We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A funny-sounding word, almost as if it were the opposite of paranoia (which entails projecting one's bad stuff into the outside world.) Metanoia is usually used for spiritually-based internal changes based on a deep and ruthless personal review, followed by penitence and/or confession. In fact, tenets of AA are based on the concept of metanoia.
In a more secular context (despite just coming off of Lent), it is never a bad idea, however unpleasant, to fearlessly do an honest review of one's character flaws and weaknesses, covert malevolences, selfishness, evil thoughts, unhelpful impulses, life errors, failures, ignorances, etc. etc. It's assumed that everybody is a mess or insufficient in some way, or in many ways. It takes great courage to review one's terrible shortcomings, and not one of us is all we can be.
I generally advise people to appraise their strengths, competencies, potentials, and virtues at the same time. Still, it's the flaws that need attention.
I learned the term from this wonderful and wide-ranging (including God and Jesus, free speech, and lots of history) conversation between Prof. Peterson and the thoughtful Australian politician John Anderson. An intellectual treat:
Steyn womders why millions of reputable Americans are spending hours going through immigration etc on every international flight home, when anyone from anywhere can just walk across the Rio Grande:
It's about W.H. Auden's humanities class at Michigan in 1941. This is not mass-market, fast-food education.
Its syllabus resurfaced a few years ago and provoked much commentary on its mass of 6,000 pages of the most powerful and challenging literature in the canon: The Divine Comedy in full, four Shakespeares, Pascal’s Pensées, Horace’s odes, Volpone, Racine, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Moby-Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, Faust, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Kafka, Rilke, T.S. Eliot. Auden even included nine operas. Opera in the 1940s was a popular art form, with millions of people tuning in each week to the Met’s Saturday broadcast, but it’s hard to imagine anything less consonant with millennials’ attention span than one of Wagner’s Teutonic enormities. Auden assigned three of them.
According to the guide, feminist geographers "challenge the masculinist formation of science as objective, gender-neutral, and value-free" by studying topics such as "spatial subjectivities" and "emotional geographies."
"I drink beer whenever I can get my hands on any," Merton confessed. "I love beer, and by that very fact, the world." But even in the hermitage, Merton struggled with other people's infatuation with his hermit identity.
In an age where there is much talk about "being yourself" I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else. Rather, it seems to me that when one is too intent on "being himself" he runs the risk of impersonating a shadow. . . I am accused of living in the woods like Thoreau instead of living in the desert like St. John the Baptist. All I can answer is that I am not living "like anybody." Or "unlike anybody." We all live somehow or other, and that's that. It is a compelling necessity for me to be free to embrace the necessity of my own nature.
16:1 When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him.
16:2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb.
16:3 They had been saying to one another, "Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?"
16:4 When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back.
16:5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed.
16:6 But he said to them, "Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him.
16:7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you."
16:8 So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid.
Betrayal is a common catechism in the Church of the Self. Hymns to Me are the hosannas it hurls at an empty heaven. The politics of such a church require as First Things a rejection of all things not of, by, and for the self. A religion or a country of the people, by the people, and for the people is high on the list of things to be abhorred since it requires an allegiance that is other than to the self. The Church of the Self effectively mandates treason, and we see it now manifested daily in the bright robes of “unstiffled dissent” which shroud an increasingly vicious anti-Americanism that has its roots, not in reasoned criticism, but in unreasoned hate. We hear the hate but what we have not been allowed to see is the treason behind it.
I'm not telling her to go away. And you shouldn't be either if you want the Republicans to keep winning. The more Hillary talks, the more she reminds us what really happened
"Sorting yourself out is harder than you think." It's just a good chat about foolish youth who want to save the world. Peterson is right. It's adolescent narcissism.
The point of Trump was that, unlike the boy scouts, he'd play smashmouth. And the kind of guy who's willing to do that is so rare on the Republican bench that you can't afford to be too picky.
I always have crafted my own "studies" in Judaism for the major, and some minor, Jewish holidays. This time I am so impressed with a column written by a scholar at the solid and liberal Hartman Institute in Israel, which my esteemed rabbi attends each year and which offers courses and speakers around the US at synagogues.
This column confronts the anti-Israel agenda of trying to disassociate Jews from our thousands of years of roots and attachment in favor of relative newcomers, many indeed only since Israel brought relative prosperity to the formerly barren desert. Most recently, UNESCO ignored the Jewish temples on the Mount in Jerusalem -- our holiest place-- instead just referring to the site by later Arab names.
Here's the column, well worth the read, about Jews as a people and a religion, with Passover and its narrative being highlighted for its a central portion of our daily prayers, our ethic, and our unending attachment to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount-- regardless of diaspora and persecutions.
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a member of the Institute's iEngage Project, and a contributing editor to The New Republic. His latest book, Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation, was named the 2013 National Jewish Book Council Book of the Year. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, has just been released in paperback by HarperCollins.
A New Kenneth Clark Biography 
From 
Drinking several coffees a day 