Fencing Bear at Prayer

"Since beliefs are largely unconscious and are not simply derived from experience, and since clearly, at least for most people, beliefs change, the question arises, how do they change?  This is too complicated a question to address, because the factors that create change are too numerous and because the possibility of change cannot itself be divorced from beliefs about change.  Moreover, it is difficult to distinguish change in belief from modification or refinement of belief or from simple exchange by which a person's present beliefs are inversions of former beliefs now rejected, as is so often true of atheistic beliefs.  Finally, it is as much to be expected that a person will become more entrenched in beliefs when they become conscious as that the person will reject them.  I would say that in our culture beliefs change primarily because of the lingering notion that to have them is to be unenlightened and that full enfranchisement in the culture is tied to dissolvi...

It's out there, I know it. I even occasionally catch glimpses of it as I am driving to and from fencing practice. Even so, it amazes me that some people--i.e. other writers--seem to profess to know anything about it, at least on a scale larger than, say, the several hundred or maybe even thousand people they happen to encounter on a regular basis in their everyday lives. How do they do it? I suppose, in part, I try to do the same thing, if with a time period somewhat distant from ours, but in actual fact I know (and am--I am not embarrassed to note--somewhat comforted to realize) that what we actually know about what medieval people thought, for example, about Christianity, is limited to a few dozen writers at most, tops a few hundred. Indeed, if one spent one's lifetime reading nothing but the works of these authors, it would probably be possible to read almost everything they wrote, that is, insofar as it survives. Nobody could do that with even what is published in a s...

It’s so amazing, it’s almost impossible fully to articulate. I have spent, yes, another week in the Manuscripts Reading Room at the British Library copying out texts, particularly Hours and Psalters of the Blessed Virgin Mary. (For those of you who are wondering what it is that historians do all day, for medievalists, at least, this is part of it.) Okay, so maybe that’s not so amazing, although I am fairly impressed at how well I can read the variety of scripts. After all, I do have a laptop which, thanks to the Apple Corporation, means that all the copying I am doing involves not quill pen and ink, but simply typing.* It is, I admit, slightly burdensome having constantly to go to the Formatting Palette whenever I want to change font size or color so as to reproduce as closely as I can in Microsoft Word the overall appearance of the texts.** But, then, of course, the scribes who made the books I am reading had not only to write everything—EVERYTHING—out by hand, but also make all...