I have been watching Art:21 documentaries with the wife & kids lately. If you are not familiar, Art:21 is a PBS documentary series which explores the works & artists of contemporary visual arts; they build each episode upon a theme and pick 4-5 artists to highlight. It has been interesting looking at how these contemporary [...]

If you follow me on twitter you have seen my progress through Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. It has been a interesting read, even if I disagree with a lot of his commentary. In his concluding remarks on Hegel, he poses an interesting reflection upon the purpose of the State, contrasting Hegel against [...]

I’ve been thinking about hypocrisy recently, and the following half-baked idea came to mind: My Christian life is like the ridiculous consumer driven ‘green eco-friendly’ products. We Americans are an idealistic lot on the whole. We like to dream big. We like to talk about change—though the actual following through is where we often fall short. How [...]

Here is the concluding comment by Bertrand Russell (from A History of Western Philosophy) on St. Augustine and St. Ambrose & St. Jerome. It is strange that the last men of intellectual eminence before the dark ages were concerned, not with saving civilization or expellig the barbarians or reforming the abuses of the administration, but [...]

The following quote comes from Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, it is the concluding paragraph of the section on St. Augustine’s The City of God. He is closing out his remarks on Augustine’s eschatology and strangely concludes with a connection to Marx and a further reference to Nazism—Russell is thinly veiling his antagonism towards [...]