Becoming a Better Person      

   You know...liberal-arts professors are better persons. They read Aristotle, Plato and Cicero. 

   And Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Hobbes and Locke. 

   You haven't studied the great ones? See, that's why you're not a better person. You haven't exposed yourself to the world's open-minded writers and philosophers.  😉

   Instead of reading fiction and People magazine, you need to feed your mind with the works of Kant, Wordsworth, Poe, Tennyson, Melville, James, Hemingway and Faulkner. You just don't know what you're missing.  😉 

   Take me. I have read each of Hemingway's best-known novels, in which no one lived happily ever after. The Old Man and the Sea was the only enjoyable book of the five, and even there, sharks ate the old man's prize catch before he got it to shore.

   The author himself didn't live happily ever after. 

   Okay. We've read a bit from some of the above, and Thoreau, and a number of contemporary thinkers and politicians. But, I'm not a better person for it.

   Want a suggestion? Read Jimmy Donut's stuff. It won't make you better, but we ask only four minutes of your day. There aren't any hidden agendas, and it's free.

   Better yet, if you haven't already, try Solomon, Isaiah, Daniel, Hosea, Amos, Micah, Zechariah...and Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, along with Peter, Paul and Mary, correction, James. They were all students of the original Author.

   As for wise, current scholars, a professor at Florida International University wrote that anyone who thinks great literature and philosophy can make you a better person, "hasn't spent much time in English and philosophy departments." 

       Jimmy