This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If we persist in encouraging and educating only the intellect in our schools, we will inevitably create an instrumental conception of life, in which all human activity will be valued as a means to an end, never for itself.
What is between one person and another is emptiness, nothingness, a space or field in which we can meet, talk, love, hate, hurt, nurture, encourage, and otherwise engage in ethically significant activity with one another. The between is the place wherein we are able to interact with one another, and it is a field of possibility, an opportunity as much as an emptiness to fill. Leaving the notion of emptiness to one side for the present, the betweenness of men and women works itself out in the way called “ethics,” which occasions and is the description of the consensual rules and structures of social existence.
Ethics | Existence | Hate | Love | Men | Opportunity | Present | Space |
Government is everywhere to a great extent controlled by powerful minorities, with an interest distinct from that of the mass of the people.
Government | People |
In your daily life, you can treat people you meet in a way that strengthens them in spirit through genuine interest or respect… not a patronizing or false sense of sincerity… but rather a genuine curiosity and respect for each individual you meet… Your actions do make a lasting impact on each person you encounter. It’s an enormous responsibility to take seriously how you treat the people in your life, and a great joy to know you have acted with caring, warmth, and love.
Curiosity | Individual | Joy | Life | Life | Love | People | Respect | Responsibility | Sense | Sincerity | Spirit | Respect |
The bare fact is that truth cannot be tolerant and cannot admit compromise or limitations that scientific research looks on the whole field of human activity as its own, and must adopt an uncompromisingly critical attitude towards any other power that seeks to usurp any part of its province.
God must become an activity in our consciousness.
Consciousness | God |
Could the mind have an existence entirely independent of the central nervous system?... Scientific evidence that not only was her brain not working, it specifically demonstrated the absence of all cortical activity when these conversations actually took place. So where could these brand-new memories have been created?... Imagine the implications of the notion that quanta of conscious energy could exist independently in the Universe, able to enter from anywhere, at any time.
Absence | Energy | Evidence | Existence | Mind | System | Time | Universe |
The transformation from non-living to living requires two steps. First, environmental sources must provide the energy needed to add an atom or two (also taken from the environment) to a molecular complex. The second step, the process is reversed; the added atoms and energy have to be returned to the environment – otherwise nothing more than a chemical activity is occurring. Thus, right at life’s beginning, natural selection seems inevitable.
Beginning | Energy | Inevitable | Life | Life | Nothing | Right |
The public interest is best served by the free exchange of ideas.
The liturgy, like the feast, exists not to educate but to seduce people into participating in common activity of the highest order, where one is freed to learn things which cannot be taught.
The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.
Values are goals which behavior strives to realize. Any activity which is oriented toward the accomplishment of some end is a value-oriented activity.
Accomplishment | Behavior | Goals |
The dominant values of activity and productivity, the overwhelming importance of close family ties as well as friendships, the reliance on good health, and now, in old age, the concern with the depletion of one’s life savings and the fear of senility and dependence are commonly held attitudes…
Age | Dependence | Family | Fear | Good | Health | Life | Life | Old age | Old |
Prayer is one human activity where any inner suggestion of triumph, any shy satisfaction is most likely to be false.
Prayer |
Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old by deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul… You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.
Confidence | Despair | Doubt | Faith | Fear | Hope | Ideals | People | Self | Self-confidence | Soul | Old |
One hundred years after its invention, film art still occupies a marginal place in academic circles. The very activity of watching television is routinely dismissed as inherently inferior to the activity of reading, regardless of content. But narrative beauty is independent of medium. Oral tales, pictorial stories, plays, novels, movies, and television shows can all range from the lame and sensationalist to the heartbreaking and illuminating. We need every available form of expression and all the new ones we can muster to help us understand who we are and what we are doing.
Art | Beauty | Invention | Need | Novels | Reading | Television | Art | Beauty | Understand |
At particular epochs of their life, [children] reveal an intense and extraordinary interest in certain objects and exercises, which one might look for in vain at a later age… Such attention is not the results of mere curiosity; it is more like a burning passion. A keen emotion first rises from the depths of the unconscious, and sets in motion a marvelous creative activity in contact with the outside world, thus building up consciousness.
Age | Attention | Children | Consciousness | Curiosity | Life | Life | Passion | World |
We are not born in our full development but with a capacity for good an evil; we are begotten as well without virtue as without vice, and before the activity of our own personal will there is nothing in man but what God has stored in him.
Capacity | Evil | God | Good | Man | Nothing | Virtue | Virtue | Will | God |