That's what's so ironic about the conservative backlash against BDSMers. With increased visibility comes increased bigotry, and conservatives continue to rally against kinky events by local groups to get them shut down. What the anti-kink fanatics do...
At most schools, the social, intellectual, and spiritual components are confined to separate experiential spheres. We party, we learn, and we contemplate the metaphysical, but we rarely do all three simultaneously and en masse. Maybe most college stu...
The landed classes neglected technical education, taking refuge in classical studies; as late as 1930, for example, long after Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge had discovered the atomic nucleus and begun transmuting elements, the physics laboratory at ...
he saw in Populism the first glimmerings of some of the great intellectual upheavals of the twentieth century—naturalism, muckraking, and hard-hitting social satire—which would eventually topple the genteel tradition of the nineteenth century. In...
The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. ... Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers — common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other wor...
However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to...
Moral scepticism can no more be refuted or proved by logic than intellectual scepticism can. When we stick to it that there is truth (be it of either kind), we do so with our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The sceptic with...
When Benjamin Franklin, the famous inventor and publisher, was serving as the American ambassador to France, he often impressed French intellectual with the wisdom of his remarks. At one dinner, the question was raised, "What human condition deserves...
Be ruthless in one important area: Yourself. Be ruthless about your commitment to Christ. Be ruthless about your intellectual growth. Be ruthless about finishing well. One of the biggest areas we should be ruthless about is our time. How much time do...
We are forever lured by the sirens of the dogmatic mind, with its haughty complacency, which determines that one´s relationship to others is only meaningful when one tries to convince them of one´s single truth. In such a spiritual and intellectual...
If you’re an Orthodox believer, then what sustains this framework is the obligation that you follow. But if you live in a democratic, liberal world whose motto is: “Make choices and manage your choices according to what is good for you,” then t...
In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea, expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is horribly debased wh...
I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intell...
My point is, however, that churches do promote beliefs that would more appropriately find a place in a context of intellectual debate. They wind up cheerleading for highly dubious opinions on historical, scientific, and metaphysical matters, simply o...
The Bible- banned, burned, beloved. More widely read, more frequently attacked than any other book in history. Generations of intellectuals have attempted to discredit it; dictators of every age have outlawed it and executed those who read it. Yet so...
In , written in the early 1950s, Czeslaw Milosz wrote that Eastern European intellectuals, reading in clandestine editions, were amazed to find that its author had never visited the Soviet Union. How, then, had he captured its mental and moral atmosp...
The man who did the shooting was a civilian, Peter Kakhovsky, a gifted intellectual of extreme purity of motive in whom the conviction of the necessity of regicide burned with a gem-like flame. Determined to kill, expecting to die, this brilliant and...
Mr. Orage, one of the most active and intelligent reformers for the last generation in England, attempted this very thing. He, in his little intellectual review which was supported by so brilliant a group of writers for so many years, published week ...
[L]ike people, ideas have social lives. They’re one way when they’re by themselves, and another when they’re surrounded by their peers. Crammed together, they grow more uncertain, more interesting, more surprising; they come out of themselves a...
Now, as it happens, theology is actually a pitilessly demanding discipline concerning an immense, profoundly sophisticated legacy of hermeneutics, dialectics, and logic; it deals in minute detail with a vast variety of concrete historical data; over ...
True thinking takes place within a frame of continuous historical development in which progress in understanding is being made. . . . No constructive thinking that is worth while can be undertaken that sets at nought the intellectual labours of the c...