• Our latest library additions include a Temenos Academy video recorded lecture by Prof. William C. Chittick, speaking about “Divine Love in Early Persian Prose”:

Know that in reality no fragant herb subtler than the herb of love grew in the meadows of lordhood and servanthood. It is Love that conveys a man to the Beloved—everything else is a highway robber on the path. All the attributes of the tawhid-voicers fall apart in tawhid. All the attributes of the lovers come to nothing in Love.

• In his article “Setting Science Free From Materialism,” Rupert Sheldrake shows how a science that remained closer to its own ideal would at the same time be closer to traditional world views:

The sciences as taught in Asia, Africa, the Islamic countries, and elsewhere are still packaged in an ideology shaped by their European past. Materialism gains its persuasive power from the technological applications of science. But the successes of these applications do not prove that this ideology is true.

• “New Jerusalem Glowing”, an article by Elliot R. Wolfson on the works of Leonard Cohen, touching on many facets and the mystical side of the poet’s work:

The one who has no tears to weep has no song to sing. Between desolation and elation is the still-point where the poet finds his footing.

• Finally, an insightful article by Prof. David C. Schindler “Why Socrates Didn’t Charge: Plato and the Metaphysics of Money,” shedding light on the deep causes of contemporary financial debacle:

A strictly money-based economy can grow only in a purely “horizontal” sense, which means in terms of geographical expansion or the multiplication of non-necessary desires. To use money to produce money, in abstraction from the limits determined by real goods, is necessarily at some level to betray the order of the good.