by Lucille Turner | Oct 22, 2017 | History and Fiction
In England, Ireland, Scotland and America we celebrate Halloween on October 31st with little understanding of the origins of the festival. Halloween is part of our culture, so we celebrate it as a matter of course, and like many other traditions we are attached to,...
by Lucille Turner | Oct 8, 2017 | History and Fiction
The history of the idea of time is the history of progress. The clock changed the world as the wheel changed the world, except that with a clock you can’t travel backwards; time goes one way only, onwards to the future. The direction of time is intuitively obvious to...
by Lucille Turner | Sep 29, 2017 | Philosophy
The motivation for almost all warfare throughout history has mainly been either economic gain or territorial gain. There have been wars fought over religion, but even these have been fuelled by gain of some kind. The Second World War felt exceptional because there was...
by Lucille Turner | Sep 23, 2017 | History and Fiction
As Christianity spread its influence over Rome’s old empire, with its promise of immortality for those who repented of their sins, the concept of evil and what it represented became a subject of vital importance. In my last post on Sin, Saint Jerome is noted as having...
by Lucille Turner | Sep 15, 2017 | History and Fiction
Sin, as a concept, stands in opposition to virtue. Aristotle examined both these concepts in his writing on Ethics. But he drew the line between deliberate acts of vice and ‘passionate’ ones, saying that there was a difference between a sin committed with intent, and...
