Purpose in life

Winter is Coming

“A Hazy Shade of Winter” (listen to it here) was written by Paul Simon in the early sixties and appears on Simon & Garfunkel’s fourth studio album, Bookends (1968). The song is a metaphor for a life which draws upon the transition from fall to winter. It speaks of a person who once had great…

Live This Life (Follow-up to Terminal)

A few days ago my thoughts were focused on the fact that we are all “terminal.” Today my mind turns to the things within us that drive us to keep on living. We have likely all known someone who planned to “live a hard life, have a good time, and die young” only to be…

Terminal

“Death is to be warded off by exercise, by healthy habits, by medical advances. What cannot be halted can be delayed, and what cannot forever be delayed can be denied. But all our progress and all our protest notwithstanding, the mortality rate holds steady at 100 percent.”[1] In a culture that speaks little about death,…

The Consumerism of Calvin (yes, that Calvin!)

Oblivion

Recently, I watched the science-fiction movie Oblivion (2013; starring Tom Cruise and directed by Joseph Kosinski). It is an entertaining movie with a good mix of action, philosophy, and romance. If anything, the writers and director may have been a little too ambitious, for one can readily see threads from several other movies embedded in…

How We Spend Our Days

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” – Annie Dillard, The Writing Life “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives; and how we spend our lives, of course, determines the person we become.” – Keith Shields, Thirst If I spend my days writing, I…

The Harvard Grant Study

In the fall of 2008, journalist and author, Joshua Wolf Shenk was given the rare privilege to spend a month reading the results of a 70 year longitudinal study of mental and physical well-being known as the “Grant Study.” Prior to this, the files had been kept locked up to all but a few researchers.…

Life is This Simple

“Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.”– Thomas Merton, Spiritual Master: The Essential Writings;  Orbis Books, 2001.

Laws of the Flesh and the Physical

In 1955, Flannery O’Conner1 said, “Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.”2 I wonder what she would say about the whole world today. 2014 is a time in which we are “post-everything.” Many have given up on the Catholic Church, given up on Evangelicalism, given up…

Contributing a Verse

Apple has released a 90 second commercial that features a Walt Whitman poem and narration by Robin Williams. The end of the poem asks the question, “What good . . . [is] me, [is] life?” The answer given is, “That you are here—that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and you…