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AUTHORS FOR A NEW AGE

Alexandria: How Christianity Destroyed the Pagan Culture of the Hellenistic World

 GAITHER STEWART, HISTORY, Political Philosophy  3 Responses »
Mar 162016
 
Library of Alexandria

The ruins of the Library of Alexandria. Photo by Behn Liu Song. (CC BY-SA 3.0)

=By= Gaither Stewart

“To Certain People There Comes A Day When They Must Say The Great Yes Or The Great No…”

And if you can’t shape your life the way you want, at least try as much as you can not to degrade it…

You said, “I will go to another land, I will go to another sea….
 Always you will arrive in this city. To another land-do not hope-
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have ruined your life here
in this little corner, you have destroyed it in the whole world,…

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Murder in the Cathedral: A Study of Power Relations

 GAITHER STEWART, Political Philosophy  No Responses »
Jan 312016
 
Holy See

The Holy See

=By= Gaither Stewart

The worldwide influence of the Roman Catholic Church emanates from the Holy See,which is the Church’s central government headed by the Pope and physically located within the territory of the Vatican State inside the city of Rome with a population of 821. The Holy See has diplomatic relations with world nations which maintain two separate embassies in Rome: one to Italy and one to the Holy See. Now why the hell, one wonders, should Argentina or the USA, China or Gabon maintain diplomatic relations with a church? Likewise the Holy See has its embassies around the world, the nunciatures, while from day to day the Roman Church insists on meddling in Italy’s and world affairs. Today the Roman Catholic is effectively blocking new legislationon on same sex marriages and concommitant rights in Italy and other countries. One of the first demonstrative acts of each new pope is a triumphant cortege through the streets of “Italy”, just across the Tiber River from the Vatican.

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Possibility—Probability of Nuking Russia

 GAITHER STEWART, Political Philosophy  1 Response »
Jan 242016
 

US nuclear weapons=By= Gaither Stewart

By pure chance the two events occurred simultaneously: On a summer morning I read a reference to Aristotle’s discussion of possibility and probability in Meyer H. Abrams’ book, The Mirror and the Lamp, (in 1998 labeled by Modern Library one of the one hundred greatest English-language non-fiction books of the twentieth century). On the same day, I read several press articles concerning the demands of neocon madmen in the U.S. to “pull the trigger” on Russia, Iran and/or Syria

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Reading Lenin in Modern Rome

 Featured, GAITHER STEWART, HISTORY, Political Philosophy, POLITIKON  No Responses »
Jan 212016
 
Bogdanov, Gorki and Lenin, playing chess in Capri (1908)

Bogdanov, Gorki and Lenin, playing chess in Capri (1908)

=By= Gaither Stewart

A bit of Lenin before breakfast gives you the strength of a hundred camels in the courtyard. (My adaptation of a Paul Bowles’ Arab adage)

(Rome) Il signore Drin Drin, Capri fishermen called Lenin in 1910 and 1912 when the revolutionary and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya visited the Russian writer Maxim Gorky in his villa on the now famous island near Naples. Lenin did not speak Italian but he had heard the men he learned to fish with use a word he understood as drin drin (in Italian the onomatopoeia associated with ring or buzz) so the day he felt a bite on his pole, he shouted “drin drin.” Thus Vladimir Ilyich acquired his only known non-revolutionary nickname.

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