The following articles will help you adjust to what you are about to learn. Read them carefully and then think about each one and the central theme it is trying to impart. I need you to learn to stay quiet and process things through your mind. I need you to see in the conscious mind but feel in the subconscious mind.
Magnanimity
Jill Carattini
In the early fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer penned The Canterbury Tales, a sometimes bawdy, often hilarious, and always sharply critical satire on the religious folk of his day. The “tales” of the pilgrims make up the content of the story. Despite their common path of pilgrimage to Canterbury, Chaucer’s Christian characters are largely examples of the corruption and dissolute living that had overtaken virtue in the church. However, in the case of “The Parson’s Tale,” Chaucer gives us an extended prose narrative intended to instruct the pilgrims in Christian morality. This tale, by contrast, represented the kind of Christianity Chaucer espoused as ideal, and so he gives the Parson the last word of the narrative.(1)
The Parson’s Tale presents a theological treatise on repentance and how to overcome the “seven deadly sins” with the virtues of the spiritual life. One of those virtues is magnanimity offered as the virtue to combat the sin of acedia. Now, acedia was considered one of the most serious of sins. It manifested itself in sloth or spiritual despair, but more significantly embodied the temptation to give up caring about anything truly important. Acedia led to spiritual impotence and smallness of heart. Spiritual impotence would allow vice to flourish and virtue to languish, not because vice was purposely chosen or intentionally entered into, but because spiritual lassitude desiccated one’s concern to be virtuous.
In our day, this same acedia distracts many a Christian pilgrim from following the way of Jesus. Author Kathleen Norris warns that acedia “is known to foster excessive self-justification, as well as a casual yet implacable judgmentalism toward others,” and readily lends itself to this process of spiritual apathy.(2) With this understanding, we can see why the Parson would encourage magnanimity to combat acedia, for a magnanimous person is a person who is generous of spirit, caring, and gracious in forgiveness. Chaucer, through the voice of the Parson, warns that “a great heart is needed against acedia, lest it swallow up the soul.” A great heart is a magnanimous heart full of generosity and graciousness, eager to forgive. Acedia, on the other hand, makes our hearts small, consumed not with care for the things God cares for, but devoured by things that do not matter at all.
Acedia further makes it easy for me to pluck the speck out of my sister’s eye while I ignore the log in my own. This propensity to see others as the primary problem, while elevating one’s own self is a clear sign that acedia has taken root in one’s life. On the contrary, magnanimity, as Norris notes, “requires creativity to recognize our faults, and to discern virtues in those we would rather disdain. Forgiveness demands close attention, flexibility, and stringent self-assessment, faculties that are hard to come by as we career blindly into the twenty-first century, and are increasingly asked to choose information over knowledge, theory over experience, and certainty over ambiguity.”(4)
Like the Parson’s Tale, Jesus shared many tales, parables as we know them, regarding the virtuous life. Jesus was inviting those who heard his story to respond by living a kingdom-life here and now. When invited to the house of a Pharisee one evening, a woman who was known to be a sinner entered the house and wept at Jesus’s feet, anointing them with her tears and perfume, and wiping his feet with her hair. Now in Jesus’s day, a man would not allow a woman to touch him, let alone a woman who was a known sinner. The Pharisee who invited Jesus knew this, and he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet he would know who and what sort of person this woman is who is touching him” (Luke 7:39). Jesus then tells the tale of two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii and the other fifty. Which of them, Jesus asks, when forgiven their debt, would love the moneylender more? The Pharisee replies that the one who owed more would love more. Jesus then delivers the last line of the tale: “For this reason I say to you, her sins, which are many, have been forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little” (7:47). Jesus understood the importance of magnanimity in the fight against a small, acedic heart. As his followers, will we simply continue as idle pilgrims on the way to vacant Canterburys, missing the true heart of the pilgrimage? Or will we hear the tale of Christ, follow in his virtuous steps, and discover along the way the hopeful significance of pilgrims, pilgrimage, and finding ourselves at home in the Kingdom.
(1) Ed. Larry Benson, "Explanatory Notes,” in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Riverside Chaucer, Third Edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 956.
(2) Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me (New York: Penguin, 2008), 116.
(3) Ibid.
Jericho Road
Jill Carattini
As the economic crisis monopolizes news stories worldwide, the images become more disquieting. The morning news brought a picture of a Zimbabwean paperboy holding stacks of depreciating cash belittled by monstrous inflation rates. Stories of the U.S. subprime meltdown, foreclosed homes, and families living on the streets, now in the bitter cold, were not far behind. Global unemployment concerns also join the voices of fear and uncertainty, concerns my own family and many others feel acutely.
There are many things that the writings of Scripture do not say about the situation we find before us: the practice of corporate bail outs or chancy economic loans, to name a few. But the writings of Scripture have much to say about debts and debtors, neighbors and communities, and the economic crisis as it forever sits between the rich and the poor, the last and the first, the powerful and the powerless. As implications of the economic crisis reach beyond typical boundaries to an increasingly larger populace, opportunities to examine the dynamics of power and wealth articulated in Scripture loom large before us. Opportunities to encounter on some small scale the daily concerns of “the least of these” hit a little closer to home. In other words, opportunities duly present themselves to grow further consumed by our own situations or more attentive to communal realities and our neighbors struggling in a common economy.
The writings of Scripture present the invitation to step out of our autonomous economics and into a community of divine abundance, where there is room at the table and bread to pass around. We can cling to the spirit of autonomy that flows freely through our markets and mindsets; we can remain convinced of our sense of entitlement, and assured that our worth (and our neighbor’s worth) is indeed enhanced by the things we collect, consume, and dispose of. Or, we can consider the God who rained bread from heaven in the deadest of wastelands, the Spirit who blessed five loaves and two fish to feed five thousand, and the Son who told stories which proposed that we, too, are to live with such a spirit of generosity and an existence ever-concerned with its neighbors.
In difficult times, it is easy to reason that we only have the energy and the resources to worry about ourselves. We might even reason that the Good Samaritan himself helped the man on the side of the road only because it did not come as a great personal or financial liability. In fact, the one who first asked the question that merited Jesus’s telling of this parable imagined the world quite similarly. His very question, "Who is my neighbor?" betrays his philosophy that the world can be classified in terms of commodities, liabilities, and entitlements: “There are those I might be responsible to help and there are those I am not responsible to help. There are certain situations in which I might be accountable and there are situations in which I am off the hook.”
Yet Jesus squelches any cry of liability or entitlement with a story which turns these categories into the smoke and mirrors that they are. Instead of the stance of autonomy that asks about personal risk, far better questions seem to be posed by one who indeed had much to lose: “What will happen to this man if I keep walking?” “What will happen to this man if I fail to respond with compassion?” “Who will take care of my neighbor, if I do not?” Through this Samaritan, Jesus suggests that loving our neighbor demands the abrupt dismissal of self-interest, hierarchical concern, and individualistic fear--not just for the sake of the one wounded but for every neighbor, on every road, for the sake of the common good. Such a neighbor even learns to inquire, “Why is it that this man has been denied safe passage in the first place?”
Exactly one year before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said something very similar:
“[W]e are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”(1)
As implications of the recession hit closer and closer to home, might it be our open homes, and not our fears, that get bigger. Jericho Road is in need of good neighbors.
(1) Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. Ed. James Washington (New York: Harper Collins, 1986), 241.
Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi
Jill Carattini
“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going--so far as I can tell--but it’s changing.”(1) So begins Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic essay, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" His article describes the shifting of his own thought patterns; how he once could delve easily into long bouts of prose, but now finds his mind trailing off after skimming only a few pages. As a writer he is the first to applaud the instant wonders of Google searches, information-trails, and hyperlinks ad infinitum. He just wonders aloud about the cost.
University of Virginia English professor Mark Edmundson is another voice attempting to articulate the current cultural ecosystem, and the minds, souls, and relationships it cultivates. In an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education he attempts to describe the turbo-charged orientation of his students to life around them. “They want to study, travel, make friends, make more friends, read everything (superfast), take in all the movies, listen to every hot band, keep up with everyone they’ve ever known... They live to multiply possibilities. They’re enemies of closure... [They] want to take eight classes a term, major promiscuously, have a semester abroad at three different colleges, [and] connect with every likely person who has a page on Facebook.”(2) Edmundson argues that for all the virtues of a generation that lives the possibilities of life so fully, there are detriments to the mind that perpetually seeks more and other options. For many, the moment of maximum pleasure is no longer “the moment of closure, where you sealed the deal,” but rather, “the moment when the choices had been multiplied to the highest sum...the moment of maximum promise.”
There is a phrase in Latin that summarizes the idea that the way our minds and souls are oriented is the way our lives are oriented. Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi is an axiom of ancient Christianity, meaning, the rule of worship is the rule of belief is the rule of life. That is, the way we are oriented in worship (whatever it might be that we focus on most devotedly) orients the way we believe and the way we live. In a cultural ecosystem where we seem to worship choices and possibilities, where the virtue of good multi-tasking has replaced the virtue of singleness of heart, it is understandable that we are both truly and metaphorically “all over the place”--mentally, spiritually, even bodily, in a state of perpetual possibility-seeking.
Of course, the ancient Christians who first repeated the idiom, Lex orandi lex credendi lex vivendi, did so with God in mind as the subject, aware that God was the only object of worship who could ever quiet their restless souls. Before any formal creeds were written, the early church held this adage, knowing that the essence of their theology would rise from their acts of adoration, thanksgiving, and petition. And they knew that the ways of their worship, the things they said when they prayed, not only defined their ultimate beliefs, but ultimately defined their lives.
The same is true of our lives today. That which claims the most thorough part of our hearts, souls, minds, and strength both reflects and shapes our lives. We most certainly live in a time when the greatest commandment comes with great difficulty, when focusing our hearts, minds, and souls on one thing is a challenge met with a constant parade of options vying for our attention. But the God who longs to gather us, whose arm is not too short to save (even from ourselves), nor ear too dull to hear, is the same yesterday and today.
What’s more, the distracted soul is hardly unique to the age of Google. There was a time when the ancient church father Augustine of Hippo defined his soul as “too cramped” for God to enter. He prayed that God might widen it, seeing too that it needed to be emptied. “You prompt us yourself to find satisfaction in appraising you,” he prayed. “[Y]ou made us tilted toward you, and our heart is unstable until stabilized in you.”(3) Of course, such satisfaction in worship is not likely if God is treated as one of many possibilities in a never-ending, ever-expanding web of activities and diversions. If faith is only a part of life, then it has become as optional as pursuing one more hyperlink or skimming one more article. But those who fully approach the God of all possibilities find rest and focus, wisdom--and indeed, possibility--for their souls. As we worship, so will we live.
(1) Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Atlantic, (July/August 2008).
(2) Mark Edmundson, “Dwelling in Possibilities,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 54, Issue 27, Pg. B7.
(3) Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Garry Wills, (New York: Penguin, 2006), 5.
Running in the House of God
Jill Carattini
I once lived in a house with an accommodating layout for a child hoping to escape punishment. If I dared to run away from the spanking that I knew was coming, this house made it seem like a valid plan. A large wall served as a partition between the rooms, such that the kitchen and dining room were on one side while the living room and sunroom were on the other. Thus, I could essentially run in endless circles, my little legs one step ahead of the parent on my trail.
Of course, this split-second strategy always backfired. While I might have eluded capture for a short time, punishment was inevitable, and probably worse for trying to escape parental hands. But the attempt to run always ended with a troubling dilemma. I knew I couldn't run forever; yet once I started running, I was afraid to stop.
For some reason, this escape scenario remains a vivid picture for me. Oddly, I'm not entirely sure it is a stunt I duplicated more than once; it seems I would have quickly learned of its ineffectiveness. Even so, the dilemma wrought from running in circles seems a vivid memory. From time to time, the image of my futile escape plan still comes boldly to mind.
It is this picture that surfaces when I begin to feel distant from God. Whether I have been disobedient or I have simply been absent, once again I am a child in that old house running away from the hand of a disciplining parent. Once more I am struck with the dread of an impossible dilemma; afraid to stop running, but knowing with each circle that I am only making it worse. I want to return to God's presence; I want for all things to be restored. But I find myself unable to face the one I have disappointed, unable to face up to my offenses.
The psalmist calls for an entirely different approach between child and Father. Facing the impossible dilemma of his own sin, David did not choose to run from God (once his offense had been exposed). He fell instead on his knees, facing his faults and inadequacies, facing the face of God. With a broken heart, he approached the one he disappointed. "Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love.... For I know my transgressions and my sin is always before me" (Psalm 51:1-3). Grieving his sin and remembering his God, David discovered the tender and vulnerable worship that is fashioned within a broken heart. And he discovered how deeply pleasing it was to the one he had sinned against: "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise" (Psalm 51:17). The heart most open toward the Father is a heart that is broken before Him.
Contrition is a word we now use infrequently, though it remains a powerful call to one of the deepest places of worship. As David discovered, it is not an easy call to answer; it runs counter to our instinct to run, calling us instead to come near with a broken heart. The word "contrite" derives from the Latin word contritus, meaning pulverized or ground to pieces. While this may be exactly the fearful condition we seek to avoid, it is not a word meant to describe what God will do to the running child when she is finally caught. Rather, it describes what happens to the child’s heart when she catches a glimpse of her own sins. Yet, in the willful act of allowing our hearts to be broken in pieces by our own sin, it is here that God's mercy is nearest. The shattered soul is far closer to wholeness than the one who refuses in fear or vanity to return to the Father. To be contrite of heart is to stop running and to turn without panic or pride to the one who has been running with us all along.
Oscar Wilde was a soul familiar with the entangling circles of sin. He at times followed fear or instinct and kept running; other times he found himself compelled to stop and face his depravity before the face of God. In a poem written after his release from prison, he spoke plainly of that which broke his dizzying cycles.
Ah! happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his plan
And cleanse his soul from Sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?
The willful heartache of a child that knows she has fallen short is a heart that is open to the embrace of the Father. In God's house, we need not run in fear.
The Face That Remains
Jill Carattini
Thomas Grüter has always had trouble putting names with faces. But unlike most of us who might have trouble recollecting the name of the man who just said hello, Grüter's trouble lies in recognizing the face of the man who just said hello--even if it is his own father's. His condition is called prosopagnosia or "face blindness," and until recently the disorder was thought to be exceedingly rare. But new research led by a team that included Grüter himself shows the disorder is surprisingly common.
Those affected with prosopagnosia are not forgetful or inattentive, nor are they the social snobs they are often accused of being. When it comes to faces--even their own--they see very little that distinguishes one from another. The part of the brain that signals face recognition simply does not respond. As a result, they may greet acquaintances as strangers, struggle to keep up with plots in movies, and have difficulty finding their own children at school pick-up time. "I see faces that are human," notes one woman of her condition, "but they all look more or less the same. It's like looking at a bunch of golden retrievers: some may seem a little older or smaller or bigger, but essentially they all look alike."(1)
The more I think about what it would mean to live unable to recognize faces, the more I am amazed at our ability to do so at all. Human faces are quite complex, differing in both great and minute details. Our faces change with expression or circumstance, angle or shift of light; they are transformed by emotions and altered by different situations. Given the intricacy of the task, it is phenomenal that we should be able to recognize so many faces so effortlessly in the first place.
Yet the face is one of the very first things we learn to respond to as infants. Developmental psychologists speak readily of the importance of the human face in the life of a newborn, particularly the faces of mother and father, which the child quickly comes to recognize. Professor James Loder speaks of the tendency of an infant to smile when one holds the mere configuration of a face on a stick beside the crib. Writes Loder, "[T]he face phenomenon is not strictly something that comes only from the environment; it is also a construct created by the child and developed out of the child's inherent resources and deep-seated longing. Children seem uniquely endowed with a potential capacity to sum up all the complexity of the nurturing presence in the figure of the face."(2) For the child, the face plays a central role in their developing sense of the order of the universe. Thus, when the face of the loving nurturer goes away in any capacity (which is inevitable), the child's world is upset on some level. For what has gone away is not merely a static face but a much greater presence.
In this, children inherently illustrate a correlation drawn in biblical language. In both Greek and in Hebrew, the word for "face" is also the word for "presence." Though we do not literally behold the face of God, it is the Father’s greater countenance that we seek, his presence that comforts above all. The psalmist's plea is that the confirming presence of God's love would remain with him always: "Do not hide your face from me, do not turn your servant away in anger; you have been my helper. Do not reject me or forsake me, O God my Savior. Though my father and mother forsake me, the LORD will receive me" (Psalm 27:9-10). Scripture seems to pronounce what is echoed in the skills and longings of a developing child. Namely, our years urge us to pursue “a relationship with the One who is the cosmic ordering, self-confirming presence.”(3) That is to say, the enduring pursuit of the faithful is a pursuit of the Face that will not go away.
I cannot imagine the hardship of those for whom no face is familiar. But there are times when God's face is certainly obscure to me, and it is a painful discomfort. I know the signs of God’s assuring presence are around me, but I am at times hard-pressed to recognize it. It is in such times when I am reminded by my own longing that God is near. Though recognition is a task that doesn't always come effortlessly, the longing to know the face of God is a sign placed deeply within us, an assuring mark of God’s very presence. Surely God’s face shines upon us! Wherever we are in our stages of recognition, the promise of God is extended: For now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.
(1) Nicholas Bakalar, "Just Another Face in the Crowd Even if It's Your Own," The New York Times, July 18, 2006.
(2) James E. Loder, The Logic of the Spirit (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 91.
Self-Deception and the God Who Sees
Jill Carattini
I remember filling out the small card of questions thinking far more about the consequences of each answer than the most accurate one. It is somewhat ironic that one of the most defining moments in the life of a college freshman--sharing a single room with a complete stranger--is largely determined by overly optimistic answers on a single sheet of paper. When it comes to defining oneself, objectivism is often a struggle.
A university article aimed at preparing freshman for the experience of a college roommate bemoans the fact that many fail to report accurately when asked simple questions that could help them avoid serious tension. Do you smoke? Do you stay up late? Do you listen to loud music? Administrators insist that honesty (the kind that looks beyond the best-case scenario) will get problems dealt with before they become an issue. But who really wants to answer a vehement "yes" to "Are you a messy person?" particularly when they are in the market for a roommate. It's hard to own up to being a disaster to someone who will have to share it with you.
Yet, beyond the obvious desire to show ourselves to others in the best light possible is the complicated dynamic that we often simply see ourselves in the best light possible. Some may insist that living with a roommate will help them in their desire to stay neat; others may just really think of themselves as a clean and organized person when they are altogether not.
The human capacity for self-deception makes me really nervous. Or, I should specify, my own capacity to be self-deceived makes me incredibly nervous. Our ability to see plainly into the places where others exist blind and indifferent extends well beyond roommates and college questionnaires. In honest moments, that I can see clearly where so-and-so's trouble lies, that I can verbalize the problem she is entirely avoiding strikes me with a twinge of dread: what, then, is the trouble she sees so clearly in me? Other times, and probably more often than I care to admit, the blind spots in my own personality are forgotten in the midst of my lamenting of the blind spots of someone else: How can she not see that this is the problem? Will he ever be honest with himself?
Scripture is full of similar pleas to God: "How long will mockers delight in mockery and fools hate knowledge?" (Proverbs 1:22). "How long will this continue in the hearts of these lying prophets, who prophesy the delusions of their own minds?" (Jeremiah 23:36). The scriptures also offer compelling images of those in the troubling midst of self-deception themselves. It is difficult to read the book of Jonah without coming away with the image of a stubborn, deceived prophet. Yet, even as I walk away from him in a righteous huff (what kind of prophet is annoyed with God’s mercy?), I wonder warily about the seaweed wrapped around my own head; I wonder how many times I have prayed from the unfamiliar belly of a darkness that God in his mercy allowed to swallow me.
As the psalmist gave a description of the wicked, perhaps ideally he also trembled, however slightly, at the small part of himself that mirrored it: "There is no fear of God before the eyes of the wicked. For in his own eyes he flatters himself too much to detect or hate his sin" (Psalm 36:1b-2). We can no doubt rest assured that God sees every blind spot we operate with and every lie we tell ourselves. While we are pointing out every flaw of our neighbor, God is seeing every flaw of humanity (including the one part of humanity we do not see) and loving them (and us) anyway. Bowing to this God, as Hagar discovered in the desert, is bowing to the God who sees--and who chooses to love and care for us regardless. The question we do well to answer accurately is how long we are willing to go about our lives in blindness without Him?
The Good Life
Margaret Manning
“What is the good life?” is a question as old as philosophy itself. In fact, it is the question that birthed philosophy as we know it.(1) Posed by ancient Greek thinkers and incorporated into the thought of Socrates through Plato, and then Aristotle, this question gets at the heart of human meaning and purpose. Why are we here, and since we are here, what are we to be doing? What is our meaning and purpose?
Out of the early Greek quest for the answer emerged two schools of thought. From Plato emerged rationalism: the good life consists of ascertaining unchanging ideals-- justice, truth, goodness, beauty--those “forms” found in the ideal world. From Aristotle emerged empiricism: the good life consists of ascertaining knowledge through experience--what we can perceive of this world through our senses.(2)
For both Aristotle and Plato, rational thought used in contemplation of ideas is the substance of the good life. Despite the obvious emphasis by both on goodness emerging from the contemplative life of the mind (even though they disagreed on the source of rationality) both philosophers saw the good life as impacting and benefiting society. For Plato, society must emulate justice, truth, goodness, and beauty; so he constructs an ideal society. For Aristotle, virtue lived out in society is the substance of the good life, and well-being arises from well-doing.
Not long ago, I conducted an internet search on the tag “What is the good life?” and I was amazed at what came up as the top results of my search. Most of the entries involved shopping or consumption of one variety or another. Some entries were on locations to live, and still others involved books or other media aimed at helping one construct a good life. Others were the names of stores selling goods to promote “the good life.” There were no immediate entries on Plato, Aristotle, or the philosophical quest that they helped inaugurate. There were no results on wisdom or the quest for knowledge lived out in a virtuous life. Instead, most of the entries involved material pursuits and gains. Sadly, this reflects our modern definition of what is good.
What images come to mind when you ponder the good life? Perhaps during these trying economic times, it is difficult not to equate material items with the good life, more money, more security, or more opportunity. While it has always been said of every generation that these are times of great crisis and upheaval, we feel this search for meaning anew and afresh today, and perhaps wonder at the practicality or wisdom of looking to the past for insight or understanding into the good life.
And yet, the ancients remind us that “not even when one has an abundance does one’s life consist of possessions” (Luke 12:15). In this view, the good life involves what we do with our things, abundant or meager as they may be, and necessarily involves right living in community. Perhaps the ancient wisdom is particularly instructive in a time in which we would equate goodness with what we possess. “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8) Do justice, love kindness, and live out both of those virtues in light of humility before God; this is the good life. And this is a vision of the good life, cast not when times were good, but during a time when judgment and exile awaited the nation of Israel.
The wisdom of the ancients, from the Greeks to the Hebrews, suggests that the good life can be attained regardless of circumstance or possession. It is found when we live out wisdom in justice and kindness. It is found in the application of knowledge rightly applied in relationship to the world around us. That wisdom comes from God alone, and is part and parcel of a relationship with God who is the source of what is good. The good life is not bought or sold; it is not a prime real estate location, or a formula for success. The good life is our life offered to others in justice, kindness, and humility.
(1) A.L. Herman, The Ways of Philosophy: Searching for a Worthwhile Life (Scholars Press: Atlanta, 1990), 1.
(2) Ibid, 82.
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