As a spiritual goal and method, seeking spiritual contacts with individual people* is the best strategy - and superior to the use of abstract models.

The difference is that the division of reality into persons (into "beings") is the primary division of reality - reality actually is divided into beings; whereas any ...

Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am, who shares both my March 15 birthday and my given names of William James, came up in the comments on "The Byrds and Byrd, Marcellus and Marsellus" (June 3). Bill Wright wrote:

Interesting. He goes by the stage name Will.i.am, which turns William into a form of the sacred name: Will ...

This morning I spotted someone wearing this T-shirt:

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This caught my attention because I had just posted about a homophone of pie in "The closest calendrical approximations of pi" (June 6).

At first I thought of pie as a diminutive ending as in cutie-pie (which used to be written as QT 3.14 on ...

It's hard to believe now, but I was a contributor to Wikipedia in its early years. I created these articles:Anne StrieberCTR ringGadianton robbersGazelemJ. J. DeweyList of code names in the Doctrine and CovenantsMaster MahanRobert Matthews (religious figure)Ted R. Kurts (a.k.a. Ted Jesus Christ God, sadly no longer ...

I recently featured an unconventional pieta by Franz von Stuck and drew parallels between its depiction of Christ in the tomb and Hans Holbein's rendition of the lifeless Jesus.

Today, I focused a little on another von Stuck painting, Lucifer, a simple work depicting a man-demon with glowing eyes sitting pensively ...

This afternoon I was teaching the construction "It is [adjective] for [noun] to [verb]." After giving several examples, I asked one of my students to make a sentence. He thought for a second and said, "It is impossible for people to fly."

In the evening, I finish reading Powerless. When I closed the document and went ...

March 14: This is the usual Pi Day. It encodes 3.14, which is approximately 99.9493% of pi.

July 22: This encodes 22/7, or approximately 3.1429, which is about 100.0403% of pi., a slightly closer approximation than 3.14.

November 10: This is the 314th day of a common year and the 315th day of a leap year. Thus on ...

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From the movie Akenfield (1977) - a horse-drawn reaper binder - in action, from a distance; surely one of the most poetic of Mankind's machines (although very hard work for the horses).

I am re-reading Ronald Blythe's Akenfield again, this time as an audiobook, and am again finding it a deeply ...

This morning I was reading Powerless over a cup of coffee at a breakfast shop. A television screen across the room was playing the news with the sound off, but I was reading and didn't pay any attention to it.

I read this:

It's just a story I'm working on, What's it about, It's about... uh... an invisible war, What ...

once i publish the new novel i am putting together a new essay collection with the most recent musings for the many people who only like to read me about boring stuff like metaphysics. because a writer who publishes is always a bit like a prostitute.

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when people pester me about something theology related i'm going ...

Imagine someone who, as a child, suffered under an abusive, alcoholic father.

Telling that person that he cannot apply his individual experience to all fathers or fatherhood in general may be logically coherent, but it essentially sidesteps the individual's terrible childhood growing up under a bad father.

One bad ...

The question of "History" - that there is an objectively-true, evidenced account of the past: of how things came to be the way they are now - is one that has been very strong since the subject of History began to emerge as a distinctive discipline, detached (supposedly!) from religious (later ideological) ...

The scale of modern-day evil is extraordinary but many people are insensitive to this evil because, being spiritually based, it is not obvious to the materialistically minded. The majority simply look away as long as they personally are not suffering. But that is becoming less easy to do as one of the manifestations ...

I was reading a biography of Stevie Smith by Frances Spalding, and a chapter concerning her relationship to Christianity - by which was largely meant the Church of England.

At one point it quoted a passage to the effect that the one thing SS found most repellent was the idea of Hell. In particular, to summarize, ...

I have just finished reading Stevie Smith's "The Novel on Yellow Paper" - which ended badly in a narrative sense - but also because she kept inserting chunks of untranslated German.

A couple of weeks ago I was reading Owen Barfield's "Saving the Appearances" and he peppered the text with bits of untranslated Latin, ...

My last post, "Many a Melchizedek," about a sync involving the word many, quoted some Byrds lyrics. This morning I was reading Laeth's latest, Powerless, and found this (ellipsis in the original):

Maybe it’s because we have similar tastes in music… and there aren’t that many Byrd or Purcell fans out there

The ...

Regular readers may recall that I have soft spot for pieta paintings.

​In fact, I have featured a few on these pages over the years, including some that "don't work," (for me at least).

With that in mind, I recently stumbled across a rather unconventional pieta that does work, albeit without the traditional ...

Yesterday morning (June 1), I woke up with the phrase "many a Melchizedek" in my mind, though with no memory of any dream that may have put it there. It comes from my 2021 post "Lives, the universes, and everything" (coincidentally posted on my 42nd birthday), in which I imagine God saying this to Moses:

The first ...

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Someone who is on the side of God the Creator, and who desires to attain the salvation of Jesus Christ, must Proceed With Caution when it comes to joining any formal organization.

This is because we inhabit a totalitarian system; meaning that all formal institutions in our society are connected ...

Romanticism is A Fact of modern Man; such a powerful factor in the makeup of modern Man, that those who exclude or ignore the romantic in their ideology (whether that be Christian or Secular Right, or anything else) consign themselves to feeble motivation, feeble courage; and the inevitability of their own corruption ...

Despite that this is a selfish blog, consisting of me thinking-in-writing some of the notions I get in the early morning; from time to time I do invite questions from readers, and this is one of those times.

The phrase "less than zero" entered the sync stream with my post "The Jolly Switzer" (April 29). Searching my blog for the name Bret (as in Bret Harte, author of "The Jolly Switzer") had led me to Bret Easton Ellis and his novel Less Than Zero. Just the day before, Vox Day had published a post also titled "Less Than ...

symbolism really does happen, and sometimes it happens so poetically it couldn’t have been planned. it just had to be so. in this case, it is the man who coined the phrase ‘symbolism happens’ who apparently used the example of ‘heirloom yeast’ sourdough starter as an image and metaphor ...

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St Andrew's Church*, Bywell

We have recently begun a project to visit old churches in Northumbria; starting by getting suggestions from a little book by the legend that was Stan Beckesall ; backed-up by a copy of "Pevsner" for Northumberland; plus whatever booklets or leaflets we find in the ...

Considering that our life and world - and much of our social interaction - is underpinned and permeated with moral evaluations; we have a terrible problem about discussing the nature and presence of evil!

The difficulty about discussing evil is so lasting and intractable that there are plenty of people, including ...

the desire for meaning is universal, but the pursuit of it is a recent affair. medievals did not pursue meaning. it was just there. we have this freedom. and this blessing. of pursuing meaning, not having it just given to us. thus our meaning, when found, is more meaningful.

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in the realm of coincidences, ...

In "Whale-watching from the shore" (July 2018), I wrote:

This has been a weirdly persistent theme in my dreams for the past couple of years: taking a walk along a coastline of rocky cliffs for the express purpose of “seeing the whales.” And I do see them, looking down from the cliffs, dozens of them — rights ...

Christian faith is - or should be - focused on resurrected eternal life in post-mortal Heaven... So, not this moral life, not this earth and universe.

But what should we Do Here and Now?

The answer could be - Do what you evaluate as best: and start now.

...BUT - don't expect to make a system from it.

Do not ...

I have written before about the corrupting spiritual vortex that is prepper survivalism; where low-level people (such as you and me) engage in preparing to escape survive catastrophes, to become the nucleus and leadership of future human civilization... or something.

I have also discussed "elite" survivalism, of the ...