“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.”
~Thomas Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, 1819
A couple of weeks ago I read C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. It changed the way I look at ethics, and had ramifications in many areas of life. One [...]

What’s a good burger? Wayne Bonnell, amateur burger critic and husband of my old piano teacher, warns that the burger ratings on his website are subjective. However, he says that his “criteria include taste and texture of the meat, taste of the cheese, bun quality, and bun to burger ratio.”
On the walls of the Five [...]

St. Thomas of Canterbury was an interesting man. Caught up in the political affairs of his time, this good churchman became embroiled by conflict and was killed by servants of an angry king. I just finished reading T.S. Lewis’s play, Murder in the Cathedral, which tells the story of his death. It is an amazing [...]

What? A new blog? Why, this one is only two months old! Yes, but I’ve enjoyed it so much that I’m starting another one. Actually, I’m reviving an attempted blog startup that I abandoned about two years ago.
But don’t worry. It has changed and so have I. Florzel, Prince of Bohemia is the blog where [...]

“With separate ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ free love has done,
For one is both and both are one in love.”
~Christina Rosetti, Monna Innominata: Sonnet of Sonnets
A few years ago a topic in my high school debate league was whether we ought to value cultural diversity above cultural unity. It was an interesting topic, but the broader question [...]

I just looked at the sidebar of this blog and noticed that the “thoughts” category contains far more posts than any other one. And really, all the categories could be put under “thoughts.” This situation reflects the purpose of Abdiel Blog.
Although some bloggers focus on special topics such as technology or politics, nearly all of [...]

I’ve been thinking about my June 10 post on excuses. I was talking about shallow, social excuses, but there is a much deeper, more harmful kind - personal excuses. These are justifications we make in our minds, often unconsciously, for wrong behavior.
For example, this last year or so I have been really busy with college [...]

A couple of years ago I read Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Niel Postman. Using phrases such as “the epistemology of television,” he argued that the world of TV and mass media has fundamentally re-shaped how we view all aspects of life. In his eyes, the change was not favorable. TV, he claimed, inherently promotes [...]

Now, I am not a philosopher, nor do I know what the great philosophers have said on this subject in the past. I have no qualifications whatsoever to write about happiness. But I claim the blogger’s right: to write even if I don’t know what I’m talking about.
I asked myself a question today. What [...]