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"If Only" at Nine O’clock

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On a fruit fly, the wisdom of hindsight, and the tidiest regret on record.  We are obsessed with time. We optimise our mornings, track our sleep, and read the latest advice on how to add ten years to our lives. Experts forecast the future with great confidence, but the future keeps arriving uninvited. Behind it all lies a quiet wish we should have known sooner: which job to take, which warning to heed, and which people to hold on to while we could. Yet the clearest statement of the problem I have come across belongs to a creature with a single day to live. The Fruit Fly Snoopy has been talking to a fruit fly, which is more than many of us manage with our neighbours. He reports the conversation to Woodstock with a small, contented smile. Some of these creatures, it seems, live only twenty-four hours. This one had a single regret, which he expressed with the composure of someone who has seen the end of the day: “I wish I knew at nine o’clock what I know now.” Consider the econo...
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Dancing in the Leaves: Snoopy and the Gift of an Ordinary Afternoon

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This autumn's news is much like every autumn's. Wars drag on, prices climb, politicians quarrel, and the experts cannot agree whether the end will come by fire, flood, or algorithm. We scroll, we worry, and we go to bed feeling that someone ought to be doing something about it. Yet for Snoopy...   The Dance Goes On Snoopy is wonderfully subversive. The world is full of people who need a cause, a campaign, a grievance, or at least a strong opinion about the state of civilisation. Snoopy needs a pile of leaves. He dances in it, throws himself about with abandon, and finally announces, “I’m hooked on autumn!” Those who know him will know he’s hooked on all the seasons. We have made happiness an extraordinarily complicated business. We pursue it through self-fulfilment, personal development, lifestyle choices, and the careful cultivation of our own importance. Snoopy finds it in the garden, courtesy of a season he did not invent and a tree that has not consulted him about it...
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An Obligation to Our Feet

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  On the meaning of life, the wisdom of hindsight, and the necessity of dancing. Snoopy has been thinking. A dangerous habit for a beagle and a ruinous one for a philosopher. In one cartoon he tells Woodstock about a fruit fly with twenty-four hours to live, whose only regret is that it didn’t know at nine o’clock what it knows at the day’s ending. In another, wearing a scoutmaster’s hat, he leads a troop of small birds up a hill in search of an objective and, when one asks a question, confesses that he has no idea what the meaning of life is. In the third and fourth images, the world is falling apart, and he dances. Lucy is baffled. Surely, she feels, there are graver matters to attend to. Side by side, the four contain a fairly complete theory of the human condition. We climb hills without knowing why. We gain the wisdom to understand the climb only when the daylight starts to fail. Throughout, we have to decide whether we can enjoy ourselves before someone explains the whole b...
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Open Discussion

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The Orange Plague: When Satire Becomes Spectacle

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Six weeks without a post. Illness and family troubles have kept me occupied with the inconvenient business of being a human being. I had hoped to spend my time arguing about the state of the world, rather than being reminded of my own small place in it. Unfortunately, Providence has a habit of interrupting one's plans without first consulting one's editorial calendar. But I am back, and have an article to prove it. I trust the world has managed to muddle along without my assistance, though I cannot guarantee that it has improved in my absence. Normal service, such as it is, resumes below.  Apologies to the Cressie and Lain for the images. One fears you may both be overcome by an attack of the vapours! Introduction One doesn’t expect to find a statue of a naked, golden Donald Trump inside the European Parliament. Yet, for three days earlier this month, there he sat in all his glory in Strasbourg. A gilded figure more than two and a half metres tall, covered in 23-carat gold leaf...
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God's Delight

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"May the LORD rejoice in his works." (Psalm 104:31) The God Who Needs Nothing Genesis does not open by explaining God. It opens with Him speaking, and the first thing said of what He makes is that it is good. Again and again the verdict comes: God saw that it was good. And at the end, complete: "God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good." Before there is a doctrine of God, there is a Maker Who looks at what He has made and delights in it. The doctrine came later, worked out carefully because so much depended on getting it right. God is one, eternal, uncreated, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, good beyond any goodness we can imagine. He is, in the old phrase, actus purus : no potential left unrealised, nothing in Him still waiting to become something else. Aquinas gave the classical formulation: in God, essence and existence are not two things. God is ipsum esse subsistens , subsistent Being itself. Everything else receives its being. Go...
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The Music of Creation

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Preface This is the second of two essays that do not attempt to explain evil away or reduce providence to a formula that removes mystery. They are an invitation to consider how a good God can create a world with a genuine wound in it, and govern that world without either overriding its freedom or abandoning it to itself. The Question of Providence Having asked why a good God permits a world with a wound in it, a second question follows close behind, and it is no easier: how does He govern such a world at all, without becoming either the wound's author or a stranger to it? Ask someone what it means to say God governs the world, and you will usually get one of two pictures. In the first, God is a hand pulling every movement from above. Nothing happens that He does not directly bring into being: the storm, the accident, the choice you made this morning. Free will becomes a kind of illusion, convincing from where we stand, invisible from His side of the curtain. In the second...
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