Sublime

My upbringing in a three-generation family made me an unconscious Confucianist. It seeps into you, the Confucianist belief that society works best where every man aims to be a gentleman. The ideal is a junzi, a gentleman…That means he does not do evil, he tries to do good, he is loyal to his father and mother, faithful to his wife, brings up his ch

Briefly Carleton considered the other man, of whom he’d made such a study he might have been appointed professor of Thomas Studies at the University of Essex. He knew, for example, that Thomas was a confirmed bachelor, as they say, never seen in the company of a beautiful young person or a stately older one; that he had about him the melancholy rel

secular humanist liberal thinking.

The man I came to know well, over burgers and coffee and old photos and worn bible pages, was a man childlike and growing to the end, proof that the “good news” he always preached could be lived for a lifetime and remain good. His faith and life’s accomplishments did not produce a dour moralism. It did not produce a Graceland-sized ego. For all his

the life story of Thomas More, scholar, philosopher, writer, and advisor to Henry VIII, who was then beheaded by the king, has been well compared to that of Seneca. 13 Seneca as a historical character (rather than as a writer or philosopher) often did come across rather badly in early modern literature and drama