ESSAYS
WRITTEN IN AND
AGAINST THE ZEITGEIST
November 2016
as well as:
PENSÉES: THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS
January 2022
BEERT
C. VERSTRAETE
Copyright © 2017, 2022, Beert C. Verstraete
ESSAYS WRITTEN IN AND AGAINST THE ZEITGEIST
Preface: Nov. 12, 2016
As I was
nearing the end of writing my memoirs, I began to weigh in my mind the
possibility of more non-academic writing and decided upon a series of short
essays in which I would reflect on contemporary politics, society, culture,
literature, and the Christian faith, a good part of this blended with personal
experiences, of mine, whether recent or of long ago. You will not be surprised
that the Greek and Roman classics often make their appearance.
Anyone who
has read my memoirs (which were meant only for family and friends and therefore
privately printed) will probably feel at times a certain déja vu, but I hope that he or she will appreciate with me the
fresh opportunity I have now to expand on what I wrote earlier.
Much of
what I have to say comes with the gravitas which is its due, but I will
do my best to bring in the light touch as well. I love the clarion call, so
terse and expressive at the same time, of the German Zeitgeist (“Spirit
of the Age”), so I have included it in my title. My intention was to start on this project
almost immediately after I had finished my memoirs; however, for a while I was
so absorbed by my anxiety over the outcome of the American presidential
election, and then by the widespread response of dismay resulting from the election
of Donald Trump, that I could not bring myself to make a start.
Commiseration
with friends about this state of affairs has truly cleared my mind and I am
ready now. Literary inspiration has come above all from Michel Montaigne's Essays
and Blaise Pascal's Pensées, but I certainly do not delude myself that
my compositions will in any way approach the classic stature of these works.
FOLLOWING IS A SELECTION OF ESSAYS POSTED IN PDF FORMAT
To read "PENSÉES: THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS"
see PDF "PENSÉES" at the end of PDF "ESSAYS"
Table of Contents:
1. A Jekyll and Hyde Trump? A Transformed Trump?
A Possibly Encouraging Lesson from
Roman History—with Postscript
2. Christmas Lights: “And the Light Shines in
the Darkness”
3. Homo Deus: Man / Humanity as God
4. Jacques Ellul (1912-1994): A Thinker of “Curmudgeon Luddism”?
5. The Triumph of Grace in Ellul's Confessional
Theology
6. On the Past Coming into Our View
7. A Tale of Two Countries
8. A (Very Short) Tale of Two Freeways
9. Ecclesiastes and the Meditations of Marcus
Aurelius:
Two very different but not altogether
dissimilar voices from Antiquity
10. Classical Greek and
Judaeo-Christian Humanism Compared in Sophocles' Antigone and Psalm 8
11. A Dutch “Mountain,” Then
and Now
12. Reflections on Vimy and
Word War I—with Postscript
13. The Coming of Spring in
Catullus 46 and Horace Odes 1.4 and 1.9
14. Highrise, Lowrise:
Reflections on Contemporary Architecture
15. From a Tent to the Met:
Getting to Know Opera in My Own Slow Way—with Postscript
16. Memories and Reminders
of Past Times in Amherst, Nova Scotia
17. Theodor Fontane: Getting to Know and Appreciate a Great German
Novelist
18. The Meaning of Jesus'
Death
19. The Coming of a Dark Age
in the Last Century, a Golden Age almost 2000 Years Earlier
20. A Vast Grey Sea
21. "PENSÉES: THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS" see PDF "PENSÉES" at the end of PDF "ESSAYS"
