My mother’s family think I have lost my faith and they pray for me to recover it. I don’t know what they’re talking about. Other people, so I have read, are pious as children and later become skeptical (or, as they say on This I Believe: “in time I outgrew the creeds and dogmas of…
She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees…
Yet it was on just such a day as this, an ordinary Wednesday or Thursday, that he felt the deepest foreboding. And when his doctor, seeking to reassure him, suggested that in these perilous times a man might well be entitled to such a feeling, that only the insensitive did not, etc., it made him…
The New Yorker a confederacy of duncesJohn Kennedy Toolephilosophical literatureRobert GottliebWalker Percy
Freely available here allen Mendenhallbrian smithChristopher Adair-Toteffelizabeth amatoFarrell O’GormanFriedrich Hayekjessica hooten wilsonMichael OakeshottTimothy FullerWalker Percy
“One last question to satisfy my idle curiosity. What has been going on in your mind during all the years when we listened to music together, read the Crito, and spoke together—or was it only I who spoke—good Lord, I can’t remember—of goodness and truth and beauty and nobility?” Another cry and the ramoneur is…
It is my mother’s way to see life, past and present, in terms of a standard comic exaggeration. If she had spent four years in Buchenwald, she would recollect it so: “So I said to him: listen, Mister, if you think I’m going to eat this stuff, you’ve got another think coming.” . . .…
New article in The Linacre. Percy was concerned with spiritual suicide at heart—despair, made explicit to him by Kierkegaard—resembling Victor Frankl’s concern with meaning and the current “existential vacuum” (Desmond 2005). However, the novelist’s theological mooring gave him a stronger platform to map postmodern man’s search for meaning, making him a prime example for physicians…
A good rotation. A rotation I define as the experiencing of the new beyond the expectation of the experiencing of the new. For example, taking one’s first trip to Taxco would not be a rotation, or no more than a very ordinary rotation; but getting lost on the way and discovering a hidden valley would…
Sometimes when she mentions God, it strikes me that my mother uses him as but one of the devices that come to hand in an outrageous man’s world, to be put to work like all the rest in the one enterprise she has any use for: the canny management of the shocks of life. It…
