[Click here for part I]
We see the manifestations of Nietzsche’s pessimism in contrast with Dostoevsky’s optimism in their widely divergent views of love, compassion and pity.  Operating out of a hermeneutic of suspicion, Zarathustra views the Christian teaching of love thy neighbor as inauthentic-a mere mask for self-aggrandizement due to a lack of self-love.   In [...]

Both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche emphasize the importance of embodied life, of living fully in this world, and both issue stern warnings against living for the sake of abstract ideals or realms that may in fact have no connection with reality.  Of course the critiques of both authors, while sharing the similarities noted above, are wildly [...]

“That is my goal: time and timelessness are connected. This instant and eternity are struggling within us. And this is the cause of all our contradictions….”
Arvo Pärt
I absolutely love Arvo Pärt’s music.  In case you are unfamiliar with Pärt, below is a brief biography copied verbatim from this website.
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Born in Paide, Estonia in [...]

Foster Care Statistics
Over 513,000 American children are in foster care, taken away when their families are in crisis and can’t take care of them. But there aren’t enough foster families to take them in. There isn’t enough money to provide them the things every child needs. There aren’t enough people to help them, mentor them, [...]

[Part I, Part II]
Next I turn briefly to Prentice’s claim regarding the similarity of purpose in the Proslogion and the De primo principio.  Here Prentice states that both works have more or less the same goal, but the way they attempt to accomplish those goals are somewhat different.  Both works aim to articulate a clear, [...]

I realize that many of my good friends, Roman Catholic, Anglican, evangelical, and others will not understand why I have chosen to try to find common ground with our President-Elect Barack Obama given his views on Roe v. Wade.  Let me say very clearly that I disagree with Obama’s support of Roe v. Wade and [...]

We now turn to the distinctives of the De primo. As was the case with the Monologion and the Proslogion, the De primo may also be characterized as discursive, meditative, and reverent.  However, the discursive quality of the work is perhaps the dominant of the three, as we find long chains of intricately woven [...]