What is one to do when emotional pain comes on strong and unexpected? Many people regularly experience a chaotic mixture of pain and pleasure, joy and despair, that makes them ask what the hell is going on? Why do I feel great one moment and completely blitzed by painful emotions the next, and for seemingly…
So many Christians want to increase their faith. And why wouldn’t they? It seems only natural. But have they never read when Christ nearly rebuked his disciples for asking him to increase their faith? It’s the passage where he tells them that faith the size of a mustard seed is enough (small faith is enough),…
The Cherokee have a rite of passage for their youth. Whether the rite is still practiced I have no idea, but I hope it is. Apparently a father takes his boy into the wilderness, blindfolds him, and has him sit alone on a stump. The boy is to remain on the stump throughout the night…
The loneliest one is not the one who knows he is alone in the world. To know one is alone is actually the beginning of emancipation, and has little in common with the dread hopelessness of being truly alone. Awareness of loneliness has the power to make one at home in the earth, to integrate…
I often find myself wishing I were living the savage life. I use savage in the old sense to mean pre-civilized man. The savage had many advantages that modern man will likely never have, or even conceive of. For example, the ability to see the full night sky. Modern lighting has made this spectacle nearly…
There is a “very specific quality that distinguishes [man from animal],” says Rousseau, “about which there can be no argument: the faculty of self-perfection.” A horse never strains to be a horse but every man strains to become something other than what he is. And while every person is in pursuit of perfection they never…
Nihilism is a tricky mode of existence. How does one continue existing, in an existence one finds thoroughly meaningless, when one’s very being demands love and relationship with others to survive? Dostoevsky has a scene in the Brother’s Karamazov where a man, an elder of an Orthodox monastery, explains how the more he “loves humanity…
In political discourse (if such a thing still exists) one often hears various religious groups claim that atheism is just another religion and therefore the removal of God from the public square is the same as instituting yet another religion, atheism. Though I understand this sentiment, the fact is atheism is anything but a religion.…
“The present contains nothing but the past,” says the great Henri Bergson, “and what is found in the effect was already present in the cause.” Is this true of the human psyche? Is our present state of mind merely an aggregate of our total experiences and affects from birth to the present? It may be…
George Kelly defined guilt as: “A perception of one’s apparent dislodgement from his core role structure.” This “core role” develops out of our relationships with significant others whom we construe ourselves in certain ways: loving, responsible, secure, etc. It seems to follow that any religious paradigm which casts human beings as essentially good makes guilt…
Depression is a problem of courage (Adler). It is a condition in people who are afraid of life, who have given up independent development and have been totally immersed in the acts and aid of others (Becker). They’ve lived lives of “systematic self-restraint”; a life that can be described as a series of silent retreats…
Aristotle in The Art of Rhetoric analyzes the most important subjects of deliberative oratory (one of his three genres of rhetorical speech). He narrows deliberation to five main categories: revenue, war and peace, the defense of the realm, imports and exports, and legislation. Not a thrilling list at first glance, but reading through the…
