A law of the universe, as true as any other: “If I make this face, you have to scratch my head.”
Somebody wants to be friends
Highfalutin fido
Finished Reading (2023): Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth by Jennifer Banks 📚
An excellent biographical-philosophical flyover and a much needed spark to shift our thinking. There’s definitely room for her “Philosophy of Birth” to grow.
Each person, in simply being born, creates an opportunity for history to begin again. … We are more than history’s byproducts; we are instead creative participants in history, nature, and time. A human is born a tiny, infinitesimal piece of some massive whole, but that macrocosm is not impervious to the smallness of our individual births.
Marilynne Robinson:
It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light. … Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.
Simple things
Mornings are the best
Pioneer Falls
Finished Reading: Neither Beast Nor God: The Dignity of the Human Person by Gilbert Meilaender 📚
Thoughtfulness is an understatement when it comes to Meilaender. In each of his books, I always appreciate his nonrelativist, both-and approach.
Thinking seriously about human dignity should compel us to ask whether freedom and consent are really all we ought to care about—to ask whether being human means nothing more than the freedom to shape and reshape ourselves, or whether it also means honoring the embodied character of our life and affirming some of its limits.