I’ve just come across a on-my-first-impression fascinating online magazine Aeon with quite a few articles worthy of comment. One that garnered its fair share of discussion was ‘Die, selfish gene, die‘ by David Dobbs arguing that Richard Dawkins’ concept of the selfish gene is no longer useful with the growing awareness of the importance of …
Monthly Archives: June 2014
Mindfulness Once Again
Having expressed my ambivalence toward the practice of mindfulness the other day I felt I should report this post from the Scientific American blog by Tom Ireland. MRI scans show that after an eight-week course of mindfulness practice, the brain’s “fight or flight” center, the amygdala, appears to shrink. This primal region of the brain, …
Grieving
Up until last August I only knew of Erik Meyer as a CSS guru (that’s Cascading Style Sheets — web stuff) but then his daughter was diagnosed with a brain tumour and over the last year he has been writing about his family’s experience. It seems wrong to say so but he has written that …
Pope Francis on Capitalism and War
We are in a world economic system that is not good. A system that in order to survive must make war, as great empires have always done. But since you cannot have a Third World War, you have regional wars. And what does this mean? That arms are made and sold, and in this way …
Paddington Bear
As a confirmed consumer of marmalade sandwiches at breakfast-time I thought I ought to post this trailer for the film about a childhood icon with a similar predilection. I must say he doesn’t look a thing like the illustrations I remember so fondly. Maybe it’s the missing duffel coat.
The Frailty of the Body
Three posts to set alongside each other: Sonia Saraiya at The AV Club reflecting on the violence done to bodies in the TV production of Game of Thrones Richard Beck commenting on two posts from Andrew Krinks entitled “Soulful Resistance: Theological Body Knowledge on Tennessee’s Death Row” (Part 1, Part 2) My own Advent reflection …
Spiritual Exercise, Part I
Maybe surprisingly, St Ignatius in his retreat manual, the Spiritual Exercises, doesn’t talk much about prayer. OK he talks endlessly about prayer but always as a variety of spiritual exercise. Spiritual exercise is his preferred category. There is a prejudice that prayer, if you are doing it right, should be serene, peaceful, passive, restful even. …
‘The Phases of Venus and Heliocentricity: A Rough Guide’
Another excellent ‘Rough Guide‘ to the state of historical research into astronomy in the early modern period, this time asking what the observation of the phases of Venus proved or didn’t prove about rival models of the Solar System. Clear and nicely complicated! Thank you Renaissance Mathematicus.
The Practice of Gratitude
Gratitude is a pleasant state of mind in itself, rooted in the awareness of having been gifted, but it can also be a way of responding to God the Giver with thankfulness and generosity. Gratitude needs to be entertained though, dwelled with, so it becomes a habit of seeing and feeling and acting. And that …
Changing Categories: ME, CFS, Fatigue
There are some things that are supposed to be sacrosanct on the internet: one of them is that URIs, web addresses to you and me, should never change once they have been allotted. Now, in reality, web addresses get deleted or modified all the time — but I don’t like to be the culprit. Despite …