Daily pages of reflection...for knowledge, understanding, to wisdom
Section of The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci Section of The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci

International Peace

November 6, 2018
Year 3, Day 310 | No Comments
Section of The Infant Jesus and St. John the Baptist, Guido Reni, n.d.

This is being written on the close of the 2012 Olympics in London, U.K, also known as Great Britain.  It has been an excellent Olympics XXX – of the modern age.  Today the American team in Basketball won the gold medal with a score of 107 to 101, playing the Spanish team.  The American team included Kevin Love from the Minneapolis professional team, and the Spanish included Mario Rubio from the same team.  (Both Olympic teams were manned by excellent players, some from professional teams in the sport.)   Rubio is a Spanish citizen, but did not play in the game while recovering from an injury.  He represented his country for the team.  The Olympics had nothing to do with either… Read more

Cavalier Children

November 5, 2018
Year 3, Day 309 | No Comments
Section of Sistine Chapel ceiling, Michaelangelo, 1508-1512

We do not manage embarrassment well, especially when the challenges appear against our most cherished idealistic contexts of life in matters we hold as pride factors.  These include family, national identity, personal image of self, religious orientation, and other areas of what might be termed sacred personal precincts to us, either as individuals or social groupings.  We commonly overly react; give them too much time; permit them more consideration than they deserve; and, allow them to guide us to some degree in our lives relating to self and others.  The fear of embarrassment may cost us some important experiences of our lives.  If vulnerable to the point we may permit our formations of others on a shallow basis.  I have… Read more

Sayings

November 4, 2018
Year 3, Day 308 | No Comments

Growing old requires education so to become tolerant of emerging generations.  Historically the gift of long life was seen as given of God for appropriate conduct, so to have some influence with God.  Aged persons were seen as important to a community for counsel, peace, problem solving and benediction.  The modernization of life with industrialization, national economies, changing family profiles and values, and a half dozen or so other influences, the aged have become somewhat superfluous.  They even become, for some analysts, a burden to be insulted for requiring maintenance resources.  I have read a number of these perceptions.  Only now and then are elders credited for the enormous infrastructure ceded to the future, to the improved order of things… Read more

Intentionality

November 3, 2018
Year 3, Day 307 | No Comments
Section of The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci

Virtually all substantive matters in our lives, personal or corporate with others, are complex, or vexing.  We are likely without all the information and facts needed to include, exclude, delay, amend, or incorporate factors into the context with which we are dealing.  The wise person goes along in what is believed, given acceptable evidence, with what seems most positive and beneficial to healthy mind, body, and future solutions.  This demands humility of the human being, which precludes a number of negatives, like anger, and introduces affirmatives like consideration, patience, and whatever is necessary for decision making in an imperfect world context.  Humility is the Christian answer to doubt.  This, and this, and this, I firmly believe, but not so sternly… Read more

Rise and Fall

November 2, 2018
Year 3, Day 306 | No Comments
Section of The Descent from the Cross, Rogier van der Weyden, c. 1435

We use language in various eras to accent or moderate ideas and actions, so adding-to or taking-from the context of interest relative to virtue or evil.  How far up do we perceive the good or how far down the evil?  Gibbon in his classic, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chose the word fall (evaluating firmly a social failure to a stern negative conclusion) in characterizing that history.  In generations long after Gibbon, Toynbee chose the words dead end to characterize the fall of even modern nations.  They were born, rise, flourish, decline and reach a dead end – perhaps like a box canyon with no dynamic future.  Both historians are saying the same thing,… Read more

Breaking the Mold

November 1, 2018
Year 3, Day 305 | No Comments
Section of Adoration of the Magi, artist unknown

There are problems in society that seem to be perpetual.  Some of them suggest that in standard societal life we do not really address main points that would change the profiles of mankind in society, both in personal and social life.  One of these contexts has been mentioned rather often in literature, but usually in passing, without much effort in addressing solutions, or in communicating the ways persons follow for life survival and functioning.  Just one short article in The Week (11/12/2012, pg. 23) will provide citation that can be replicated from other publications: …. If people with your surname in 1800 were members of the elite, you’re likely to be elite, too; if your family name was linked to… Read more

Satan and Angels

October 31, 2018
Year 3, Day 304 | No Comments
Section of Adoration of the Magi, artist unknown

The accents of Halloween, as practiced in America at the time of this writing, offers opportunity for me to accent the theology of Satan, both in his person and in his place in the cosmos.  Literature about Satan, the chief of devils and sometimes called a devil, seems not to have made great conscious impact upon the general society.  More than 90% respondents say they believe in God.  Less than 50 % say they believe in a person known as Satan or Devil.  The Devil, whose work seems so obvious to biblical Christians receives considerably less acknowledgment than God receives.  We may accept that persons who believe in an omnipotent God would not believe in a Satan, evil as Satan… Read more

Individuality

October 30, 2018
Year 3, Day 303 | No Comments
Section of The Crucifixion, Pedro Orrente, ca. 1625–30

Artists of the Western World have had on-again/off-again experience with Christianity.  The authors of great literature belong to the list as artists of language to elevated thought and conduct.  Some did give us art about the divine.  This is true for sacred music as in The Messiah by Handel, in Sculpture like David or The Pieta, in painting seen in the various renditions of Christ’s Crucifixion and other scenes.  I have a very striking copy of the Crucifixion as rendered by one of my nieces.  It is meaningful to me in that it represents an event highly meaningful to me, very well cast, and she is the author of a rendition with the implications of the event.  Not only is… Read more

History

October 29, 2018
Year 3, Day 302 | No Comments

A favored area for Christian apologists is history.  Christian theologians prefer a biblical logic which has its base in history and the nature of God.  These are, for strict scientists (holding nature’s boundaries for their methodology), too unwieldy to carry the point, for faith in God.  Spiritual conclusions do not emerge from controlled experiments.  If the presupposition holds that the scientific method only, working with the elements of nature, provide the exclusive way to truth then the person of faith and the person of controlled and strictly replicated study are passing each other in the night.  Both work with mystery, but the strict scientific person has an attractive benefit in the limitations of nature.  It is easier to unlock nature’s… Read more

Ordinary People

October 28, 2018
Year 3, Day 301 | No Comments

Published history doesn’t give us a balanced report about the ordinary folks of the generations – and these are the masses that live during any era.  We know most about the rich, powerful, educated and creative men and women.  We know a bit about the movement of armies, the destructive forces of civil life including great movements of nature, economics, and other massive influences like emigrations, but little how these and those families functioned.  Statistics are helping the story. Sometimes stories are made up, or reported in such a way that there occurs significant distortion in the reports and beliefs.  We talk, for example, about the Wild West.  The chances (statistics) of being murdered in New York City during the… Read more

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