“He bent over all that groaned… the universe appeared to him an immense malady; he felt fever everywhere; he heard the sound of suffering all around him; and without trying to solve the enigma, he sought to heal the wound.” I read these words, again and again, year after year, wondering what they mean, wondering...
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“Workers of the world unite— all you have to lose are your chains!” The terrible irony of Marx’s challenge to the 19th-century is that wherever his revolution went, workers were in fact chained in. The Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist vision of human being in the world was the cause of untold sorrow for millions upon millions of people...
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Shadow and light. Watching the mysterious interplay between the sky and the grass, the trees and the flowers, I found myself thinking about the way shadow and light makes its way through life for every one of us. We live amidst both glories and ruins, all day long having to make sense of the very...
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“The devil laughs because God’s world seems senseless to him; the angels laugh with joy because everything in God’s world has its meaning.” When I first read those words, I was struck by their hard-won wisdom. Milan Kundera, one of the great novelists of the 20th-century, wrote about the challenge of being human in the...
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Most of life is pretty autobiographical. What we think about, what we do, where we live, why we care about some things and not others, and on and on; in thousands upon thousands of ways what we think and say and do grows out of who we are. This is as true for me as...
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