The Moral Bankruptcy of American Liberalism

 

Samarkand

 

There Is Absolutely No "Unbroken" Religion

 

"There is absolutely no "unbroken" religion working as a vital force which is not compelled at some point to demand the credo non quod, sed quia absurdum--the "sacrifice of the intellect." -- Max Weber.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Coming Only is Sacred

This old age ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Circles" (1841).

Loving and Honoring Jesus the Jew

 

We should love and honor Jesus the Jew as a proto-Rabbinic (re-)visionary and as a Palestinian crushed beneath the Roman Imperial wheel. Unfortunately, that sort of love and honor is thoughtlessly and routinely denied to Jesus and, instead, he is fetishized as a Mediterranean Dying-and-Rising God (a notion acceptable to gentiles but abhorrent to Jews, not to mention Muslims).

Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly observed, "As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect...Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors and recites fables merely of his brother's or his brother's brother's God" (Self-Reliance).

Mevlana's Urs

 

Hermeneutics

 

Anouar Brahem "Houdouth" Live at Acropolis , Athens - 2021

From the River to the Sea!

 

Winter Reading

 

 

When Autumn turns to Winter, I return to the Russians. 

I first read Tolstoy's "Kingdom of God" in my early 30s, when I was reading everything by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky that I could get my hands on (plus Turgenev, Pushkin, Gogol, and Chekhov). 

In that book, Tolstoy states unequivocally that you cannot have both the Nicene Creed and the Sermon on the Mount: you must choose. Either Constantinian (Imperial) Christianity or the teachings of Rabbi Jesus.

I knew he was right, chose the latter, and never looked back. 

It took me much longer to appreciate Chekhov. I have found that he must be read and re-read until the bleakness of his vision overwhelms. It is then that you discover the depths of his compassion for suffering, and often insufferable, humanity. In the process, you may also find the sources of the "Kingdom of God" within yourself.