Tag Archives: philosophy/religion

Cultural Literacy: Separation of Church and State

Posted on July 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

Given the zeitgeist, particularly as defined by the current Supreme Court of the United States, now seems like a good time to post this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of the separation of church and state. This is a full-page document with a reading of five sentences, two of them longish compounds, and seven comprehension questions. The reading does a nice job of explaining the ambiguity of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment (which I, like other First Amendment absolutists, I expect, wish weren’t there) without ever mentioning the term.

So there might be a way of turning this document into something of a treasure hunt for the term “Establishment Clause.” Or something else entirely.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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Fable

Posted on July 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

“Fable: A short tale, usually epigrammatic, with animals, men, gods, and even inanimate objects as characters. The action of a fable illustrates a moral which is usually (but not always) explicitly stated at the end. This moral often attains the force of a proverb. The fable form appears early in man’s cultural development, being a common part of the oral folk literature of primitive tribes. It appeared in Egyptian papyri of c1500 BC, and in Greece a recognizable fable was included in the works of Hesiod in the 8th century BC. By far the most famous fables are those attributed to Aesop, a Greek slave who lived about 600 BC. In India the fable also appeared early, the great Indian collection, the Panchatantra, having been composed in the 3rd century. Modern fables have been dominated by the genius and style of La Fontaine, the great French fabulist of the 17th century, who wrote fables in polished and witty poetry that have been widely translated and imitated.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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The 23 Enigma

Posted on July 1, 2022 | 1 comment

“In Tangier in 1960 the Beat writer William Burroughs met a sea captain called Captain Clark, who boasted to him that he had never had an accident in twenty-three years; later that day Clark’s boat sank, killing him and everyone on board. Burroughs was reflecting on this, that same evening, when he heard a radio report about a plane crash in Florida: the pilot was another Captain Clark and the plane was Flight 23. From then on Burroughs began noting down incidents of the number 23, and wrote a short story, 23 Skidoo.

Burroughs’ friends Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea adopted the ’23 Enigma’ as a guiding principle in their conspiratorial Illuminatis! Trilogy. Twenty-threes come thick and fast: babies get 23 chromosomes from each parent; 23 in the I-Ching means ‘breaking apart’; 23 is the psalm of choice at funerals; and so on. All nice examples of selective perception or, as Wilson put it, ‘When you start looking for something you tend to find it.’ The composer Alban Berg was also obsessed with the number, which appears repeatedly in his opera Lulu and in his violin concertos.”

Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.

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Athanasius Kircher

Posted on July 1, 2022 | Leave a comment

In keeping with this morning’s apparent theme of arcane and forbidden knowledge, here is a reading on Athanasius Kircher along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Do you know about Kircher? He is in many respects the representative Renaissance man; he wanted to know everything. This reading, in the “Additional Facts” section does observe that Kircher at one point was in possession of the Voynich Manuscript, one of European intellectual history’s great enigmas and the kind of thing that would have fascinated me in middle or high school.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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Illuminism

Posted on July 1, 2022 | Leave a comment

“Illuminism: A pseudoscientific movement of mystics and visionaries in the 18th century which influenced literature in the 19th century. At first inspired by Christian doctrines, illuminists sought to live according to the Gospel and to regenerate their souls by direct contact with the divine. They also, however, believed in spiritism, magnetism, alchemy, and magic and professed to invoke the invisible and the arcane. Among the more famous illuminists were Swedenborg, who conversed with the dead; Lavater a believer in black magic , who thought to contact God by magnetism; Claude de Saint Martin (“the unknown philosopher”), who sought to hasten the coming of Christ by meditation and prayer; Mesmer (see MESMERISM); the Comte de Saint-Germain, who pretended to be several hundred years old and to possess the elixir of eternal life; Franz Joseph Gall, who founded the pseudoscience of phrenology, the study of the relationship of skull shape to character traits; and the famous “Count” Alessandro di Cagliostro, a charlatan who performed feats of magic and alchemy, founded a secret Masonic sect, and narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Inquisition. A reaction against 18-century rational philosophies, illuminism under many names (e.g. millenarianism, syncretism, neopaganism, pythagorism, theosophy, etc.) influenced some writers of the romantic period. It revived a sense of religious exaltation and created, or recreated, a need for the infinite merged with a sense of the inner life.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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The Doubter’s Companion: Hard Work

Posted on June 28, 2022 | Leave a comment

“Hard Work: The work ethic remains a popular explanation for the success of the West. This doubtful argument relies heavily on comparing humans to insects such as ants. Above all, the work ethic has a feel about it of low-level morality aimed at the poorer end of society.

There are lots of poor in the world who work all the time. On the other hand, large deposit banks, although non-productive, have been among the most profitable institutions over the last half-century. Their executives continue to work relatively short hours. The executives of large, publicly traded corporations work longer hours than the poor. And they compete with each other—not with other corporations—to work ever harder; by spending more of each day at their desks processing paper and developing relationships. This benefits their reputations and their careers. There is no proof that it has an effect on productivity or profits or the corporation.

Entrepreneurs are quite different. They usually have to work very hard in order to create their enterprise in order not to have to work hard later on in their lives. In other words, they create in order not to work.

To the extent that the west has succeeded, it is probably the result not of work but of innovation—not just technological, but social, intellectual, political, verbal, visual, acoustical, even emotional. In order to innovate some have spent a great deal of time thinking and experimenting, perhaps more than any other civilization in history.

Technological innovation in particular continues as if we were on an unstoppable roll. Yet our structures do not as a rule reward physical hard work. What they do favor is a narrowly defined type of intense labor that is best described as white-collar slogging.”

Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.

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The Doubter’s Companion: Democracy

Posted on June 24, 2022 | Leave a comment

Democracy: An existential system in which words are more important than actions. Not a judgmental system.

Democracy is not intended to be efficient, linear, logical, cheap, the source of absolute truth, manned by angels, saints or virgins, profitable, the justification for any particular economic system, a simple matter of majority rule or for that matter a simple matter of majorities. Nor is it an administrative procedure, patriotic, a reflection of tribalism, a passive servant of either law or regulation, elegant or particularly charming.

Democracy is the only system capable of reflecting the humanist principle of equilibrium or balance, The key to its secret is the involvement of the citizen.

Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston.The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.

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Oswald Spengler

Posted on June 22, 2022 | Leave a comment

“Oswald Spengler: (1880-1936) German philosopher. A schoolmaster before he turned to writing, Spengler is remembered for his influential The Decline of the West (2 volumes, 1918-22), a study in the philosophy of history. He contended that civilizations pass through a life cycle, blossoming and decaying like natural organisms, and that Western culture is irreversibly past its creative stage and headed into eclipse. Though acclaimed by a public disillusioned in the wake of World War I, his work was criticized by both professional scholars and the Nazi party, despite some affinities with its dogma.”

Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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Archimedes

Posted on June 22, 2022 | Leave a comment

Here is a reading on Archimedes along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

Is there anything more I need to say about this polymath from Syracuse? He gave us the lever, and shouted “Eureka” (Greek for “I have found it”) when he solved the problem of the Golden Crown.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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56 Pillars

Posted on June 22, 2022 | Leave a comment

“In prehistoric Britain, fifty-six stone pillars stood in the outer circle of Stonehenge. In more recent times, the National War Memorial in Washington, erected after World War II, commemorates the dead with fifty-six pillars (also the number of signatures on the 1776 Declaration of Independence of the thirteen states). And in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic, fifty-six towering red columns were erected to represent the ‘equal, united and harmonious’ ethnic groups of China.”

Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.

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