A few weeks ago, in a moment of some haste, I sold all my bookshelves. Sleek, shiny, and black, they were from Ikea and had, given their age, survived fairly well.  In the course of several moves from Montréal to Toronto and back, they had been taken apart and put back together one too many…

For the wit of man cannot for dullness keep the right way to search out truth, but strayeth in diverse errors, and as it were groping in darkness, oftentimes stumbleth, till at length it wander and vanishes away, so in seeking truth, it doth betray how unfit it is to seek and find truth. Jean…

✚ It has often been said that Plutarch educated Europe. To understand why, Shakespeare’s name need only be mentioned. For Plutarch’s textual corpus was one upon which the bard could easily draw. Shakespeare obviously mined the Parallel Lives for his own artistic purposes. But its many considerations of the situated human character, and the different…

We’re now well into October, 2017, and Jagmeet Singh has been elected as leader of the New Democratic Party. He is the first person of a visible minority to attain that role in Canada. An important aspect of this leadership race, as with most, was about contrast. How did the candidates compare with one another…

Albert Camus may not be a character in the second season of “Fargo,” but Noreen Vanderslice (Emily Haine) is repeatedly shown reading her way through one of his most famous texts. The fundamental subject of the The Myth of Sisyphus is this: it is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a meaning; therefore…

✚ Recently I heard a phrase about the Bible, said almost in passing, that sounds eminently reasonable stated on its own. To understand the Bible we have “to take it as it is.” This possibly supercilious saying gives me pause. For I think it expresses a deeply-seated human urge to shore up the sensibility of…