In the winter semester of 2009, I took Philosophy of Mind, an undergraduate course, with the late Prof. Bernard Hodgson (1946-2009) at Trent University. Prof. Hodgson sadly passed away very soon after delivering the final lecture for the course. He was a very pleasant and engaging speaker and after his general outline of the course,…
Learning To Pray (Part 2)
What makes a place familiar? What makes a visit feel like a return? Part of the familiarity is knowing what I can or cannot do in a place—the rights and duties the place affords me. In the place I am now writing about, one of my rights is the right to pray. I have the…
Learning To Pray (Part 1)
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…
Risks of Creativity
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…
Joan Didion, Grief, & Attention
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…