judgement vs happiness?

has fear of universal judgement been replaced by a demand for equal happiness?

how to feel life is a "pilgrimage"...

...when most all of the traditional supports for "God" lie in ruins?

pilgrimage, bildung and shopping

the old, mostly-forgotten and/or ignored idea that we are "strangers and pilgrims" (cf. eg Epistle to the Hebrews 11.13) in this world, is in fundamental contrast to the dominant ethos of eg "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", and even more so to the unexamined occupation of consumer shopping to pass the time.
"pilgrimage" and bildung are related, if they have differing ideas of man at their cores.

is "God" an "It"?

if a person would speak of "God", as a being, an entity, which one speaks about, but one does not want to use "It", nor the traditional "He", not the equalizing "She", then how is one to speak of "God". "It" just does not seem right, and the other two are limited by our human condition.

"Thou" would be a form of direct address, but the question here is to find a "pronoun" that would allow one to speak appropriately about the, at least, imagined "Being" that is called "God".

today, in an old mirror...

it is both consoling and disconcerting to read one's recent thoughts and insights already first written in  the 1870s and 1880s, as I did today while sitting in a Starbucks in Moscow reading in yesterday's- received The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age.
eg. 1874, James DeKoven, Anglican priest (!): "More people, in this western land, are lead away from God by a sort of every-day materialism than by scientific doubt." and, in 1878: "The visible encroaches on the invisible...". (p 14, 16)

sic permanet gloria mundi?

the myth of Er suggests that we did choose our parents, and the idea that all that we do on earth -- also hinted in the lines toward the end of Goethe's Faust "Es kann die Spur von meinen Erdetagen/Nicht in Äonen untergehn" (lines 11583-4) -- might be permanent, if not in "this world", could be termed in contrast to sic transit gloria mundi: sic permanet gloria mundi.
this assumes some such reality as the Zoroastrian daena.

Russian soul?

Ru$$ian $oul?

the uninformed state of America

Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason (2008) is enlightening and realistically depressing, and personally I better understood why I feel like my mind is dullened after just a few days visiting "down South", and this à la my heroes become kinsman Emerson and Thoreau.

in sum: The Uninformed State of America. but I believe the condition is one not especially homo (in)sapiens Americanus, but of homo insapiens. or a tendency of fuga mundi (escape the world) or better agnothi seauton.

cosmos?

if "God" is not where, how, when or why many believe(d), is the vast cosmos with the order and beauty we presume(d)?

a bridge crossing

for some years now I have thought that my studies were useless in this demi-thoughtful world, and rather more -- though this is surely a bit "theoretical", as it is said -- preparing for some test like crossing the Chinvat Peretu.