The Philosophical Optimist

[Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to publish a note on this theme on the 14 th , but here it is, better late than never].                  Giacomo Chevalier de Seingalt Casanova, the man known to the world simply as "Casanova," was the proverbial lover, and a prolific writer who recorded his amorous adventures for later generations to read.   Although he was not a man most honorable men would think of as a role model, there is one lesson we can learn from his life, and how he lived it.   That lesson is simply this truth: every woman is lovely, and needs to be loved.             This was the secret, we are told, of Casanova's amorous success.   He treated each woman as if she were indeed, the loveliest woman in the world; for, for him, for the moment, she was.   His error was not in viewing each woman as lovely, b...

            Ours is a postdiluvian era.   The deluge that we have come through, and in whose aftermath we now live, is feminism, in all its various waves.   Gone are the days when the Jetsons would have an episode mocking Jane’s desire to learn how to drive, along with the very idea of “lady drivers” (what Precambrian stratum did that sort of thinking belong to, anyway?).   Now, we are more likely to see television shows where the women are equal partners with the men (in numbers and in power), if not the leaders of their respective groups.   Such is indeed an example of positive progress, and the sort of spiritual development that constitutes genuine progress, and not just an increase of our power over nature that so often is called by that name.             Still, the waves of feminism keep coming, and some feminists, it appears, will not be happy u...

“[He made] the stars also”—Genesis 1.16b             Growing up Christian in the Bible Belt of the American South is no doubt different from growing up some other places.   In such an environment it is not at all strange for someone to ask you for your favorite verse of scripture.   As a lifelong learner and a teacher, my personal favorite was always Christ’s words, “You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free”; for as another wise man once wrote, “truth is truth, / To th’ end of reck’ning” (Isabella, from William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure V.i.45-46).             Still, as we played these occasional games of scripture quotation, there was always some wisenheimer who would quote John 11.35.   You had to be a wisenheimer to quote John 11.35 because it is the shortest single verse in the English Bible.   There, in the story of the ...