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The Quiet Crisis of Value In our age of algorithmic nudging and “post-truth” discourse, we are often haunted by the suspicion that our moral compass has been replaced by a mirror. We treat objective value as a phantom, preferring a “subjectivist solvent” that reduces every truth claim to a mere matter of personal preference or…
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It is a rare treat to dive into the deep end of the “sovereignty of the self” with a student before they head off to the university “jungle.” Recently, I’ve been reading through Nietzsche with a Grade 12 student who was eager to tackle the heavy hitters before her first year of university. I have…
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We live in an age of unprecedented cognitive surplus, yet we are haunted by a singular, hollow paradox: we have more information than any generation in history, but less “drive” to do anything meaningful with it. We are masters of the digital scroll, experts in the irony of the meme, and sophisticated deconstructors of every…
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I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog talking about the “Wise Imagination”—the muscle we build when we read deeply. But there is a common misconception that the goal of a “baptized imagination” is simply to make us “nicer” or more “empathetic.” In our era of hyper-polarization, empathy is marketed as a universal panacea;…
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To suggest one is “against empathy” sounds, to the modern ear, as inherently absurd as being “against kittens” or “against sunshine.” We have been conditioned to view empathy as an absolute moral good—a panacea for all social ills. However, the weight of neuroscientific and psychological evidence suggests a more radical, counterintuitive premise. As Yale psychologist…
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George MacDonald integrated his understanding of biography as “God’s story” into the very fiber of his fiction. Characters such as Anodos in Phantastes, Wilfrid in Wilfrid Cumbermede, and Belorba Day in The Flight of the Shadow are all autobiographers chronicling their personal transformations. Critics have long noted that MacDonald’s fiction derives its strength from this…
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George MacDonald was profoundly influenced by German Romanticism, particularly through the Idealism and creative imagination of Novalis. Novalis sought to shift the reader’s understanding of truth from an objective “expelling” of data to a subjective “inward” understanding. MacDonald often paraphrased Novalis in his personal correspondence, writing: “The Realist is an Idealist who knows nothing of…
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The Victorian Age represented progress to much of the Western world. With a burgeoning industrial base in Europe and North America, alongside flourishing developments in health, science, and religion, the Victorian era was the precursor to the Modern belief in empirical evidence. This shift paved the way for a more progressive, educated aristocracy that redefined…
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The Wild Knight of Dogma: Chesterton and the Perilous Edge “Orthodoxy is not only… the only safe guardian of morality or order,” G.K. Chesterton writes, “but it is also the only logical guardian of liberty, innovation, and advance” (O, 133). In the final chapters of Orthodoxy, Chesterton invites his readers to see not the heaviness…
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In his introduction to Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton recounts his journey of examining the great questions of life, only to believe he was alone in his discoveries. He eventually realized he was in the “ridiculous position of being backed up by all of Christendom,” finding that his “fancied” modern ideas were, in fact, “eighteen hundred years…