Category Archives: philosophy

Heartbreak

philosophy, photography, Uncategorized

This startling photo of a young girl in a Nazi concentration camp stopped me cold. I was scrolling through my Twitter feed and my eyes were fixed on her gaze.

The Nazis killed Czeslawa Kwoka, a Polish Catholic girl, in 1943 at Auschwitz. According to the photographer, before this photograph was taken, the girl dried her tears and the blood from the cut on her lip.

The original picture has been digitally colorized and enhanced. That may be part of why I stopped scrolling. She died 80 years ago this year.

What is left to be said about the holocaust? It demonstrates the depths to which humanity can sink. I’m a realist. If it happened before it can happen again. Sometimes by watching the news it feels like we are heading in this direction again. Some human lives seem to have no value.

What can be done, you might ask? Start with the human life right in front of you. In every encounter with another person we have a choice in what to think and how to behave.

Pope Francis & Holy Spirit

philosophy

The Holy Spirit will never tell you that on your journey everything is going just fine. … No, he corrects you; he makes you weep for your sins; he pushes you to change, to fight against your lies and deceptions, even when that calls for hard work, interior struggle and sacrifice,” Pope Francis said in his homily on June 5.

“Whereas the evil spirit, on the contrary, pushes you to always do what you think and you find pleasing. He makes you think that you have the right to use your freedom any way you want. Then, once you are left feeling empty inside – it is bad, this feeling of emptiness inside, many of us have felt it – and when you are left feeling empty inside, he blames you, becomes the accuser, and throws you down, destroys you.”

 

https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/251454/on-pentecost-pope-francis-explained-how-to-distinguish-the-holy-spirit-s-voice

Onalee McGraw on Romantic Love in Classic Films

Media Literacy, philosophy, storytelling

I have learned a great deal during the past several years from my friend Dr. Onalee McGraw about the power and influence of the classic films of the golden era. In this piece, she writes about what our current culture has forgotten and how we can once again remember through the classics she recommends. By the way, I am still working my way through her recommendations list. I only recently saw “It Happened One Night” on TCM when they were playing 30 days of Oscar winners. What an excellent film.

Learn more from Dr. McGraw here:

https://dronaleemcgraw.wixsite.com/classicfilms/post/the-heart-has-its-reasons-romantic-love-revisited-in-30-great-films-from-the-classic-era

Frankenstein for Engineers

good reads, philosophy, storytelling, teaching

In the Mastering Academic Conversations class we offer for incoming college freshmen, we typically read a book together. Or perhaps I should say, we assign a book to read together, I’m not sure how much of it actually is read.

There is always a “common-read” book that is selected for use throughout K-State each year and it always has interesting programming associated with it such as bringing in the book’s author to speak and so forth, however, those books vary widely in subject matter and interest area from year to year. Sometimes they are works of fiction and other times they are non-fiction works.

Nex year we are planning to do the book Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelly and there is a nifty, annotated version for scientists and engineers we are planning to use. I’m pretty excited about this. I think our students will benefit from reading classic literature and I think the work is still very relevant to our times as we seem to think that science and technology is our salvation. It is not.

C.S. Lewis on Writers Like Flannery O’Connor

creativity, philosophy

I’ve been re-reading C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity this week. I was in my 20’s and missed most of its message last time. Here’s an excerpt relevant to what I’ve been wondering about the violent writings of Flannery O’Connor.

“Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your whole life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself…

“That explains what always used to puzzle me about Christian writers; they seem to be so very strict at one moment and so very free and easy at another. They talk about mere sins of thought as if they were immensely important: and then they talk about the most frightful murders and treacheries as if you had only got to repent and all would be forgiven. But I have come to see that they are right. What they are always thinking of is the mark which the action leaves on that tiny central self which no one sees in this life but which each of us will have to endure — or enjoy — forever.