• Make the new year a creative one: Write a poem every morning. How can you do that? Poet, William Stafford, has the answer: “Lower your standards!” 
  • Know this: A society which scorns excellence in plumbing because it is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. So writes John Gardner.
  • Are you planning to spend your summer vacation writing an academic article? Consider this: It is estimated that there are about 200,000 academic journals published in the English language and the average number of readers per article is five.
  • A post-modern, biblical, recasting of Murphy’s Law: In the house of irritation there are many rooms! Remember, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for an irritated person not to be a pain to be around.
  • Since 1993, close to 200 lawsuits have been filed by USA prison inmates, defending on grounds of religion practices that range from masturbation to reggae music. In one case, in a Texan prison, an inmate claimed that his religion required that once a week he be served chateaubriand. Why isn’t religion more popular?
  • If you watch a game, it’s fun. If you play it, it’s recreation. If you work at it, it’s golf. (Bob Hope 
  • Past cultures believed in the other world, a reality beyond their own. We too believe in the other world, Hollywood.
  • Careerist’s credo for those in ecclesial or civil service:

            Don’t think.

            If you think, don’t speak.

            If you think and speak, don’t write.

            If you think and speak and write, don’t sign your name.

            If you think and speak and write your name, don’t be surprised.

                                                                        (National Catholic Reporter)

  • Yes, moral relativism is all the fashion: A lot of people say that there aren’t any “shoulds” in life, but here’s something you should know: There are only three words in the English language that end with gry … hungry, angry, and puggry! 
  • Having trouble defining God? Try Alfred North Whitehead’s definition of the ineffable: God is the unconditioned actuality of conceptual feeling at the base of things; so that, by reason of this primordial actuality, there is an order in the relevance of eternal objects to the process of creation. His unity of conceptual operations is a free creative act, untrammelled by reference to any particular course of things. It is deflected neither by love, nor by hatred, for what in fact comes to pass. The particularities of the actual world presuppose it; while it merely presupposes the general metaphysical character of creative advance, of which it is the primordial exemplification.  The primordial nature of God is the acquirement by creativity of a primordial character. His conceptual actuality at once exemplifies and establishes the categorical conditions. The conceptual feelings, which compose his primordial nature, exemplify in their subjective forms their mutual sensitivity and their subjective unity of subjective aim. These subjective forms are valuations determining the relative relevance of eternal objects for each occasion of actuality. 
  • Strange anomalies. Therapy and prostitution: If you are lonely and nobody understands you and you feel like going crazy and you have some money left over that you don’t need for food, you can buy somebody to love you, at $100 per hour. But there are two different kinds of love you can buy; one is laudable, the other criminal, and the difference between them is laughable. Yet how exactly to explain that difference? Here’s a PH.D thesis in phenomenology waiting to be written.
  • Then there is the story of the Farmer who voted against Daylight Saving Time because he was afraid that the extra hour of sunlight each day might be too much for his crops to take!
  • It is easier to behave yourself into a new way of feeling than to feel yourself into a new way of behaving.

So have a good year!