Author: Douglas Brooks

I’ve recently laced into the idea the spiritual life has final goals (or goals at all), that it is a pursuit of happiness. But this can lead to a few mistaken impressions including that we are advancing the idea that discontent is for its own sake, that this process makes us more “unhappy,” and...

Allow me to be contrarian. You were expecting?  Let’s start by saying that happiness is way, way overrated. I can think of 330 million things I would rather pursue than happiness. That makes me damn near unAmerican and certainly no one ever mistook me for a Buddhist but for my love of metaphysical annihilation at death....

Robert Mueller’s friends and colleagues have too much respect for him as a person to say much of anything negative about his manner or his findings. I too do not doubt for a moment his integrity. I think he thinks he did the right thing and that he doesn’t need to explain himself further....

An article in the Washington Post is chocked full of data points about why Americans won’t elect a professed atheist. The author argues we need one and that may or may not be true. He understands that won’t happen but not for the core reasons. I think the author needs a further distinction to...

Understanding Nihilism It seems like the right day to write about nihilism. There is a puzzling collusion of facts to consider. Nihilism isn’t a metaphor, it’s not a story we tell because of some inherited past. We may have nihilistic stories but there’s always some way we try to redirect them. That can fail...

Words like “disparity” or “incongruity” don’t do the matter justice. I mean something more like “chasm,” in this case the chasm between the legal and the ethical. Our president and his criminal mob are not being prosecuted because their acts or their position within the legal system suggests that their behavior has not risen...

I think I learned more about being a capable contrarian from Dean Miller than just about anyone. Examples abound, of course, but few live up to it. Dean loved John Masters’ novels and Nevil Shute. He was also a nevil in that Urban Dictionary kinda’ way. Guys like this are just an anachronism nowadays....

For President’s Day I reread Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Its most familiar bits about malice towards none and charity toward all remind us that this hope was not realized but reversed in the aftermath of his death. The Confederate traitors largely did not pay for their crimes of treason but rather freed black people...

You can always count on the lessons of religion to help you explain the worst of politics. That’s because both are rooted in fraud and some kind of hope for the better. We’re so confused about that we can’t quit. If there is a best too then never forget it comes with its shadows....

Most folks don’t register self-consciously that they have “a view of history.”  But truth is, they do. For progressives the present is the beginning of the future. For conservatives the present is the end of the past. For the one there is a horizon of hope and concern about forgetting past lessons; for the...