life on materialism (philosophical)

When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart.

Numerous modern thinkers have noted the spiritual nature of eating meals in community. I wonder if this is why “Sunday Brunch” is such a popular alternative to attending church services. The Orthodox ...

The search for the good life, which so often is defined in terms of “things” and the means to get as many “things” as possible, has turned into a dead end as more and more people have more and more.

The best things in life aren't things.

God is the author of the physical world, and in his wisdom, he designed physical realities to convey spiritual mysteries. “There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God,” as C. S. Lewis insist...

Let us treasure up in our soul some of those things which are permanent..., not of those which will forsake us and be destroyed, and which only tickle our senses for a little while.

I am convinced that the scourge of our scientific and technological age is depersonalization. There is a heartbeat pulsating at the center of the universe, giving life and meaning to everything, but o...

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words. It is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the ...

The scholastics used to say: Homo non proprie humanus sed superhumanus est —which means that to be properly human, you must go beyond the merely human.

Modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increa...

Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others—his last breath. (1897)

Westerners have a complicated relationship with money. We don’t like it when wealthy people receive special treatment or look down on the rest of us as riffraff. But many (can we say most?) of us aspi...

The big issue . . . is not whether one applauds or disapproves of the growth of consumerism. The central issue is that consumerism is now a fact of life.”11

Do you want your life to count? Do you want to look back and say that you made the biggest difference possible? Most Christians want to devote their lives to something significant. Deep inside they wa...

Human life in the western world today... is characterized by an enormously wide range of incompatible truth claims pertaining to human values, aspirations, norms, morality, and meaning— A hyperplurali...

Christ knew that by bread alone you cannot animate man. If there were no spiritual life, no ideal of beauty, man would waste away, die, go mad, kill himself or give himself to pagan fantasies. And as ...

The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering...but in the development of the soul.

Identities—what makes us who we are, the kind of people we are—is what we love. More specifically, our identity is shaped by what we ultimately love or what we love as ultimate—what, at the end of the...

The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving the shell of edifying behavior.

Modern man is a bleak business. To our chagrin we discover that the declaration of autonomy has issued not in a race of free, masterly men, but rather in a race that can be described by its poets and ...

Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires, but for that very reason ignored his attainable desires. By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by ...

The problem is that if we are regularly taught to understand the spiritual life as mainly, if not exclusively, about giving up things, we will never hear the call to engage with life or particular iss...

Just as the word itself suggests, a worldview is an overall view of the world. It’s not a physical view of the world, like the sight of planet Earth you might get from an orbiting space station. Rathe...

Man is pushed by drives. But he is pulled by values.

Before you long for a life that is imperishable, you must accept that you are perishing along with everyone you care about. You must recognize that anything you might accomplish or acquire in this wor...

The boundary between living and nonliving is actually removed in food. Food is natural communion – partaking of the flesh of the world. When I take food, I am eating world matter in general, and in so...

Gaining spiritual life is conditional on suffering loss. We cannot measure our lives in terms of "gain"; they must be measured in terms of "loss." Our real capacity lies not in how...

In March 1845, Henry David Thoreau received a letter from poet William Ellery Channing. “Build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive,” wrote Channing. “I see ...

Psalm 101:3: “I will not set before my eyes anything that is worthless.” The term here—worthless—is a compound, literally: without profit. It is “the quality of being useless, good for nothing.” Pg.11...

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.