By Laura A. Roser The Bhagavad Gita is a 700-verse Sanskrit scripture that is part of the Hindu epic Mahabharata. It tells the story of a warrior—prince Arjuna—who must decide whether or not to go to war with his cousins to gain rulership over the kingdom. His cause is just, but Isn’t it a sin…
By Laura A. Roser In his book, Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore writes: How you spend your working hours — what you look at, sit on and work with —makes a difference, not only in terms of efficiency but for its effect on your sense of yourself and the direction your imagination takes. Some…
By Randy Petersen Adventures as a History Writer My agent came to me with a great idea. “Did you know that Ben Franklin and George Whitefield were friends? Somebody should write a book about that.” If you don’t know the name George Whitefield, you’re not alone. He was the British preacher who captivated the American colonies…
By Laura A. Roser Blaise Pascal’s Views on Rationality Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, inventor, physicist, writer, and Christian philosopher, wrote in his work Pensées (“Thoughts”) in 1660-62: Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness. Simultaneously Embracing Reason and Lack of Reason Life is full of…
By Laura A. Roser Henry David Thoreau on Living Deliberately In his seminal work, Walden (first published in 1854), Thoreau wrote: However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The…
By Laura A. Roser On Consciousness and How Thought Structures Affect Our Reality Have you ever wondered if reality is subjective? Is what you’re experiencing similar to what other humans are experiencing? Do your senses interpret stimuli the same way as the majority of people around you? Is reality mostly molded by your thoughts, or is…
By Laura A. Roser How Our Environment Shapes Our Thoughts In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), John Locke writes: “We are all a sort of chameleons, that still take a tincture from things near us: nor is it to be wondered at in children, who better understand what they see, than what they hear.” It is…
By Laura A. Roser Zen and the Art of Car Shopping My taste in cars drives my engineer father crazy. I rate a car’s attractiveness over its utility every time — which usually means that I end up with a cute, but temperamental foreign car that’s expensive to fix and costs significantly more than a “more…
By Laura A. Roser Living Between Extremes If you eat too much, you get fat and sick and die. If you eat too little, you waste away and die. The key is eating the right amount of the right foods. This leads to health, vitality, and a long life. Of course, the questions then arise, “What…
By Laura A. Roser In his version of the Bhagavad Gita, Eknath Easwaran writes, “The word Dharma means many things, but its underlying sense is ‘that which supports,’ from the root dhri, to support, hold up, or bear. Generally, dharma implies support from within: the essence of a thing, its virtue, that which makes it…
