sta-serial

Sometime early in 1599 (and it is a shame the exact date is not known, because a global holiday should be celebrated on that day, with...

‘Life unexamined is not worth living.’ So, I have had a go at it, with more, I trust, of Chaucer’s grateful happiness than Dante’s...

Many people have found that solid reality has led them to a religious faith. ‘I begin through the grass once again to be bound to the...

‘What a discovery that would be – a system that did not shut out,’ writes Virginia Woolf in her diary. Perhaps I can cheekily suggest...

There is one very simple, very useful question I ask all my clients about their gardens: ‘What is it for?’ It is, surprisingly, a...

In Moby-Dick, as soon as the Pequod has set sail ‘and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic’, Ishmael pauses for a...

I am aware that I may sound like Miss Pollyanna Pangloss, finding ‘truth’ in oak trees and centipedes, and cooing over woodlice and...

I am lying in the bath on an unhurried morning reading a poetry anthology. It is a good bath; it is a good anthology too but I’m not in...

STA is initially a personal rather than a public philosophy. However politically, economically and technologically interconnected we...

We are nearing the home straight – ten chapters to go. So, to recap, in case, in this deluge of words, you have lost your bearings (or...

How does STA – an acceptance of the seemingly real facts I have listed about us and the world, and the ‘natural duties’ which I claim...

I am making the rather large claim that Praise, Love, Creativity and Haecceity are our ‘Natural Duties’ because they are the behaviour of...

‘Each person has his own gift from God – one person has one kind of gift and the next person has a different one.’ St Paul is clear, if a...

It is through our haecceity that we praise, love and create. It is the mode in which we perform those natural duties. Each will...

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each...

Acculturation appears in other guises too. Ancient Greek literary criticism spoke of mimesis – the attempt by an artist to represent...

If, as I claim, creativity is our birthright, what goes wrong? I think there are two main obstacles, the individual and the social –...

In the bleak early years of World War Two, getting middle-aged and fat, seeing the European civilisation he adored tearing itself to...

These two cultural artefacts – the shimmering silk cape and the Harvest Thanksgiving invitation – superficially very different, are both...

But without a parable spake he not unto them. (Mark 4.34) Once before a time, a something suddenly emerged out of the prevailing...