go down, sweet Moses, / Your burdens are weighing you down. You’ve borne enmity like a slave: / your past days suppliant, your diurnal turns craven, your Amens bleating, / stern, and uncowed. For how now, gentle Moses? / You, who were offered one sturdy plank, / yet held fast to the rotten. / You, to whom love flowed like spring,…
• May 13, 2011

  Examination of conscience: On humility and compassion: Second day of spiritual exercise (2)

  There are times when a problem stops you in your tracks. Mine has been determining how much reality to let in. 1 To live well, we must be grounded in a lived reality. By “a lived reality,” I mean a net of ownmost desires and values that are connected to an external world. Take one…
• May 12, 2011

  Hume’s philosophy of life

  In “A Philosopher in Love,” the historian Robert Zaretsky focuses on Hume’s art of living, attending to lived ideas rather than ideas detached from the rhythms of life.
• May 11, 2011

  Childhood as spiritual exercise: Peter in The Snowy Day

  I don’t know what led me to the local library to stand in the middle of the kids’ section, to look down at my running shoes and around me at the little tables, and, standing there not unself-consciously to  read Ezra Jack Keat’s The Snowy Day. It may be that the idea of home has…
• May 10, 2011

  Poussin’s spiritual exercise

  I am reading John Armstrong’s inestimable In Search of Civilization. I am reading it slowly. On page 123, Armstrong observes, It is said of Poussin–one of the most thoughtful of painters–that he owned only nineteen books. Of course this was in the early seventeenth century–an era when personal libraries were much smaller than today and…