Something Special

"I further know that if God has something special for you, you have a knowledge of it inside you, which causes you not to be satisfied with anything that is not that thing."

-- Leonard Cheshire

Three Mysteries

CREATION, EVIL, TIME ~ three mysteries, about which it is only possible, in the last analysis, to say that they are somehow interconnected, and that their relationship to the greater mystery of divine Reality is one of limitation.
-- Aldus Huxley

The Function of Poetry

"'What is the use or function of poetry nowadays?' is a question not the less poignant for being defiandy asked by so many stupid people or apologetically answered by so many silly people. The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites. But 'nowadays'? Function and use remain the same; only the application has changed. This was once a warning to man that he must keep in harmony with the family of living creatures among which he was born, by obedience to the wishes of the lady of the house; it is now a reminder that he has disregarded the warning, turned the house upside down by capricious experiments in philosophy, science and industry, and brought ruin on himself and his family."

Robert Graves

A Universal Corrosive

"I can think of lots of reasons why The Closing of the American Mind deserves as many readers as it earned in the eighties; Bloom’s sly wit and the torrential energy of his prose are worth the price of admission, in my opinion. But this one carries a special urgency. As well as anyone then or now, he understood that the intellectual fashion of materialism​—​of explaining all life, human or animal, mental or otherwise, by means of physical processes alone​—​had led inescapably to a doctrinaire relativism that would prove to be a universal corrosive."

Andrew Ferguson, The Weekly Standard, Apr 9, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 29

The Souls in Plato's Cave

"Like the souls in Plato's cave, we ourselves cast the shadows that make us aware of our existence, and at the same time block the light that is the source of our existence."
N.N. Scott, in conversation, 2004

Competing for the Same Space

The atheistic cosmology is only the extreme state of the religious belief that the creator of the universe is separate, a thing we supplicate at a distance. These two viewpoints prompt such contention because they are both on the same side of the equation, and competing for the same mental space.