Time will tell—‘It is impossible to think in advance of experience, and no experience is merely empirical’
After a long and challenging week (as I know it will have been for all of you) and having spent an entire day (Saturday) from dawn until dusk writing the following piece I find that, as 9pm approaches, I can no longer tell whether it contains anything more than mere, arrant nonsense. It’s certainly a flawed and […]
More speed? More strength? More consumption? More Things?—A meditation on Love in the time of Coronavirus
READINGS Matthew 6:19-29 (trans. David Bentley Hart): [Jesus said:] Do not store up treasures for yourself on the earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves penetrate by digging and steal; Rather, store up for yourself treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves neither penetrate by digging nor steal; […]
Facts not fear. Clean hands. Open hearts.—An Epicurean/Lucretian meditation on how to respond to the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic
Lucretius contemplating how nature works Introductory meditation (excluding the Lord’s Prayer) adapted from ‘An Epicurean Gathering’ arranged by me, Lewis Connolly (until recently the minister of the Ipswich Unitarian Meeting House) and Dean Reynolds: The Roman poet Lucretius wrote: In the murk of our darkness, you, Epicurus, raised your blazing lantern to show us the […]
Learning from Lucretius in the shadow of coronavirus
READING: Lines 78-58 from Book VI of the De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) by Lucretius trans. by David R. Slavitt (University of California Press, 2008, pp. 253-254) . . . But people / tend to revert under stress to their earlier superstitions and imagine cruel taskmasters, omnipotent beings we wretches / ought to fear and appease, […]