classics digests, reflections and reviews
XLI. On Divinity God is near you, he is with you, he is within you. This is what I mean, Lucilius : a holy spirit indwells within us. one who marks our good and bad deeds, and is our guardian. As we treat this spirit, so are we treated by it. Indeed, no man can be good without the help of God. Can one rise superior to fortune unless God […]
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II. On Discursive Reading Be careful, however, lest this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady. You must linger among a limited number of master- thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having […]
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All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, Some exit on their sick-bed, some on the battlefield, others, like Socrates and Thomas More, were executed by the state they had loved and served. Thomas More lived in late 15th and early 16th century Europe, in the time of the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. Peter Ackroyd’s sympathetic and […]
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Peace is Desired by All, but not For All If there is no man who does not wish to be joyful, neither is there any one who does not wish to have peace. For even they who make war desire nothing but victory,—desire, that is to say, to attain to peace with glory. … For even they who intentionally interrupt the peace in which they are living have no hatred […]
Read moreAnselm of Canterbury endeavours to prove by “plain reasoning and fact”, without resort to revelation, “as if nothing were known of Christ”, that it is necessary for the death of a God-man to save man from death so that he may enjoy eternal life. Justice, Dignity and Offense If, as Plato writes in Republic, justice is to give each his due, what is the just due creatures ought to give […]
Read moreAbuse of Names as a Herald of Tyranny The first ever political coup in the long ancient history of China was heralded by an incident in court involving abuse of names. According to the Records of the Grand Historian (史记), not long after Qin Er Shi, the youngest son of the First Emperor of Qin, succeeded the throne by killing his eldest brother, one of his scheming ministers, who helped […]
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The author of this book, Prof. Larry Hurtado, passed away on Nov. 25, 2019. When he was alive, I pestered the professor with many questions about New Testament studies. He was gracious enough to answer all these questions from a complete stranger, on one condition: I read his books. I finished this a week after his passing, partly to fulfill my promise and partly to pay tribute. Perhaps the best […]
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