intellectual history
What does the West owe to Christianity and Islam?: Secular critics
Three hundred and fifty-nine years Galileo spent his last nine years under house arrest for describing what he saw through a telescope. The institution that confined him did not formally acknowledge he was right until 1992. That is not a footnote in the debt story.... What does the West owe to Christianity and Islam?: Civilizational inheritors
The line from Aquinas Aquinas died in 1274. He synthesized Aristotelian logic with Christian theology, established natural law, articulated just war doctrine, and laid groundwork for the scientific method.... What does the West owe to Christianity and Islam?: The Story
The surgeon who doesn’t know In 1088, students in Bologna organized themselves into a universitas — a legal corporation with elected rectors and the right to grant degrees. The model spread to Paris, Oxford, Cambridge. Every one was a Church institution. The faculty were clergy.... Is 'Western civilization' a real thing or a brand?: Selective inheritors
The commentator In twelfth-century Cordoba, Ibn Rushd wrote commentaries on Aristotle so thorough that Latin Christendom called him "the Commentator" — the way they called Aristotle "the Philosopher." Aquinas built Catholic theology on Aristotle’s framework, and he encountered it... Is 'Western civilization' a real thing or a brand?: Category critics
The relay race that wasn’t Columbia needed a reason. Twenty million dead. Veterans coming home. The faculty designed a course that explained why — a narrative from Athenian democracy through Roman law to the American republic, as if the whole thing were a relay race and the baton... Is 'Western civilization' a real thing or a brand?: Civilizational defenders
The execution and the guilt In 399 BCE, Athens executed Socrates for asking questions. That fact — that the civilization killed its greatest philosopher and then spent twenty-four centuries feeling guilty about it — tells you more about what we mean by "the West" than any... 🕊️“Awakening” and “enlightenment” are terribly vague terms for most people. 🕊️
Awakening
andenlightenment
are terribly vague terms for most people.sometimes referring to the universal, undeniable sense of being that is so simple and everpresently already here that we almost never think to pay attention to it (without training), except when something is so beautiful or horrible that it knocks us out of meaning making and we’re confronted with the immensity of experience.
Sometimes we mean an abiding realization/resting in the conscious knowing of that alwaysness: nonduality; a persistent state of nonsymbolic experience; seeing that the constructed nature of the world and self are so ephemeral and empty that our experience is better understood as a dream; union with a divine quality of love and surrender into the fullness of experience.
Other times we mean a total perfection of being human—not just the abiding realization, but some obviation of all shadow material (cleaning up)—repressed and split off self-bits, unconscious motivations, unhealthy or self-destructive habits).
right!? it’s so unhelpful at this point. or maybe it’s helpful to identify who not to trust 😂 Not to mention in intellectual circles you don’t even know if it’s "(western enlightenment aka age of reason)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment]" or spiritual...