The Body’s Authority
The age we live in has earned many nicknames. It’s been referred to as The Consumer Age, The Information Age and The Digital Age, among others. Philosopher Richard Kearney has...
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Radical Coherence
An opening preamble: • If the world were purely materialistic, then all of its processes would follow the cause-and-effect mechanics of forces acting on matter, and its final truth would...
The Fiction that Creates our Reality
Our culture’s idea of the human body has strayed so far from reality that it qualifies as a work of fiction. The effects of that fiction, alas, couldn’t be more...
Love and the Hidden Whole
The Cloud of Unknowing is a penetrating bit of writing by an unknown mediaeval mystic, composed to counsel a young student in his quest to seek God. The author warns...
Fantasy or Partnership?
Three little news items caught my eye over this past weekend. They were radically diverse in nature, but they sort of chimed together in my mind around a single theme....
To be wholly successful ...
What is the single most destructive influence in our society? There are so many stellar candidates out there – but in all honesty I’d be tempted to point the finger...
Divine Embodiment
In late June I went to England with my daughter for a two-week cycling trip. At the halfway mark we had lunch with Rowan Williams, recently retired as the Archbishop...
Foreground and Background
An experiment, which was provoked by an interesting study. People were shown paintings for a minute or so, and then were asked to describe what they saw. Participants in Western cultures...
The Companionship of the Present
The real challenge any of us faces isn’t a matter of figuring out how to live, or how to see the world, or how to think about life – although...
48 hours, and freedom of choice
We exercise choice all the time. Sometimes we exercise choices that we made decades ago, and which have persevered through the years by sheer habit. By contrast, freedom of choice...
The Danger or the Dance?
I’ve been thinking about the choices we make, and the ones we seem to deliberately avoid making, and how they shape everything we see when we look around us. Our...
On intimacy
It seems to me that the issue of being present is one that almost entirely depends on a willingness to permit intimacy. How intimately do you allow yourself to feel...