Then and Now
Now that I’ve concluded the first season of my podcast episodes on happiness, I can return to thinking about lived religion!
An Enchanted World: The Shared Religious Landscape of Late Antiquity now has many (positive) reviews, and I have participated in several podcast interviews about it. This is one of my favorites, with Classical Wisdom Speaks (by Anya Leonard), which I did several months ago although it was just released.
Most of the things I worry about never happen. This should be reassuring, but my mind draws the opposite conclusion: clearly the worrying worked. We are built to anticipate danger, and occasionally that ability saves us. More often, though, it leaves … [Continue reading] about Happiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life: Episode 8: Worry, Control, and the Art of Letting Go
A restaurant with no menu sounds liberating. You can order anything you want, prepared any way you like. It also sounds exhausting. Every possibility remains open, and every disappointing choice belongs entirely to you. We usually treat freedom as an … [Continue reading] about Happiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life: Episode 7: What Freedom is For
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We tend to measure a life by what it produced: the work completed, the recognition earned, the things left behind. Virtue asks us to use a different measure. What kind of person did we become while doing all of that? Aristotle believed that we become … [Continue reading] about Happiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life: Episode 6: Virtue and the Elephant
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Nothing lasts. The work, the worries, the possessions, the reputation, even the memory of having been here—all of it eventually disappears. Ecclesiastes does not answer this problem by discovering some hidden permanence. It asks whether the … [Continue reading] about Happiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life: Episode 5: Pleasure Under the Sun