Category: thatch

Anthropology has long shown that religion, rather than an intellectual contrivance or a set-out system of commandments and controls, is simply a social and cult...

The eminent Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida (1870-1945) spent much of his life in Kyoto, teaching at the university there and, after retirement in 1927, wri...

The great dilemma for dwellers of small or tiny houses is what to do with books. (Here, of course, we are not referring to electronic formats, which are sometim...

In an article by Raymond D. Havens titled “Solitude and the Neoclassicists,” reviewed in Hermitary, the author notes that the dry rationalist Britis...

In every major world religion, the emergence of eremitism or a more restrained form of solitude practice emerges at a very specific historical point in the evol...

Minimalism and simplicity are often and erroneously made to be synonymous. Minimalism is a style of art and aesthetics, while simplicity refers to a style of li...

The previous entry noted that Western Christian theologians conclude that the image and likeness of God refers ultimately to immortality, the only factor that t...

In his Book of Disquiet, the eccentric Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa notes the horror that must have come upon the 19th century to realize the full meaning ...

The previous post presented Kierkegaard’s discovery (1844) of the ethical contradictions in the biblical Abraham — and, by extension, Yahweh, though...

The fate of Western culture is anticipated in the 19th century not by Nietzsche but by his predecessor Kierkegaard, who, like Nietzsche, places this fate square...