Category: Seven Deadly Sins
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Man Does not Live by Bread Alone
Or by bed alone. Top o' the Stack.
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Envy
Given our manifold limitations, it is a wonder that anyone could feel envy for another. How petty and wretched you must be to feel diminished by a minor success of mine!
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The Tree and the House
A parable about envy. Substack latest. Opening: A man planted a tree to shade his house from the desert sun. The tree, a palo verde, grew like a weed and was soon taller than the house. The house became envious, feeling diminished by the tree’s stature. The house said to the tree: "How dare you…
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Once More on Envy
His mother wanted him to amount to something. His father was afraid that he might — and make the father look small.
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Envy Again
How little you must know about me to envy me! Would you envy me had you trod my paths and had thereby come to appreciate the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" (Hamlet, Act III, Scene I) that found in me their target? Your envy, an ugly sin and deadly, is bred in ignorance which,…
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Envy
How little you must be to envy me!
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Of Palate and Penis
The control of the one aids in the control of the other, and the control of the other in the control of the one. The Desert Fathers knew this, and enjoined the control of both.
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Kadın erkeğin şeytanıdır
"Woman is man's devil." (Turkish proverb) Never underestimate the power of concupiscence to derange, disorient, and delude. When Spanish bishop Xavier Novell resigned last month, the Roman Catholic Church cited strictly personal reasons without going into detail. It has now emerged in Spanish media that he fell in love with a woman who writes Satanic-tinged…
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Gluttony: Another Sign of Decline
So what can we teach the Muslim world? How to be gluttons? Another sign of decline is the proliferation of food shows, The U. S. of Bacon being one of them. A big fat 'foody' roams the land in quest of diners and dives that put bacon into everything. As something of a trencherman back in the…
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Righteous Anger
There is righteous anger. But how much of what is called 'righteous anger' is righteousness and how much anger? The righteous know; the merely angry fool themselves.
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How did We get to be so Proud?
Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important? In a line often (mis)attributed to St. Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine." So inauspicious a beginning for so…
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The Lust of the Eyes and the Pride of Life
This just over the transom from T. O. with my responses: I am wondering if you'd like to tackle this question prompted by your latest post on the sensus divinitatis. Suppose a man indulges his sensual desires and passions (especially sexual passion) without restraint when he is young. Then, as he ages, he realizes…
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St. John Cassian on Anger
The Philokalia, vol. I (Faber and Faber, 1979, p. 83): If, therefore, you desire to attain perfection and rightly to pursue the spiritual way, you should make yourself a stranger to all sinful anger and wrath. Listen to what St. Paul enjoins: 'Rid yourselves of all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamour, evil speaking and all malice'…
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The Fall of John Searle
By now you will have heard that the distinguished philosopher, John R. Searle, has been stripped of his emeritus status at the University of California, Berkeley. He was found to have violated sexual harrassment policies. A long-time reader of this blog astutely observes that things went worse for Peter Abelard, and then adds: Also, behaviour…