The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

SPIRIT MATTERS - Reaching for the Divine

When William James (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_james) went to the University of Edinburgh in 1901 to deliver a series of lectures on ‘natural religion’, he defined religion as ‘the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine’. Considering religion, […]

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Dark Witch

FANTASTIC FICTION - Escapes to other places and other times

Ever popular Nora Roberts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nora_Roberts) has a new offering. The summary is as follows. With indifferent parents, Iona Sheehan grew up craving devotion and acceptance. From her maternal grandmother, she learned where to find both: a land of lush forests, dazzling lakes, and centuries-old legends. County Mayo, Ireland. Where her ancestors’ blood and magic have flowed

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Berlin

PAST PRESENT - What's new in History

Why do we often have a fascination for the grisly facts of warfare? Is it because our behaviour in war reveals something about the truth of human nature? We find elements of the highest courage, heroism, self-sacrifice and utter brutality, cruelty, sadism, destructiveness. The outline of these features seem to stand out so much more

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Arthur Hugh Clough

LIVES WELL LIVED? A pick from biography and memoir

Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Hugh_Clough) trod that ever- so-delicate path between faith and doubt that 20th century philosopher Anthony Kenny came to do himself. Both also had a connection with Liverpool and Balliol College. Kenny has immersed himself in the mind of Clough in order to deliver this ‘life’. He regards Clough’s religious verse as the finest

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The Birth of Time

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

Cosmologists tell us that the Universe is 13.75 billion years old (roughly!). It’s not that I’m disinclined to believe this. What is staggering is the ingenuity that it must have taken to work this out. John Gribbin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gribbin) and (http://www.johngribbinbooks.com/) tells the story in this most useful book. In the 19th century astronomers, geologists and evolutionists first

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Mid-Victorian Britain 1851-75

PAST PRESENT - What's new in History

Mid-Victorian Britain was a period of enormous confidence and economic expansion for Britain. Geoffrey Best (http://www.britac.ac.uk/fellowship/elections/2003/best_g.cfm) gives us a history of great lucidity and readability. The Great Exhibition of 1851 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Exhibition) in fact represented the high-water mark of Victorian society, and the two decades which followed form one of the most fascinating and fruitful areas of British

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Aesthetics: the classic readings by David E. Cooper

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think

David E. Cooper, Professor of Philosopy at Durham, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E_Cooper) has put together this volume of writings about the theory of beauty. Possibly on the esoteric side, nevertheless whole academic careers have been devoted to it. Authors represented are Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Hume, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Bell, Dewey, Heidegger and Collingwood. Hume and Schopenhauer are

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Stuff

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

Before the microscope thinkers had speculated about what the world is made of at the minutest level. The miroscope introduced evidence for the first time and it has revolutionised our knowledge of the world and the organisms that inhabit it. In the seventeenth century the pioneering work of two scientists, the Dutchman Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and

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