All Things Shining

But moments like this take on greater meaning when they are shared with a community of like-minded folks who are experiencing the same kind of awe. Whether it is in the church or in the baseball stadium, the awesomeness of the moment is reinforced when it is felt as shared by others. When it is also shared that it is shared—when you all recognize t

49 Fifty years ago, for example, Henry A. Murray claimed that “Melville’s Satan is the spitting image of Milton’s hero . . . the stricken, passionate, indignant, and often eloquent rebel angel of Paradise Lost, whose role is played by Ahab.”50 On such an interpretation Melville’s Moby Dick takes the place of Milton’s God, and Ahab’s prideful, passi

The multiple meanings of the universe simply don’t add up to a single, universal truth. Our only hope is to engage in each of them fully, live contentedly in the truths they reveal, but feel no urge to reconcile them to one another. The image for this kind of plural polytheism is neither the deafening chaos of white noise nor the dumb blankness of

These are not questions you can answer in the abstract. You need to try it out and see. If it is the warmth of the coffee on a winter’s day that you like, then drinking it in a cozy corner of the house, perhaps by a fire with a blanket, in a cup that transmits the warmth to your hands might well help to bring out the best in this ritual. If it is t

Dante has a different, Christian, view. All love is good in Dante’s view as long as it is directed toward an appropriate object in an appropriate way. He counters Virgil’s Stoic view that free will should curb love with the Christian view that free will should direct love. Dante thinks that you should intensify your love and be committed to whateve

It is here that Dante inadvertently shows us that the Greek metaphysics Aquinas is working with undermines the agape love we saw in the early Christianity of John and Paul. On the early Christian model one lives in the world with Jesus in you, and that means you live in the mood of joy not bliss, a mood that guides you to definite and directed acti

Apparently, in Augustine’s time everyone read aloud. That St. Ambrose had direct access to the meaning of the text showed that the inner was not merely the locus of desires but could be a storehouse of experiences of the truth. What was new for Augustine—not found in Plato’s philosophy nor in Jesus’ contagious love—was that the saving truth was acc

Because the Greeks understood human excellence in terms of being open to divine moods, and because these moods are transient, there is no motivation in Greek existence to reconcile the meanings that the various gods illuminate. This polytheistic plurality of incommensurate gods makes sense of Helen’s ability to move seamlessly between her domestic

The central challenge of the contemporary world, Wallace seems to think, is not just that we don’t know how to live meaningful lives; it’s that we don’t even seem to be able to focus for very long on the question.