On the Square Today

Peter Leithart describes Rupert Sheldrake’s eccentric ideas :

Scientists and non-scientists frequently equate the materialist worldview with science itself, but Sheldrake argues that much of our everyday experience, not to mention recent scientific research, points in the opposite direction. Materialism still holds sway, but it is increasingly old-fashioned.

Also today, Micah Mattix on François Villon’s “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” :

The ballade is a reminder that earthly beauty is always temporary. Death strips us all of whatever we possess of beauty or power (a topic to which Villon turns in the subsequent ballade). “The wind,” he writes, “bears them all away.”