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Sharon Lebell The Art of Living, a 130-page paperback, offers a highly condensed version of the wisdom of Epictetus [Eh-pick-tee-tis] (55 BC -135AD), a slave in the Roman Empire, who is among the most heralded Roman philosophers and possibly the best known stoic, along with Zeno. His philosophy was revived in Tom Wolfe’s bestselling novel, […]
Henry David Thoreau Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) is known as a vehement advocate of individual rights and as an opponent of social conformity, as articulated in his best known works, Walden and Civil Disobedience. In Walden, he chronicles his time living largely as hermit, in the woods, on the shores of Walden Pond, in Concord […]
Common Sense, Age of Reason, Rights of Man, Etc. (1737-1809) Thomas Paine was the impassioned voice of the American Revolution. His articles, pamphlets and books provided inspiration, courage and impetus to American revolutionaries. As John Adams wrote in 1805, “I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on [America’s] inhabitants […]
A Critique of the Bible Arthur Blech This book (CAS) joins Misquoting Jesus (Erman), Sins of the Scripture (Bishop Spong), Age of Reason (Thomas Paine), Why I Am Not A Christian (Bertrand Russell), and similar books, all of which point out contradictions in the Bible. Although published almost […]
By Andrew Skilton Andrew Skilton, a Brit, was ordained a member of the Western Buddhist Order in 1979, and he published this book in 1994. He has a degree in theology and has studied at Oxford. That’s all of the good news. A Concise History of Buddhism isn’t a history at all. It […]
Edited by Epiphanius Wilson Confucius (c. 550-478 BC), which means “Master K’ung”, has had more influence on the Chinese than any other person. His statue stands in most Chinese villages to this day. He was a student of Lao Tzu, the father of Taoism (pronounced Dow-ism), and the inspiration of Mencius, another beloved guru of […]
David Hume (1711-1776) David Hume, a Scot from Edinburgh, lived in a day when witches were burned at the stake, along with those who questioned their preachers in public. It was literally life-threatening to be a skeptic, but Hume was unabashedly candid and bravely so and was condemned and discredited all of his life by […]
Translation by T.W. Higginson Discourses offers the wisdom of Epictetus [Eh-pick-tee-tis] (55 BC -135AD), a slave in the Roman Empire (who is among the most heralded Roman philosophers and who likely walked the same streets as Christ and may have even known him) is likely the best known stoic. His philosophy was revived in Tom […]
David Hume (1711-1776) As much as I have loved David Hume’s Essays, I find his treatises, such as his Enquiry on Human Understanding (EHU), recondite to the point of abject exhaustion. To unjustly over-simplify, EHU might be congealed into his observation, which time has rendered axiomatic, “The most lively thought is still inferior to the […]
Barnestone & Meyer, Editors The Gnostic Bible (TGB) brings together 1,000 pages of selected books, letters and other works that could and/or arguably should be in either the Old or New Testaments of the Christian Bible and/or in Jewish, Muslim, Zorasterian, Greco-Roman or other religious scriptures. Most prominent among these, to Christians, are the letters […]