Tag: Saint Augustine

3,614 words

Ayn Rand’s lecture “Philosophy: Who Needs It” is a brief and compelling introduction to what philosophy is and why it is crucially important.[1] The title is not a question. But if you read it that way, Rand’s answer is: “Everyone.” (more…)

Justus of Ghent, Saint Augustine, c. 1475

4,344 words

Part 2 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

The Emerging of a Christian Historical Consciousness

For all we have said about Greek and Roman historiography (and there were other historians, such as Suetonius, Appian, and Casius Dios), contemporary scholars invariably agree that the ancients remained a “non-historical” people. Herbert Butterfield is convinced “the Greeks did not achieve historical mindedness, and never could have achieved it, because they had the wrong view of time and the time process.” The Greeks “only knew of a comparatively short history behind them — they thought that the historical past extended back for only a very few hundred years.” (more…)

Jean Ribault, the leader of France’s Huguenot colonization efforts in America.

2,179 words

Joseph Ford Cotto, 1st Baron Cotto, GGGCR
Eye for an Eye: A True Story of Life, Liberty, Murder — and the Pursuit of Revenge — at the Birth of America
Self-published, 2022

In 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther wrote a set of theses condemning corrupt financial practices within the Roman Catholic Church. Before that time, Luther’s theses would have wound up in a file in the Vatican and ignored, but thanks to the printing press, his ideas spread across Europe. In the 1520s, his ideas won many French converts. (more…)

“Know thyself”

2,575 words

Psychoanalysis is learned, first of all, from a study of one’s self, through the study of one’s own personality. — Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (more…)