I have been writing and re-writing this post for months. Something that makes writing it difficult is the multiplicity of conflicting starting points. There is no one way to start it. And the decision about how to start will affect what it becomes. I have decided to begin with writing about that multiplicity, the conflicting voices, and the competing destinations for this one piece of writing. Do I begin from a position of faith or…
Having to spend some time in a waiting room yesterday evening, I was happy to remember a small book in my back pocket. The book is a speech by Albert Camus, titled Create Dangerously: The Power and Responsibility of the Artist. The English translation is done Sandra Smith. This is one of those short books that took me a long time to finish. It’s only 46 pages long. But it’s full of ups and downs…
In her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion describes the sudden loss of her husband, John G. Dunne (1932–2003) due to a heart attack. While reading it, what caught my attention more than anything else is Didion’s attention to details. The book is full of dates, numbers, names, and locations. Here is one example: During the twenty-four December and January nights when Quintana was in the sixth-floor ICU at Beth Israel North I…
I am writing this after going through Books VI and VII of the Confessions of St. Augustine. I think various parts of the Confessions could be understood and connected in light of understanding what it means for a truth to be embodied or personified. The parts I have in mind include (a) several episodes where other people make an impression on Augustine and (b) Augustine’s appeal to Christ (toward the end of Book VII) as…
I have been lucky to have had many great teachers during my academic life and mentors who continue to enrich my intellectual pursuits. In this post, I want to write about only three of them. The first is Graham Fulton. When I first met him, he was a psychology professor at University College Sedaya International (UCSI), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I was a student there from January 2006 till July 2007, though I never had a…