Kevin Fuller's Blog (42)

Marc Chagall, painter - Informed by the Bible, Chagall found that in the Biblical Universe, men could float through the ether willy-nilly, defying gravity and the laws of physics. Chagall's use of color and whimsical flight of fancy motifs (men and women in loving embraces, floating over houses and livestock), animals floating through the air with smiles on their faces, and so on, are a reminder that religion need not be taken so…

Or Grayling contra Comte-Sponville.

Years ago, Andre' Comte-Sponville wrote a little book entitled 'A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues' in which he enumerated the clasiical and developing Virtues and supplied explanations and examinations of each. His book, though thorough and technically proficient left me with somwhat a cold feeling. Something was lacking, though at the time, I couldn't quite put my finger on what that something was.

Enter A.C. Grayling with this…

Artes Liberales. Not to be confused with Artes Illiberales. The latter, in the scholastic age, were considered servile and mercantile or describing craftsmanship. The former, however, were studied by the elite, and were the highway to an education for the free man.

The Artes Liberales are divided into first a trivium, and secondly a quadrivium. The first, the trivium, includes Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, these three being the…

These are some of the people who get it in my book and some short reasons I think why. I may not agree with their stances, their views, but in my book, they warrant recognition. Some are imaginary (film characters), others are dead, but I speak of all of them as if they were real and alive. In his book 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', Robert Pirsig describes quality as 'something you can't altogether define, yet you know it when you see it'. The following are those folks who have…

During the Enlightenment, philosophically and spiritually, authority and the divine rights of Monarchy were overthrown and democracy ennobled the citizen, who now became free. A new Virtue, Liberty, was innaugurated and the enlightened man sought it and preferred death to the loss of it. Whether your leanings are to the crown or to liberty, you now live in a world where your inaliable rights as a human being have been fought for, won, and continue to be ensured.

After the horrors of…

I've been reading Kenneth Grahame's 'The Golden Age' and one thing that strikes me is the impersonal nature of Nature Grahame presents. Grahame uses the death of a bird, where the wind still happily whips throuigh trees and deer simply hop over the carcass to bound on their merry way to point up the fact Nature is impersonal and uncaring in some ways. Later, one of the childeren wishes another for him to be Nature's Ally.

Now more than ever it seems we are needing to come to grips…

It's been over eight years now. No newspaper, no radio news, no television media, except the incidental stuff I've picked up through being in the public and at home as my wife and child have taken in the 'stuff' on a moderate level.

I was to the point I was tired of being constantly barraged with violence and murder, supposedly a representation of the world at large.

I decided to live my everyday life and see what 'stuff' I would encounter from day to day. Would I or mine be…

In the pythagorean tradition, Reason is the ability of a soul to perceive Beauty. What is Beauty? When one works day in and day out, raises children, supports a spouse, keeps house and pursues a career, when does one have the time to be Reasonable and enjoy Beauty?

This is one sign of modern times not spoken of in many Religious texts, but is covered more in schools of philosoophy, from what I see, where man at certain times must race at breakneck speed in order to keep up with the…

Tim Wallace-Murphy provides an illuminating sweep through masonic history, viewing the past through the lens of the craft, providing sketches of personages of note and various movements and even schisms that have been made manifest in the 'world's oldest secret fraternity', or as Wallace-Murphy highlights, a peculiar organization that makes good men better by means of allegory and ritual.

The author begins in Greece, citing the general move toward understanding the cosmos in a…

In the first half of this book, Jung uses the dream analysis of a mentally ill patient to draw conclusions based on what he calls universal archetypes. Jung flagrantly filters this person's dream symbolism through his own alchemical bias, where personally I could come up with all kinds of different interpretations that seemed to me just as valid. But I'm no Jung. So moving on. The flip side to the coin, for the first half, is you do get a nice exposure to the tenets of alchemy along with…