Category: Mavericks
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Me, Merton, Vows, and Ecclesiology
I study everything, join nothing. He studied everything, but joined the Trappists. Therein one root of one of his inner conflicts. His natural bent was to range freely over the cartography of the mind, but he voluntarily accepted intramural enclosure physically, intellectually, and spiritually. He took vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability. My impression from…
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On Independent Thinking
Substack latest.
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The Eremitic Option
Top o' the Stack.
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McCain the ‘Maverick’
The Democrat leadership knows how to enforce party discipline, and their members toe the line and vote as a bloc. The Republicans, however, include mavericks, the most prominent of them being Senator John McCain of Arizona: It’s become a cliché to label McCain a “maverick” for his dramatic, and increasingly frequent, breaks with the Republican…
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Even Misfits Find Their ‘Fit’
I have a longstanding interest in 'marginal types': the characters, oddballs, misfits, Thoreauvian different-drummers, wildmen, mavericks, weirdos, those who find an adjustment to life, if they find it at all, at the margins, on the fringes of respectability, near the edge of things. Those who were not stamped out as by a cookie cutter, but put…
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The Eremitic Option
Monks come in two kinds, the cenobites and the eremites or hermits. The cenobites live in community whereas the hermits go off on their own. Eremos in Greek means desert, and there are many different motives for moving into the desert either literally or figuratively. There are those whose serious psychological conditions make it impossible…
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The Several-Storied Thomas Merton: Contemplative, Writer, Bohemian, Activist
An outstanding essay by Robert Royal on the many Mertons and their uneasy unity in one fleshly vehicle. There is of course Merton the Contemplative, the convert to Catholicism who, with the typical zeal of the convert, took it all the way to the austerities of Trappist monasticism, and that at a time (1941) when…
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Dale Tuggy’s Podcast 83
The Spiritual Journey of a Maverick Philosopher
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Jim Ryan’s Story and Mine
Let me start off by recommending Jim Ryan's infrequently updated but very old (since 2002!) Philosoblog, the archives of which contain excellent material worthy of the coveted MavPhil STOA (stamp of approval). The following entry (originally posted February 2005 at my first blog) is in response to my query as to why Ryan left university teaching. JR:…
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On Independent Thinking
Properly enacted, independent thinking is not in the service of self-will or subjective opining, but in the service of submission to a higher authority, truth itself. We think for ourselves in order to find a truth that is not from ourselves, but from reality. The idea is to become dependent on reality, rather than on institutional…
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Philosophy and Livelihood
A reader asked about this and about 'going maverick.' Here is a post from five years ago, and it links to another. The comments may be of interest too.
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Pessimism and Anti-Natalism in True Detective
True Detective is a new HBO series getting rave reviews. This bit, I am told by Karl White from whom I first learned about the series, is from the first episode. It's good. I'll leave it to you to sort through the sophistry of Rust's spiel. Here is some TD dialog about religion. I'll say…
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A Fine Essay on George Orwell
By Robert Gray, in The Spectator, here. Excerpts: Orwell, then, presented Catholics as either stupid or blinkered, dishonest or self-deceived. Yet he was very far from denying the need for religion. In his opinion socialists were quite wrong to assume that when basic material needs had been supplied, spiritual concerns would wither away. ‘The truth,’…
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Hocking on the Value of the Individual
William Ernest Hocking (1873-1966) had his day in the philosophical sun, but is no longer much read – except perhaps by those contrarians who take being unread by contemporaries as a possible mark of distinction. Recently I came across this magnificent passage: Life itself is individual, and the most significant things in the world –…
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The Solid Bourgeois
The solid bourgeois may dismiss as so much nonsense philosophy, poetry, and other products of questers and romantics — all the while subscribing to the socially sanctioned nonsense of some respectable established church. Be neither bourgeois nor bohemian, the one to the exclusion of the other. The true maverick is that dialectical blend, the sublatedness (Aufgehobensein)…