On Overcoming Small Obstacles
One of the few macro lessons of life, or macro skills, that I have only gradually acquired is the ability to not allow small obstacles to stand in my way. Believe it or not, this is not a small thing. What I’ve discovered in life is that many great and wonderful projects can be derailed, not by large obstacles but by tiny, insignificant, often ridiculous ones. What we have to develop, and as early as possible, is the habit of forcing ourselves to overcome these ridiculous obstacles. The big obstacles are hard enough, but we often have help with those; ...
Debating the New Atheists, Part 2
Around 2008, after my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible came out, I was asked to fly to Ireland to participate in a debate on the existence of God at University College Cork. I had been doing radio interviews for my book and was very comfortable discussing some of the sillier arguments atheists use to attack Christianity or the Bible – for example, that the Bible is full of scientific “errors” and therefore is obviously complete nonsense. Attacks such as these are basic category errors – a comparison of apples and oranges – that are easily refuted. But despite ...
The Power of Habits to Transform Your Life
One of my favorite gurus is a fairly recent one: Leo Babauta, the young founder of the Zen Habits website and the author of numerous books on simple living, getting things done and living a mindful life. I discovered Leo about a year after he launched his website in 2007, and I was hooked. He is an odd combination of classical western wisdom (Aristotle for Pete’s sake!) and contemporary, web-savvy modern living. The father of six kids and a born again vegan from the U.S. protectorate of Guan, in the South Pacific, Leo is a former journalist who embraced the ...
Why We Need Both Orthodoxy and Spiritual Cosmopolitanism
[gallery] The photo above is of the main Bahai Temple in Haifa, Israel, one of the most beautiful religious structures in the world. It shines like a beacon on Mt. Carmel, a veritable symbol of spiritual cosmopolitanism and religious tolerance. I visited the Bahai Temple many times when I lived in Israel. It just looms above Haifa. I thought of all this when my son and I visited a Bahai community that just happens to be located less a mile from our house in our little seaside village. He had to visit a house of worship different from his own, for ...
Why Parents Drag Their Kids to Church, Temple or Their Zen Sitting Group
Here’s what sucks about life: You wake up in your crib, confused and more than a little dazed, and then spend the next 20 or 30 years trying to figure out what to do with yourself. You mostly do what you’re told. You learn how to read, play sports, try to attract members of the opposite sex. In your 20s, you look for some kind of job – and maybe decide to settle down, get married and have kids. But life, as they say, doesn’t exactly come with an operating manual – whatever people may say about the Bible or other ...
Finding a Balance Between Work and Leisure
I’ve been fortunate, over the years, because I have discovered a number of gurus who have cautioned me about indulging a monomaniacal commitment to work at all costs – especially when it involves a neglect of what really matters in life, such as anniversaries, soccer games and swim meets, school plays, sex in the afternoon, History Day competitions, Rock for Peace concerts, picnics, days at the beach, swimming, Aikido seminars, reading, Mass, vacations, skiing and lots more. These gurus include personal heroes such as the English Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton... the 1930s Chinese writer and philosopher Lin Yutan... and, more recently, ...
How to Be Happy in Life
There are many different ways of life, of course, and each person has to choose the way that fits his or her personality and intuitions about what life is all about and how to be happy. There is the way of the adventurer. The way of the businessman. The way of the scholar or priest. There is the way of the artist or mystic. There is even Gurdjieff’s Way of the Sly Man, the secret mystic who lives like an ordinary business man. But because I studied Aristotle at a young age, I’ve always ...
Can a Faithful Catholic be a Democrat, Republican or Green?
What’s a peaceful, freedom-loving, family-oriented, hard-working Catholic guy to do with the current state of U.S. politics? For decades, now, it’s been obvious that even a moderately faithful Catholic cannot feel at home in any of the major, or even the minor, U.S. political parties. We are given the choice between an increasingly militaristic, even bellicose Republican Party that goes out of its way to sneer at civil liberties and enthusiastically endorses torture, illegal surveillance of ordinary citizens and the death penalty… and the morally tone-deaf party of slavery (both literally and figuratively), the Democrats, who have never seen an ...
How I Saw the Loch Ness Monster
I never really expected to actually see the Loch Ness Monster. As a result, when I looked through the tour boat window out at the frigid waters of the loch and happened to spot “Nessie” cruising alongside with a little monster in tow, it was a startling moment. What made it more amazing was that I was gazing at the time at the radar scanner that the boat has in its main cabin. As it moves up and down the loch, this boat, and the other boats as well, are constantly scanning every nook and cranny of this 23-mile-long inland lake ...
Rob Bell Asks the Big Questions Ignored by Many Churches
What I love most about Rob Bell’s controversial book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (HarperOne, 2011), is the way it has triggered a new debate about what is really at stake in Christianity. The odd thing about Christianity, at least in the United States, is that tens, even hundreds of millions of its adherents can’t really articulate its core beliefs beyond the most superficial, kindergarten level. That is not a snobbish slam on Americans but simply a fact of life. Like most religions (with the possible exception of Buddhism), Christianity is not ...
The Eternal City
I took my whole family to Rome this year for Easter... and, as usual, it was an invigorating, life-affirming, faith-building experience for everyone. Rome has a way of doing that to people. I’ve been to many of the great cities of the world – from New York, London and Paris to Berlin, Athens, Cairo and Jerusalem – and none has the mystical quality to it as Rome does. My wife agrees. Paris is beautiful... Berlin is majestic... but Rome is truly magical. Perhaps it’s the warm, spring weather, the bright blue sky that lights up ...
The Nature of Existence
For a beach philosophizer like myself, it doesn't get much better than "The Nature of Existence," the quirky little documentary on the Meaning of Life that is opening this weekend. Filmmaker Roger Nygard wrote down the 85 toughest questions he could think of about the meaning of life -- and then set out with a camera crew to ask them of such luminaries as Indian holy man Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (The Art of Living), professional atheist polemicist Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), 24th generation Chinese Taoist Master Zhang Chengda, Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind (co-discoverer of string theory), wrestler Rob ...
Working at the Beach
It's true: There is a strange tribe of people, myself included, who can and sometimes even do work at the beach. It's mostly writers, true, but freelance professionals of many stripes can make it work. It helps to have a good smart phone... a sand-resistant laptop with a bright screen... and access to a flat space to set up shop. One of the beaches near my house has these great concrete picnic tables and a small burger cafe nearby that keeps me supplied with french fries and coffee. Bloomberg BusinessWeek just ran an article about people like ...
My First Decade of Aikido
My knees are a bloody mess. It’s been a while since I did suwari-waza, the strange practice in traditional Aikido dojos of doing techniques, samurai-style, on your knees. Last week, the sensei spent almost the entire class doing suwari-waza and, when I stood up, the skin on my knees was entirely rubbed off. Ouch! And yet here it is, the following week, and I am showing up again. I took up Aikido ten years ago, at the ripe old age of forty, and have been struggling to learn it ever since. The kids wanted to take a martial art and I thought ...
Why Blogging is the Perfect Business
There aren't too many businesses you can run while sitting at the beach... but a successful blogging-based business is one of them! Of course, what people don't tell you is that before you can sit on the sand and update your blog from anywhere in the world... you probably spent 60 hours a week in a windowless room getting your blog to do the things you want it to. But the truth is, blogging is an entirely Internet-based business. That means that it is geographically independent. You can run your blogging business from anywhere in the world that has wireless Internet ...
Thriving Long-Term Marriages
The break-up of Al and Tipper Gore's 40-year marriage is sparking a soul-searching among many long-time married couples. The Wall Street Journal today had an interesting article about the shifting marriage patterns among couples who have been married 30, 40 years or more. It turns out the Gores are typical of the baby boom generation: Whatever the Gores' issues—he's 62, she's 61—they are part of a new normal that began with their generation, according to Census statistics. Of the 8.1 million women who were married between 1970 and 1974, just over half made it to their 30th ...
The Earthy Mysticism of William McNamara
In the late 1970s, while studying philosophy in college, I discovered the “earthy mysticism” of William McNamara. For more than 30 years, it has remained the dominant spiritual influence of my life and is partly the reason I remain, despite everything, a committed follower of Christ and a stubborn (if not very pious) Catholic. A charismatic retreat master and former Carmelite friar, McNamara espouses a gritty, life-affirming, no-nonsense approach to Christian spirituality that is unique and, to me, exhilarating. Despite having encountered over the years a wide assortment of gurus and spiritual teachers from many different religious traditions, I have never ...
Sex and John Paul II’s Theology of the Body
According to rabbinic tradition, the first commandment God gives Adam and Eve in the Garden is to have sex: Pru vehravu, "be fruitful and multiply." It's little wonder, then, that Christian theology has pondered for centuries the place that human sexuality and bodily existence have in God's plan for the universe. On the one hand, anyone familiar with the Jewish testament knows that sexual attraction (and sexual sin) permeate virtually every book. What's more, two centuries of crusading secularism has exaggerated Christian pruddery in the early centuries of Christianity and in the Middle Ages. On the other hand, it's also true that the ...
Yoga is Good for the Soul
Like many Christians who practice yoga occasionally, or would like to more often, I am hardly a purist. You could even call me a “cafeteria yogi.” I pick and choose among the various yoga practices that fit my overall lifestyle, level of fitness and religious beliefs. Fortunately, at every single yoga school where I have studied, without exception, the other students are exactly the same. They are typical Canadian and American suburban professional types: harried moms, latte-swilling office workers, students, retired folk. The music is funky New Age chanting music, which, quite frankly, I find very relaxing and enjoy immensely (just ...
Jesus in Ancient China
It's an amazing story, one only now being told. More than 1,300 years ago, a Persian Christian monk named Aleben traveled 3,000 miles along the ancient caravan route known as the Silk Road all the way to China, carrying precious copies of the New Testament writings (probably in Syriac). Aleben and his fellow Christian monks stopped in the Chinese city of Chang-au (Xian), where, under the protection of the Tang Dynasty Emperor Taizong, he founded a CHristian monastery and began the arduous task of translating the Christian texts into Chinese. It was the year A.D. 635. ...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and a Return to Eden
I just finished reading Leo Damrosch's magisterial 2005 biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius) and I've been thinking a lot about how Rousseau's vision ties in, or doesn't tie in, with the problems of modern urban society. (Full disclosure: My wife hates Rousseau because he forced his lifelong mistress, Therese Levasseur, to give up their five children to foundling homes and then had the temerity to instruct women on why they should breastfeed their children and raise them according to his precepts.) Rousseau, born in Switzerland in 1712, was basically a professional vagabond and loafer who ...
A Routine Near-Death Experience… and a Rumor of Angels
Two days ago, I was almost killed in an instant. I had one of those experiences that shake you to your very core – and which, to me, constitute some sort of proof of divine providence. It was a very ordinary day. I drove my son to the beach train for his daily trip up the coast to high school. My wife had given me some money and asked me to stop at the store to pick up some sour cream. We were having chicken fajitas for dinner, and one of my kids like sour cream on them. I pulled into the ...
The Freelance Life
Can a Faithful Catholic be a Democrat, Republican or Green?
What’s a peaceful, freedom-loving, family-oriented, hard-working Catholic guy...
How I Saw the Loch Ness Monster
I never really expected to actually see the Loch Ness Monster. As a result, when...
My First Decade of Aikido
My knees are a bloody mess. It’s been a while since I did suwari-waza, the strange...
Read More Posts From This CategoryPhilosophy
Today’s Golden Age of Philosophy
Few people know this, but our age is an amazing time for people who love philosophy. When...
Debating the New Atheists, Part 2
Around 2008, after my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible came out,...
Winter is Coming
Fans of Game of Thrones, the blockbuster fantasy novels and now an HBO-TV series,...
Read More Posts From This CategoryA Closer Look
Can a Faithful Catholic be a Democrat, Republican or Green?
What’s a peaceful, freedom-loving, family-oriented, hard-working Catholic guy to do with the current state of U.S. politics? For decades, now, it’s been obvious that even a moderately faithful Catholic cannot feel at home in any of the major, or even the minor, U.S. political parties. We are given... [Read more of this post]
How I Saw the Loch Ness Monster
I never really expected to actually see the Loch Ness Monster. As a result, when I looked through the tour boat window out at the frigid waters of the loch and happened to spot “Nessie” cruising alongside with a little monster in tow, it was a startling moment. What made it more amazing was that... [Read more of this post]
My First Decade of Aikido
My knees are a bloody mess. It’s been a while since I did suwari-waza, the strange practice in traditional Aikido dojos of doing techniques, samurai-style, on your knees. Last week, the sensei spent almost the entire class doing suwari-waza and, when I stood up, the skin on my knees was entirely rubbed... [Read more of this post]
Today’s Golden Age of Philosophy
Few people know this, but our age is an amazing time for people who love philosophy. When I was in college 30 years ago, philosophy was strictly an academic exercise and there were few resources available for people, like me, who view philosophy more as a way of life or avocation than as a job. Today,... [Read more of this post]
Debating the New Atheists, Part 2
Around 2008, after my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible came out, I was asked to fly to Ireland to participate in a debate on the existence of God at University College Cork. I had been doing radio interviews for my book and was very comfortable discussing some of the sillier arguments... [Read more of this post]
Winter is Coming
Fans of Game of Thrones, the blockbuster fantasy novels and now an HBO-TV series, will recognize “Winter is Coming” as the motto of the House of Stark, the noble family who rules over the cold northern regions of the seven kingdoms in the mythical land of Westeros. For some time now, I’ve been... [Read more of this post]
Why We Should Be Skeptical of Media “Fact Checkers”
#gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } When... [Read more of this post]
Rob Bell Asks the Big Questions Ignored by Many Churches
What I love most about Rob Bell’s controversial book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (HarperOne, 2011), is the way it has triggered a new debate about what is really at stake in Christianity. The odd thing about Christianity, at least in the United... [Read more of this post]
Evolution, Creation and Adam & Eve, Part 1
The debate over Evolution, Creation and Adam and Eve is one of my least favorite topics. That’s because I’ve accepted the theory of evolution ever since fourth grade, when it was first explained to me in science class by a Dominican nun. As a result, debating evolution feels a lot like... [Read more of this post]
New Mass Translations A Bit Awkward and Therefore Beneficial
The entire English-speaking Catholic world a year ago began the painful process of adjusting to new translations of the Mass. And the verdict is in: While ordinary people in the pews tolerate or even like them… many professional church folk, including the clergy, dislike them. Some dislike them... [Read more of this post]
The Power of Habits to Transform Your Life
One of my favorite gurus is a fairly recent one: Leo Babauta, the young founder of the Zen Habits website and the author of numerous books on simple living, getting things done and living a mindful life. I discovered Leo about a year after he launched his website in 2007, and I was hooked. He is an... [Read more of this post]
Why We Need Both Orthodoxy and Spiritual Cosmopolitanism
#gallery-2 { margin: auto; } #gallery-2 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-2 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-2 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } The... [Read more of this post]
Finding a Balance Between Work and Leisure
I’ve been fortunate, over the years, because I have discovered a number of gurus who have cautioned me about indulging a monomaniacal commitment to work at all costs – especially when it involves a neglect of what really matters in life, such as anniversaries, soccer games and swim meets, school... [Read more of this post]
Why Parents Drag Their Kids to Church, Temple or Their Zen Sitting Group
Here’s what sucks about life: You wake up in your crib, confused and more than a little dazed, and then spend the next 20 or 30 years trying to figure out what to do with yourself. You mostly do what you’re told. You learn how to read, play sports, try to attract members of the opposite sex. In... [Read more of this post]
Catholic Yoga: Confession and the Lost Art of Spiritual Gastroenterology
Like most postmodern Catholics of a certain age, I hate going to Confession – really and truly dislike it. It’s worse than going to the dentist or the gastroenterologist. Like the gastroenterologist or dentist, confession is inherently embarrassing. It probes for decay and disease and often finds... [Read more of this post]
How to Muddle Through in Life
In the end, life is about muddling through as best you can. Most self-help books (and I read a lot of them) will advise you to find your “life’s purpose and passion,” but that’s like telling you the secret to success in business is to found a good company and make lots of money. The devil is... [Read more of this post]
A Routine Near-Death Experience… and a Rumor of Angels
Two days ago, I was almost killed in an instant. I had one of those experiences that shake you to your very core – and which, to me, constitute some sort of proof of divine providence. It was a very ordinary day. I drove my son to the beach train for his daily trip up the coast to high school. My... [Read more of this post]
How to Be Happy in Life
There are many different ways of life, of course, and each person has to choose the way that fits his or her personality and intuitions about what life is all about and how to be happy. There is the way of the adventurer. The way of the businessman. The way of the scholar or priest. There is the... [Read more of this post]
None of the Above
The word “politics” is derived from the word “poly,” meaning “many,” and the word “ticks,” meaning “blood sucking parasites.” – Larry Hardiman The world needs a political and economic alternative. The obsolete ideas and ideals of Big Government collectivism … and the equally... [Read more of this post]
Why Newt Gingrich is a False Messiah
Like most people who enjoy frank and intelligent conversation, I like Newt Gingrich. He is smart, knowledgeable, intelligent to a fault, every bit the history professor he once was. I first saw him, more than 18 years ago, at a gathering of conservative activists in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington.... [Read more of this post]
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