“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
Democracies do evil, directly, with malice aforethought, as the US did with slavery and the destruction of Native Americans and Jim Crow, or as a byproduct of terrible policies as we did in Vietnam and Iraq. However, healthy democracies have the moral and legal amplitude for reflection, correction and sometimes even redemption. We are no longer a healthy democracy and have not been so for some time. Now, as I […]
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The Greeks’ gods were never meant as representations of goodness and were uniformly pretty awful moral avatars – petty, often pitiless, given to jealousies. Zeus came into a universe already created, so not all powerful either. The Greeks never had a Devil, only monsters – Medusa, Cerberus, the Minotaur. The Christian conception of the moral universe and of God is fundamentally different. First, it is monotheistic. Mary and the Saints […]
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For the Greeks of the great age of Athens (5th and 4th centuries BCE), one traveled the country from house to house, not from inn to inn. Hospitality to strangers (xenia) was an expectation. This at a time when homes were the only sanctuary from the lawlessness of the open road. A host was expected to provide food, drink, and a safe haven, even to strangers – actually, especially to […]
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I do not read literature for answers. They sometimes appear: In all its absurdity and darkness, Godot still helps me see more clearly the value of friendship; Moby Dick, what a personal fanaticism can wreak; Macbeth, how political murder leads on to more murders; Ulysses, that love is always imperfect, complex, replete with contradictions. Such revelations are extras. I read for the questions, especially those so mysterious that definitive answers […]
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