Would I please "describe", you ask, "the general or characteristic tendencies of contemporary academic discourse in the humanities"? I would describe them, of course, as appalling! I doubt you were looking merely for an adjective or epithet in posing that question,...

You've come to realize, you say, that the choice we're seemingly given between a life of pleasure, ease, and sin, on the one hand, and a life of constant weariness and ascetic hardship, on the other, is actually a "false dichotomy". Renouncing self and world needn't...

A former graduate student of mine, a Roman Catholic like you—and having, like you, a serious interest in the philosophia perennis and the contemplative paths of the world's orthodox religions—researched the question you pose with some care. And when I say...

Platonic knowledge is more than mental assent to a proposition; it's the vision of the whole man, rightly formed by training in geometry, music, and gymnastics (among other arts). The writer of the rather jejune article you cite, claiming as he does that Plato is...

I was recently looking over your little book on The Life Aligned, and I was struck by what you said (on pp. 14-15) about the "need" of His Endlessness. As you note, Gurdjieff calls us to conscious suffering as our part in an "extraordinary exchange" with the Higher....

You ask for my opinion concerning the following passage from the Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan: "There is material presence, in which no knowing is involved, and such is the presence of the statue in the courtyard. There is intentional presence,...

You write regarding your use of the Jesus Prayer: "Sometimes I think I feel warmth, and sometimes my mind is attentive and my feelings fixed on one good thing. And in the next moment, everything vaporizes." Very few of us can expect much more than a rare moment or two...

Yes, my teaching "strategies" run the spectrum. If I were to plot my approaches in the different courses I teach, they would vary from my introduction to world religions, in which I lecture for as much as an hour (in a 75-minute class) and then respond to questions,...

Regarding a recent post of mine, you find as a Christian that a "strange inward tension" results when you try to adopt a "specifically Hindu term" like Witness, and you worry that it's "somehow wrong for a Christian to accept anything other than the moral teachings of...

"And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force" (Matthew 11:12). How, you ask, can one hope to attain to the Kingdom by means of violence? It seems to me the problem can be reduced to the...