THE NEW JERUSALEM

1 week ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Andrew Klavan

Sponk. Funnily enough, the moment you quoted your favorite line from Aristotle, I remembered being struck by it myself the last time I read the Ethics, about seven years ago. How sensible it was, how startling — common sense not always being the first trait you find in famous philosophers.

1 week ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Spencer Klavan

Pops,I can tell you made a big impression on Aristotle back in the day, because he actually responded to your concern about the golden mean in a passage at the beginning of his Nicomachean Ethics. It might be my favorite thing he ever wrote. And he didn’t even credit you in so much as a lousy footnote. Jerk. Anyway I like this passage so much, and I think it’s so important, that I spent some time yesterday getting into the Greek and translating the key sentences myself.

1 week ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Andrew Klavan

SpencherI want to take up where I left off last week: the difference between searching for your humanity in a set of rules and finding it in a relationship with the God-man. Over the weekend, it made me think a lot about Aristotle. Now, on the one hand, you have read Aristotle more widely and deeply than I have. On the other hand, he and I used to hang out back in the day. And he was always yammering about the golden mean. “The golden mean, the golden mean,” that’s all I ever heard from him.

1 week ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Spencer Klavan

Video games can be art. Whenever I say this, I am told that they’re addictive, or that many of them are brainless trash. I accept these points, but they’re irrelevant. To say that something can be art doesn’t mean it always is, or that it’s always healthy. “Art” is not a synonym for “good” or “good for you,” as Plato would be the first to point out were he alive to agree with me—which he surely would. Great art, though, is another matter. Great art expands the soul, renews the mind, informs the heart.

2 weeks ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Andrew Klavan

Spensoir!A comment on your last post from a subscriber with the melodious name of Zzzmdf begins with the words, “Much of life’s wisdom can be found in the original Star Trek.” I am not joking when I say that almost the exact same words went through my own mind. I was thinking about the relationship between the Starship Enterprise’s Captain James Kirk and his First Mate, the thoroughly logical and totally unemotional Mr. Spock.