Education, fundamentally, is about human flourishing, and in order for an education to succeed in engendering flourishing, it is necessary for it to reach the heart. It’s not enough to have a perfect grasp on Augustine, or to write a flawless essay on To Kill a Mockingbird. When I discover that the questions Augustine asks are my questions, or that Atticus Finch and I have something fundamental in common, human flourishing starts to happen.
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Hammurabi the Humane
While the ancient world was a world that may very well have been more violent than ours, the law codes of even the most ancient peoples (flawed though those laws were and as ours are) echo through the ages with a basic, humane instinct for justice, mercy and peace.
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Loving Your Neighbor: Liturgies in Pandemia
We are not “brains on a stick” but we instinctively seek out rituals that shape our loves – for better or for worse. At our worst, we gang up on each other and cut each other down. At our best, we give our lives for one another. It all depends on what liturgies we've been practicing.
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On Van Gogh, Swifts and Stones
a few waning-summer pieces that caught our interest
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Featured Artist: Tatiana Nikolova-Houston
Since 2008, Tatiana Nikolova-Houston has dedicated her life to re-creating and re-interpreting Byzantine and South Slavic iconography and manuscript illuminations as a ministry and mission to Western audiences. Sacred Illuminations grew out of her fascination with Slavic manuscripts, unique in their eclectic decorations inspired by Byzantine arts, Persian carpets, Bulgarian folk arts, and even Celtic designs. The illuminations reflect the joy of spirituality and provide a glimpse of the Heavenly reality, of the radiance of the Holy Spirit within everything in God’s Creation and the spiritual symbolism of Holy Scripture.
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Neither Modern nor Post-Modern: Newman on Certitude
Our reasoning might be user-relative, but truth is not itself relative. Our path to truth is only as subjects who seek it out from particular perspectives, but we must reject what C. S. Lewis later called “the poison of subjectivism” which posits that there are only perspectives and no full picture to which those perspectives attach.
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Ad Astra
Ultimately, Roy’s willingness to play the game and pursue the mission, comes from this recognition: that the personal has become inextricably entwined with the immense. There is no other way to be human than to engage with this confoundedly big thing.
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Scripture’s Knowing: A Companion to Biblical Epistemology (Book Recommendation)
That rituals are not expressions of our belief systems; rather they themselves are a way to think—a way to know, is one of Johnson’s core insights. Practicing rituals, Johnson thinks, is “embodied knowing” at its finest.
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Featured Artist: Trung Pham
How do we embrace our adversity, tragedy, trauma and find strength and courage during the time of challenges? How to gather strength during the challenging times also depends on the aesthetic vision, that is, how to find beauty in the woundedness.
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A Paper Thin Distance (Conversation)
On February 16th of this year, Daryl Davis, an African American blues musician who engages with members of the Ku Klux Klan, sat down with Christian Picciolini, the former leader of a white-supremacist skinhead group, for a conversation at the New York Encounter. Their gripping discussion offers profound insight and ultimately hope for this moment in our nation.
