Monsters at the Margin

VIRTUE IS FOUND at the margins of society more often than at its centre. If this is so, Mary Shelley's Monster is a real find! Her creature is an isolate of great sensitivity, kindness, and insight. Contrary to James Whale's 1931 film of the Creature as a lumbering dolt, Mary Shelley's Monster was modeled on Rousseau's notion of humanity as the "noble savage." The nobility of the Creature is evident as he unveils his chronicle to Victor Frankenstein upon the icy crags of Mount Blanc. Meet Frankenstein's Creature

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Desert Words to Live By

THE DESERT CAN be an empty place where the lost are driven insane by inner demons, or it can be a place of refuge and real where pilgrims escape the insanity of a chaotic world. Our desert experience is determined by how we cope with being alone. Solitude can bring strange illusions and despair or it can strip us of faulty dependence, filling us with a desire for our Creator.

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On Kindness

With all our discussions about how to relate responsibly and with spiritual maturity toward society, various themes have been creeping out of my mental woodwork, converging, and making me reflect upon my feelings about society and my attitudes and behaviours toward it.

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Review of Faceless Killers

What does this to do with Swedish author Henning Mankell or his crime mystery Faceless Killers? This is a book response, not a parental rant against the strange world of technology. Kurt Wallander, Mankell's frumpy, grumpy Swedish crime investigator and I have something in common. We are both in danger of becoming culturally irrelevant, maybe extinct; both of us fear this looming prospect.

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Facets of Fat

ARISTOTLE REPRIMANDED GREENHORN scientists in his Academy for their immature disgust toward the gross and unappealing in nature. “The consideration of the lower forms of life ought not to excite a childish repugnance. In all natural things there is something to move wonder" (Boorstin 51). He believed that all things looked at impartially are manifestations of the divine. Ralph Ralph Waldo Emerson Waldo Emerson extended Aristotle's estimate of the beauty of nature into the process of death itself: “There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful. Even the corpse has

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A Reading Guide For After The Flood

Lovers of books often complain that we read too slowly and wonder if we will ever take the time and effort to master the The Art of Speed Reading. My difficulty is that sometimes, strike that - often, that I need to acquire the Art of Reading Slowly to integrate what I read. I don't do that nearly enough. My habitual approach is to read a book with my mind and my hand outstretched to the read. I read distractedly often merely to get the basic gist, get through to book, and then add another book to my growing list

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Ethics: Duty or Relationships?

Duty has that feel of doing more in terms of law, to perform more and more actions. Those actions seem to be based, if we don't watch it, those actions can be based on rules. You don't not have fornication because you have to obey the rule. You don't do anything because the rule's there. The rule is there because of the love. Not that you have the rule first and then comes the love. I think what is going on is there is a transformation of the human personality that takes place as a result of coming into contact

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Hippies, Hindus, and Trancendentalists

The title I have chosen for a discussion of Emerson's essay, The Transcendentalist, comes from a similar title by Bob Larsen: Hippies, Hindus and Rock and Roll. In his book, Larsen tries to set up nefarious connections between the occultic and pagan world of deepest darkest Africa and India. His thesis is that because rock and roll has a connection to these cultures of paganism it participates in their demonic underpinnings. The reason I chose to parody his title is not only to get some secret revenge on Larsen, who is so obviously racist and simplistic, but also because

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Marriage and Mary Shelley

I WAS SITTING in Merk's restaurant out on Pembina Highway with Bev in 1990 when I solemnly swore that if I were to do it again, I definitely would not want to be married. At the time I k that marriage left a very sour taste in my mouth. It wasn't only that I hadn't taken care of my marriage of seventeen years well enough to make it worthwhile, it was the whole idea of being married that irked me. I joked about marriage being a socio-economic relationship which was merely functional to get a mortgage

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