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24. Going Forward
Big announcement first, I’m going to move this blog over to substack. Two main reasons for the move. The first is that it will hopefully make following my writing easier. Right now, most of my traffic is driven by facebook, but that requires me to manually copy and paste the link every time I post…
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23. Being and its Discontents
In one of the first posts during my initial writing challenge, I made a sort of leap between the indubitability of our being, the fact that we can’t doubt our own existence, to talking about Being with-a-capital-B. Fearing that this leap might seem illegitimate to some, this post is intended to justify that leap, rather…
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22. Marauders, Nphum Ga
When last we left the Marauders, they had triumphed over the Japanese at Walawbum, albeit after some very hot fighting that left the 2nd Battalion shaken. In the aftermath of that battle, the men were ravaged by disease caused by Chinese contamination of their drinking water and, later, by outbreaks of typhus. Despite these outbreaks,…
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21. Egypt
Continuing reflections on reading the Old Testament, now on the beginning of Exodus. What’s the problem with Egypt? It’s not merely the fact of Israel’s enslavement, but something constitutive about Egypt itself, something that makes the problem extend beyond the geographical bounds of the ancient kingdom and into the hearts of the Israelites in the…
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20. Bodies in the Altar
My friend Jason asked me to elaborate further “about graves as the first location markers, the relation with parts of Genesis focusing on burials, the relation to pilgrimage and veneration of saints, and especially if this informs (or is informed by) your medieval travel narrative interests.” A big ask, a big topic, but a journey…
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19. A Better Post
I’m not happy at all with how Monday’s post turned out. An interesting phenomenon is that the reduced pace of posting has led to a decrease in quality, at least as perceived by me. Extra time to prepare is not bearing fruit, something perhaps to consider going forward. I’d like, therefore, to clarify what I…
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18. The Universe is not Meaningless, On Objective and Subjective Meaning
People hunger for meaning. We have a profound desire that life not be a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”* This can create a problem with the dominant world-view of our age, which is broadly atheistic/materialist, and thus tends to denude the world of meaning. Recognizing this as a…
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17. Distraction, Despair, Social Belonging, and Resentment
This is a mild re-working of something I wrote a few years ago. I don’t want to spend so much time dwelling on the negative, on critique, but, on the other hand, it’s important to be cognizant of the bad news to grasp the significance of the good. Still, expect less diagnosis and critique going…
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16. Life
We live in memory and by memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future. Miguel de Unamuno Miguel de Unamuno was a Spanish writer and intellectual. One of the 20th century’s…
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15. The Plan Going Forward
At the end of my little writing challenge, I was worried about losing momentum. At the same time, I had to do some traveling, and the post-a-day schedule simply wasn’t tenable just in terms of the time commitment, to say nothing of the mental drain compounded by a worry that I’d run dry on topics…