Wonderful.

John Moriarty on his bush soul, fireplaces, and books ...

First and foremost they're books that explain me to me.  They give me a language that helps me.  It's almost a mirror I can look on.  These books or these books will be a mirror to me and i can say, "Yeah, I recognize me to me"... If you're beyond a place where no one understands, then you're in real trouble.  But it's when you recognize that maybe you know other people have been there there are other people who know this territory, who know this countryside, and it is this countryside is not unexplored, then, that's wonderful to know ...

Beliefs.

From Grand Valley State University's Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies,  Ari Weinzweig talks beliefs and leadership ...

Discourse.

Professors Robert George of Princeton University and Cornel West of Harvard University meet with Dr. Scott Powell, Director of the Aquinas Institute for Catholic Thought at Colorado University for a discussion about friendship, faith, and the state of civil discourse ...

GEORGE

If conservatives are doing nothing but listening to Fox News and reading National Review and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and progressives are watching MSNBC and reading The New York Times and reading The Nation, all that's going to happen there is something that Cornel and I abominate, that is everybody being reinforced in what they already believe, nobody being challenged nobody being unsettled, and they're being taught that people who disagree with them are one of two things: either they are bad people or ignorant people. Either they are frauds or they are fool. Either they are bigots or they are stupid or both, and that is just a recipe for cultural disaster.  It's exacerbating this terrible polarization and the demonization that we are seeing.  We've got to get out of these silos.  In part, it's the product of technology that enables us to hide in our own spaces and only hear people online you know.  You know where your Facebook friends are, all people who agree with you.  Your Twitter followers, all people who agree with you, and we're just simply being reinforced.  You know what we're being reinforced in when we allow that to happen?  Prejudices.  Some of them might be right, some of them might be wrong, but they're not actual thoughts.  They're just prejudices we happen to believe.  If we're lucky, they happen to be right. We haven't thought our way to them because we haven't engaged the reasons they might be wrong.  You're really only entitled to count a view as a true opinion if you reason your way to it; if you think about it, if you consider what's to be said against it, as well as what's to be said in favor of it.  Otherwise it's something that happens to you.  It's not like an experience.  It's not something you actually do.

WEST

The three of us actually, in our own calling as teachers, are fundamentally wedded to The Negro National Anthem, The Black National Anthem, "Lift Every Voice."  Not lift every echo.  You see, echo is just an extension of an echo chamber.  It's a copy, it's the imitation, it's the emulation.  We all begin with imitation and emulation, but in the end like our fingerprint, we want each student, each human being, to laugh for themselves. Don't laugh for somebody else.  Don't love for somebody else, and you can't think for somebody else.  

The only way you find your voice, and this is, of course, the language of the jazz world and the blues world, you can't be a jazz man or a blues woman unless you find your voice.  Quit imitating.  Aretha quit imitating Marion Williams.  John Coltrane quit imitating Johnny Hodges.  Russell Thompson of The Stylistics, quit imitating Eddie Holman.  The important thing is, Robert Zimmerman, you can't imitate Robert Johnson.  You're a Jewish brother from Minnesota.  Rename yourself Bob Dylan.  That's fine, but now you got your own voice.  Dylan, you just know your voice is one that is in conversation with a genius from Delta named Robert Johnson or a genius from the vanilla side of town named Hank Williams.  Both of them deeply American, deeply southern, but they found their voices and so that becomes a crucial thing in terms of breaking from the the narrow tribalism.

Service.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks talks with former Austrailian Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson ...

To see yourself as a victim essentially means to see yourself as powerless. You’ve placed yourself at the hands of the victimizer, the oppressor. Now, you can’t do that. You’re giving away your life.

Freedom means accepting responsibility, and that’s a big leap.

Democracy means abiding by the rules even if you lose. And we’re forgetting that.

When bad things happen to a country or a culture, they can ask one of two questions, and the whole fate of that culture will depend on which of the two they ask. They can ask what did we do wrong, or they can ask who did this to us. If they ask what did we do wrong, then they go through the necessary business of repentance, remorse, whatever it is, putting things right again, and then they go on and they recover.

But when they ask who did this to us, they define themselves as a victim, and any victim must have a victimizer, an oppressor. And when any culture has suffered some kind of major confusion or humiliation, and they say, who did this to us, they are looking for a scapegoat to blame. 



abide (v.)
Old English abidan, gebidan "remain, wait, wait for, delay, remain behind," from ge- completive prefix (denoting onward motion; see a- (1)) + bidan "bide, remain, wait, dwell" (see bide).

Originally intransitive (with genitive of the object: we abidon his "we waited for him"); transitive sense "endure, sustain, stay firm under," also "tolerate, bear, put up with" (now usually with a negative) is from c. 1200. Related: Abided; abiding. The historical conjugation was abide, abode, abidden, but in Modern English the formation generally is weak. Abide with "stay with (someone); live with; remain in the service of" is from c. 1300.

(From the Online Etymology Dictionary)

Thank you, Rachel.

Transcendent.

It must be the case, that when describing the our cultural inheritance, we're not just describing something that's gone.  We must be describing something of which we are still a part, and which has to change as we are changing, to accommodate us.

All this was said by Eliot, that the artist must be constantly trying to say that new thing that he came into the world to say.  But he can only say it if he adapts his style to the inheritance of the tradition, thereby transforming the tradition and transforming himself.  There is no formula for doing this, because the formula is precisely what destroy the creative act.  We have to assume that new things will come and they will come through us as they always did in the past, through fasting and prayer ... and an occasional glass of wine.

Apprehending the Transcendent, a discussion between Roger Scruton and Jordan Peterson ...