Category Archives: Place

Don’t be an Ugly Canadian

05 Sunday Apr 2026

Posted by in Anger, Place, Politics

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The No Kings protest on Boston Common on March 28 was the first time in a long time that I’ve been to a protest march. I was moved by the joyful spirit of defiance there, and I thought especially of the Canadian anti-American anger that I wrote about a couple weeks before. I was moved to make a short video – amateurish by TikToker standards, no doubt, but sincere – aimed at Canadians, reminding them that we left-leaning Americans are as alarmed by Trump as they are. I shared it on Substack Notes as well as on Instagram, which posted it to Facebook in a way open to the public. The video went modestly viral (as in 600+ views on Facebook)… and of course, it drew many comments.

Meme created by author on imgflip, recreating an older meme I couldn’t find.

I am aware of the perils of open social-media comments sections, and as I read I was reminded of the attached meme. There were several heartwarming messages of support from both sides of the border, and at least as many juvenile trollish comments from Trump supporters – including many Canadian Trump supporters (a point that will be quite relevant to what follows). But I knew the Trump supporters were out there. The commenters who saddened me this time were other Canadians.

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Canada’s anti-American anger is no small matter

15 Sunday Mar 2026

Posted by in Anger, Economics, Place, Politics

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Last time I was in Canada, I went into a café and saw an item on the menu I’d never seen before: a “Canadiano”. The barista helpfully explained that this was just an Americano. But it was striking to me that Canadians had just come up with their own version of freedom fries – and specifically out of anti-Americanism.

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The world of the women’s room

11 Sunday Jan 2026

Posted by in Epistemology, Food, Place, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Reading and Recitation, Social Science

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When I first attended an academic conference en femme, it turned out to be relevant to the conference’s discussion of gender ethics. It also taught me something else – by accident.

When a break between panels began, a female colleague and I were having an enthusiastic discussion of topics coming out of the previous panel. We both needed to go to the washroom1, so we carried on our discussion on the way to the women’s room. Then we entered neighbouring toilet stalls and sat down to do our business – and continued our Buddhist-ethics conversation across the barrier between the stalls, while sitting down in them.

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In praise of alcohol

28 Sunday Dec 2025

Posted by in Aesthetics, Early and Theravāda, Food, Friends, Health, Judaism, Place, Pleasure, Rites, Zest

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Alcohol is further out of fashion these days than at any time in living memory. Even American Prohibition just made people try harder to get alcohol. Today, though, alcohol drinking in the US has fallen to record lows, with only 54% of Gallup survey respondents saying they consume it. Nearly every cocktail-serving restaurant or even bar I visit these days has non-alcoholic mocktail options, often with sophisticated bartending flair – something barely imaginable twenty years ago.

The reasons for this are not too hard to imagine. On the one hand, the medical studies about alcohol’s harms keep piling up, often indicating that even moderate drinking – the kind touted as beneficial to health a couple decades ago – may now have many negative health consequences. On the other, alternative mind-altering substances are now easily available – most obviously cannabis, legal in many American jurisdictions and across Canada, which is a clearly healthier alternative. All in all, all things considered, the downward trend in drinking is probably not a bad thing. And there’s plenty of traditional precedent for being suspicious of alcohol: the fifth of the Five Precepts, guiding lay people, enjoins refraining from alcohol on the grounds that it causes heedlessness.

That said, there are reasons why alcohol has remained so enduringly popular in human history. And we do ourselves a disservice by disregarding them. Alcohol is not for everybody – many people find it takes control of their lives in a harmful way. But even for those people, there’s usually a reason it got so powerfully appealing in the first place. In many human lives, ones where one can control its consumption well, alcohol plays a very positive and valuable role. And as we approach the one festival in the North American ritual calendar where the drinking of alcohol typically plays the largest role, it’s worth thinking a bit about alcohol’s positives.

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Who were the Magi?

21 Sunday Dec 2025

Posted by in Christianity, Greek and Roman Tradition, Judaism, Place, Supernatural

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Depiction of Jesus with his visitors, from St. Michael’s Cathedral in Toronto. Wikimedia Commons photo by Wojciech Dittwald, CC-BY-SA licence.

One of the most familiar and celebrated parts of the traditional Christmas story is the tale of the visitors who brought gifts to the baby Jesus at his birth. If you were raised anywhere in North America or Europe you surely at least know of this tale, even if you have no Christian background. More than any other part of the Christmas story, this tale may have served to create Christmas as we know it today – since few things are more central to modern Christmas than the giving of gifts, and that giving is usually held to commemorate the story of these visitors. The famous Christmas carol “We Three Kings” is entirely about them, and several other beloved carols refer to their story (“The First Noël”, “What Child Is This?”)

Yet there is something enigmatic about these visitors. Biblical scholar Eric Vanden Eykel wrote an interesting book on them (which also serves as an engaging introduction to the methods of biblical scholarship). Vanden Eykel doesn’t even try to ask the question of whether they historically existed, because we have so little evidence on which to base an answer. Within the Bible, they are not mentioned outside of one short passage in chapter 2 of the Gospel of Matthew, and there are no other texts from a similar time period that mention them either. There are apocryphal Christian texts – texts outside the Bible – that mention them, and I was hoping these might tell an alternate story, but Vanden Eykel points out that that these are significantly later and draw on the Matthew story themselves; they are not independent witnesses. That means that if they ever existed historically – Vanden Eykel never asks that question, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was because he believes they didn’t – Matthew is by far the closest thing to a witness that we have.

So let’s take a look at what Matthew says about Jesus’s visitors. I’m taking this translation from the New Revised Standard Version, which I understand to be the most historically accurate – though leaving a couple words in the original Greek because we’ll talk about them later. I’m leaving out the part in the middle about their encounter with King Herod for space, but providing everything it says about them and their encounter with Jesus:

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Catholicism before Europe

18 Sunday May 2025

Posted by in African Thought, Eastern Orthodoxy, Greek and Roman Tradition, Place, Roman Catholicism

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Much has been made, in the US at least, of the fact that the new pope – Robert Prevost, now Leo XIV –comes from the USA. The papacy is one of the few institutions in the world where Americans have been under-represented. In recent decades, the reason for that was the US’s disproportionate global influence – a pope from outside the US was seen as a counterbalance. Yet until the previous pope – an Argentinian – it would have been ludicrous to argue that the selection of popes was in any way balanced, since for over 1200 years every single pope had come exclusively from the continent of Europe.

It’s crucial to remember, though, that that wasn’t always the case! For the Catholic Church as an institution predates the rise of European influence in the world. Christianity, with its combination of Greek and Hebrew influences, is closely tied to the development of the “Western civilization” with those same influences. And a look at the Church’s history can help remind us, in a new way, that the West is neither white nor European – for neither, fundamentally, is the Church.

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Why I’m staying in the USA

06 Sunday Apr 2025

Posted by in Family, Flourishing, Friends, Place, Politics, Social Science

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Canadians have always had a love-hate relationship with the USA; for obvious reasons, the hate side is stronger right at the moment. The US government is doing everything it can to make the country hateable – and harder to live in. When lawful permanent residents are detained without trial for exercising their free speech, this becomes a scary place indeed. So it’s quite understandable that many of those who can leave the US for Canada are planning on doing so – like the philosopher Jason Stanley making a high-profile announcement that he’s leaving Yale for Toronto.

It’s tempting to try to do something similar myself. But I’m not going to. And I want to talk about why.

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Our home and native land

04 Sunday Aug 2024

Posted by in Death, Family, French Tradition, Indigenous American Thought, Place, Politics

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A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a workshop on Native American philosophy – hosted by the Northeastern Ethics Institute, which I’m now Associate Director of. One of the main presenters was Joseph (Joey) Miller, a University of Washington professor of Muscogee ancestry.

Miller’s intriguing ideas focused on the importance of land in Native American thought – specifically North American, I might add, as opposed to Mesoamerican. In my limited studies of Aztec and Maya thought so far, I’ve seen no comparable emphasis placed on land and place. Miller cited the Apache philosopher Viola Cordova to the effect that “people come out of a specific place; we’re not all one race with one story.” And he spoke of a “land-based pedagogy” for his students. That is, he would have his students reflect on land and how it’s important to them: their land of origin, its future place in the world.

Photo of Buck Lake by Wikipedia user P199, CC BY-SA 4.0

I kept thinking back to Miller’s talk a couple weeks later, when I travelled to Buck Lake in Ontario for a memorial service for a beloved aunt. Buck Lake was where my grandfather had a cottage for most of the time I was alive; my cousins scattered their mother’s ashes over the lake, which she had loved. As far back as I could remember, my parents had their own cottage on Milk Lake, the smaller lake beside it (where, because they were the first to build on it, there is now a road called Lele Lane). Everyone who knows me knows I’m a city person through and through; I didn’t particularly like going up to Milk Lake every weekend as a child. But going back there for the first time in years, I felt a powerful connection to that land and realized how much I missed it. I found myself excited to hear the distinctive call of the whippoorwill, which I’d heard so many times long ago but is missing from my adopted home of New England.

I’ve also been thinking back to Miller’s talk in watching the reaction to J.D. Vance’s nomination speech. In his remarks accepting the Republican nomination for vice-president, Vance said this:

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Are mountains beautiful?

09 Sunday Apr 2023

Posted by in Aesthetics, Deity, Metaphysics, Place, Pleasure, Protestantism

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Western aesthetics has made a lot of a supposed distinction between “the beautiful” and “the sublime”: “sublime” referring to things like high mountains and the starry night that make us feel awe, make us feel small in a good way. Indian rasa theory would likely refer to this feeling as adbhūta rasa, the taste of wonder. I love awe-inspiring natural phenomena – Bryce Canyon, Todra Gorge – and I find the term “sublime” helpful to describe them. But I’ve long found myself mildly puzzled by the distinction. It seems obvious to me that mountains and gorges are beautiful – their sublimity is one variety, one kind, one species, of beauty. Yet writers on “the sublime” tend to treat it as something different from beauty. Why?

I’ve found a good answer to this question in a marvelous old book by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, entitled Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. I turned to this book out of curiosity about a related but slightly different phenomenon: the many generations of people who thought mountains were not beautiful. In premodern England at least, it turns out that it was commonplace to view mountains as ugly, as “warts” or “tumours”, deformities of nature. In a world where the goodness of God’s creation was assumed, writers often did not view mountains’ majesty as evidence of God’s own majesty, but rather felt the need to justify why a good and loving God would deign to create such excrescences. Why was that?

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A very brief survey of Latin American philosophy

12 Sunday Feb 2023

Posted by in African Thought, Indigenous American Thought, Metaphilosophy, Place, Politics, Roman Catholicism, Western Thought

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When one aspires to love all wisdom, one should look for it worldwide – and that task is not easy. Typically, when we philosophers look outside the West, we look above all to Asia. But within the West (at least after the fall of the Roman Empire), we also tend to narrow our focus to the United States and Western Europe, with occasional bones tossed to Canada and Australia. And there’s a lot we miss when we do.

Like Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Latin America is largely a Western culture, even if it has been on the periphery of the West’s overall attention. (Latin America and Eastern Europe each pay more attention to the USA and Western Europe than they pay to each other.) Like Africa, it is a continent-sized region of the world that gets much less philosophical attention than does Asia. Two years ago I gave African philosophy a survey post here – still less than it deserves – but have not yet done the same for Latin America. I’d like to fix that now.

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