Category: education

• 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 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…
• May 9, 2011

  The puzzle of financial prosperity and spiritual cultivation

  My dad knows the price of just about everything. He can tell good deals from bad ones, whether we’re talking cars or mangoes, real estate or running shoes. He cuts coupons assiduously, reads the Sunday ads religiously, makes lists habitually, and then plots out plans of attack. He grew up in a working class family,…
• May 8, 2011

  Examination of conscience: 2nd day of spiritual exercise (1)

  I’m finding myself incredibly impatient this morning, so I need to explore my sense of impatience. I should begin with the nature of impatience. And then get on with some exercise. I feel impatient when my desire for something is deferred. Some kind of obstacle gets in the way. A simple example: Someone is visiting,…