On May 5, 1813, Søren Kierkegaard was born in a well-off home in the northern European town of Copenhagen. The Great Dane's works have found their way woven into fiction and philosophy, especially via that of the 20th-century Existentialists like Heidegger and Sartre.
When a controversial political figure dies, I find it interesting that every college student on Facebook automatically becomes a political science expert.
Why do we lose those we love? Why do important parts of our world vanish? These are not questions for a detective story, existential or not. But they are the questions to which, in the end, Holt's wonderfully ambitious book leads us.
Darwin Deez's sophomore record, Songs For Imaginative People is one that will get Deez's listeners thinking about life beyond the beat; of his music, and beyond what one might accept as the natural rhythm of life.
Eons away from that threatening morning in Manhattan, the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis continues to stay in plain sight. It provokes an existential question: Can time run out?
Yom Kippur arrives to remind us that time is limited. We beat our chests, the Jewish defibrillation, to revive our hearts, to awaken ourselves to our own swift passage. Today, though, on this day, it is our privilege to be alive.
Neighbors lingered a long time on the lawns and street, long after the emergency workers and police had left. There was nothing we could do to help, but nobody seemed quite ready to give up the sense of solidarity that emerges around such threatening experiences.
Danny Rubin's original premise for Groundhog Day could be summed up in its core existential dilemma: "A man repeats the same day over and over again." The eBook approaches Rubin's writer's draft of the script in an equally existential way.
"Meaning" had been expunged from mainstream scholarship for some time. Those attempts -- to take it out of research -- have been, in fact, counter-productive: meaning is very much at the center of the human experience.
As an African American that knows historically the Jim Crow system of segregation affirmed by the case of Plessy v. Ferguson which made it the law of the land in separating us from having the opportunities of those who felt privileged to exercise such power.
However much I'd thought it would be neat to delve into mysticism and spirituality with David Cronenberg, it was just as enlightening to hear how he lives without them.
As I was listening to His Holiness, a question sprung full-blown to my mind: "Can, and if so, how, can those who have lost their compassion, or never had it to begin with, regain it?
There seems to be a belief that "faith" is the rejection of the world as it is; a retreat in to fantasy and wishful thinking. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, "Faith means not wanting to know what is true."
I like to imagine what our lives and society would be like if we lived in a world that encouraged and valued existential maturity. What would it be like if we were taught and motivated to connect to a deep sense of self and to live our lives from that place?
Ask two Buddhists about what they believe, and you won't just get two different answers -- you might get three or four. On the one hand, the sheer size and diversity of the Buddhist tradition makes it impossible to say what "Buddhists" think.
This is a generation that has never settled for outdated traditions, and collectively men over 50 will create new images of male aging. The sociology of Boomer male aging has vast implications for business, from edgy new products to inspired services.
But there is more going on than mere survival and reproduction. Jesus is an existential question mark for what we hold most true, good and beautiful in the human drama.
More unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life. -- Raine...
How should we live? I look for answers in books. And War and Peace is a source to be mined again and again, a book that will never grow dusty for the re-start it offers.