Month: November 2011

• November 23, 2011

  On murmuring, education, and love

  The Ancients Versus the Moderns The question we ask of power has changed tremendously. For the ancients, the principal question was, “Who rules? Who is fit to rule? What makes someone a wise ruler?” Their assumption was that the wise ruler would (or could) do no harm. You can see in Plato’s fantasy of a…
• November 22, 2011

  On murmuring as a clue to the problem of authority

  In Chapter 40 of the Rule of Life, the guidebook that has served as a basis for Christian monastic life for the past 1500 years, St. Benedict discusses how much wine is to be apportioned to each member of the monastic community. Perhaps a “half-measure of wine every day should suffice,” he says, but then he…
• November 21, 2011

  Why we need good authority

  According to The Rule of Life of the Community of Jesus, the handbook of The Community of Jesus, an ecumenical Benedictine monastery located in Orleans, Mass., “Our common life is… sustained and directed through a mutually recognized order of governance, articulated in this Rule of Life and built upon the legitimate exercise of authority and the…
• November 19, 2011

  ‘We don’t need the big voice’

  Beware of the big voice. So writes Martin Amis in his New Yorker review of Don DeLillo’s recently released collection of short stories, The Angela Esmerelda: Nine Stories. In “Laureate of Terror: Don DeLillo’s Prophetic Soul,” Amis relates, [W]hen a twelve-year-old, Esmerelda, is raped and thrown off a roof, her image “miraculously” appears on a nearby “billboard…
• November 18, 2011

  Public lectures on philosophy as a way of life

  Peter Adamson, a professor of ancient philosophy at Kings College London, is in the midst of recording an extensive number of 20-25 minute lectures addressed to the generally educated person on the “history of philosophy without any gaps.” His lectures on Aristotle’s ethics are fine and lucid as are his talks on the Cynics and the Cyrenaics.…