In connection to my current study on desire, my interests have spread into the philosophies concerning food, humor, and horror. Thus far, I have only had time to do a moderate amount of reading on food, a nearly worthless bit on humor, and a more serious amount on desire in the broadest sense. Bataille is [...]
Tags: Bataille, Death, Desire, fear, Horror, taboo, transgression
My readings this week on desire delved into the relationship of desire to language and poetry, which have been recent fascinations of mine due to my studies of Paul Ricoeur. In poetry, or metaphor, there is an inherent excess of meaning through which language develops or gains new meanings. In a metaphor, or poetry, one [...]
The strangest thing happened today. I heard the name of the great feminist theologian Mary Daly for the first time, googled her, and discovered that she had just died. There’s something sad about the timing of that sequence. Anyway, I think I’ll read something by her in the near future, in memory of our new [...]
Tags: acquaintance, feminist theologian, levi strauss, mary daly, memory
One of the more interesting portions of my day involved contemplating the cultural effects of the Black Death on 14th century Europe. People got religion: flagellants took the burden of repentance upon themselves for the whole society, peasants took up prayer as lifeline rather than pastime or social custom. Art became full of memento mori: [...]
Tags: 14th century europe, black death, bocaccio, canterbury tales, chaucer, decameron, intellectual heritage, memento mori, Repentance, self centeredness, skeletons, story cycles, tombstones
We Protestants enjoy asserting the ordinariness of Mary (the mother of Jesus), her humanity, the sinfulness we assume to be her natural portion. Riding on the (diminishing but powerful) tide of Reformation politics, we mostly avoid meditating on the person of Mary as distinct from other people, instead preferring to meditate upon her as similar [...]
Tags: baby jesus, Body of Christ, christ on the cross, confrontation, elders, election, expectation, Gabriel, god, Israel, Jesus, jesus in the temple, Mary, mary the mother of jesus, messiah, night, parental perspective, prophecies, prophecy, protestants, reformation, simeon, stumbling block, Value
I concluded the last essay by suggesting that everyone should take time out to ask themselves why they get up in the morning. Clearly this question only had tangential relevance to my main thesis in that essay, which had to do with Marcus Aurelius’s exemplary clarity in setting up an objective or ideal pattern for [...]
Tags: Death, divine providence, epicureans, marcus aurelius, material universe, meditations, moral agent, moral behavior, moral reasoning, moral vision, self analysis, stoic
