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Having spent most of my childhood just a few miles from Cheddar in Somerset, from which that type of cheese originated; I was until recently unaware of one of the most crass instances of Big Government socialism I have encountered.

During World War II, the heavy boot of central ...

For those who sometimes prefer listening to reading; I have put a link into the sidebar of the New World Island YouTube channel; which takes a selection from the Romantic Christian blogs listed above, and makes them into audio-lectures.

The prose is 'read' by the familiar Kindle test-to-speech robot called, I think, ...

Yesterday I listened to a video in which political commenters Gonzalo Lira and Alexander Mercouris were discussing the Western Elites - i.e. the leadership class: and how they had declined, across about half a century, to the current very low level of superficiality and short-termism.

GL and AM were not able to link ...

We in The West inhabit a world of institutional mediocrity - where a mixture of over-promoted middle managers and psychopaths are in charge of global, national and functional institutions.

There are very few good, and no great, leaders in mainstream public life...

The exceptions may be found in some competitive ...

It really is amazing how so many modern people cling to a world view that offers them literally nothing!

...A world view that describes a universe without purpose or meaning - where things happen only from some mixture of rigid determinism with randomness.

A human life that comes from nowhere and ends in utter ...

Over at Fourth Gospel First, I investigate the possibility that Jesus was taking on the kingly role of reading from Deuteronomy in the Temple during the Feast of Tabernacles.

I am fascinated by how people cleave to wrong ideas - despite everything.

I regard myself as something of an expert on this subject! Because I have had many wrong ideas in my life (presumably I still do); and have sometimes taken a long time (decades...) to abandon them and acknowledge their wrongness - yet I still ...

I'm taking a little break from blogging. I should be back in within a week or so.

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Because (following the Fourth Gospel teaching) I believe that Christianity is - at core - extremely simple: a matter of commitment to loving and following Jesus Christ (with 'following' understood as essentially being led by Him through mortal-death to eternal resurrected life) -- this belief leads to the question of ...

In both of my recent do-re-mi sync posts -- "Doremi, Dori me" and "What does 'do-re-mi' mean?" -- I mention the similarity of those three syllables to Domrémy, the birthplace of Joan the Maid (a link first noticed by S. K. Orr).

The musical scale begins with Domrémy and ends -- until the 19th century, and still in ...

I'm normally reading several books at once. I'm still in the middle of Valentin Tomberg's Lazarus, Come Forth! but last night I randomly decided to start reading a book I'd picked up some time ago but never opened: Terence McKenna's The Archaic Revival (1992). I only read a few pages. Between the table of contents and ...

When I lived in India I knew an Englishman, Vic Tate by name, who had been born in India in around 1915. I say he was an Englishman because all his ancestors had come from England but he had only visited the country once, in the 1950s. Otherwise he had lived his entire life in India, having stayed on as a coffee ...

I guess I've known that in theory since I read The Swiss Family Robinson as a child (on which more below), but I'd always assumed it was only psychoactive in very large doses. When I was a teenager, one of my favorite beverages was buttermilk with a pinch or two of nutmeg, and I never noticed any psychotropic effects. ...

I have said, speculated, that the reason for the unique extremity and pervasiveness of evil-affiliation in these present times - especially the high prevalence and social dominance of value-inversion - is probably due to the nature of those souls being incarnated in recent generations.

In other words, there seem to ...

Most of the solfeggio syllables we use today come from the first stanza of "Ut queant laxis," a medieval hymn to John the Baptist.

Ut queant laxis resonare fibrisMira gestorum famuli tuorum,Solve polluti labii reatum,Sancte Iohannes!

In the hymn's melody, the syllables I've bolded -- the first syllable of each ...

Novalis provides some insights into the kind of thinking Dr. Charlton frequently refers to as primary thinking or direct knowing (bold added):

72. On non-sensory or immediate knowledge.

All meaning is representative, symbolic -- a medium. All sense perception is at secondhand. The more particular, the more abstract, ...

No matter how much evidence, every particle of it pointing in the same direction; and no matter that nothing is ever learned from failures, disastrous policies are never repented nor reversed - still the majority of people (including intellectuals and commenters of the 'secular Right') continue and continue to explain ...

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From 2:40 onwards

Sir Despard Muratroyd and The Chorus From Ruddigore by Gilbert and Sullivan

Oh, why am I moody and sad? Can't guess! And why am I guiltily mad? Confess! Because I am thoroughly bad! Oh yes – You'll see it at once in my face. Oh, why am I husky and hoarse? Ah, why? It's the ...

I can recall as a teenager trying to choose a future career, with the idea of picking one where I would Do Good. I had a short-list of supposedly-Good jobs, that included being a doctor, a research scientist and creative artist.

I became a doctor eventually, later a research scientist, studied English literature ...

If you had asked me an hour ago who Michael Stipe was, I wouldn't have been able to tell you. He's the frontman for R.E.M., a band of which I have never been a huge fan and about which I know relatively little. I know a handful of their songs, and I think I owned one of their albums back in the nineties -- Green, I ...

I often state that we are now "in the End Times" - and I am convinced of it.

I do Not mean by this that the "Second Coming" of Christ is imminent, because (from my Fourth Gospel perspective) I regard the idea of the Second Coming as false - and indeed bizarre; because Jesus did his work, his work is done, it was ...

The Beatles' "All You Need is Love" would probably make sense to the ancient Greeks, but for Christians the expression must-needs be reversed to "All Love Needs is You."

I'll try to explain in the following. Bear with me:

In Ressentiment, Max Scheler juxtaposes ancient and Christian views of love to help clarify ...

When I submitted By No Means Equal to the publisher I was asked to name another book it might be compared to. I imagine this was to position it in the market. I hadn't thought about this and at first couldn't come up with anything. It had no obvious influences though, of course, many things had fed into it. But then ...

I often (far too often!) see bloggers advising their readers what to do in face of the way the world is going - and commenters asking bloggers what to do!

Where should I go (to be safe)? What job should I do (to avoid converged SJWs and enforced political correctness)? How can I find a community of ...