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Ideas & Philosophy

1,874 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 14 of 32.

781. A Hasidic master told followers to talk to God like a best friendRabbi Nachman of Breslov asked his disciples to spend an hour a day alone, ideally in a field or forest, speaking aloud to God in their own words. He died of tuberculosis at 38 in…
782. Neoplatonists thought they were simply reading Plato correctlyFor more than a thousand years, readers took it for granted that Plotinus and his successors had explained what Plato truly meant. Only around the early nineteenth century did sch…
783. How big is Metro Detroit? It depends which of four maps you useMetro Detroit can hold 3.8 million people or 5.3 million, depending on whether you count three counties, six or nine, and more than five and a half million if you add Windsor acro…
784. Some early Christians believed the archangel Michael and Christ were the same beingMichael is the warrior angel shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam, famous for casting Satan out of heaven. Less known is that from the second century several Christian groups…
785. Why one ancient rabbi argued the evil impulse is very goodGenesis ends the sixth day with God finding creation very good. A rabbinic reading seized on one small word, and, to argue that the verse praises the evil impulse too: without it,…
786. The Mishnah exists because rabbis feared an oral law would be forgottenFor generations Jewish law was taught by memory, and writing it down was considered off limits. Then the Temple fell in 70 CE, Judea lost its autonomy, and scholars worried the tr…
787. In revived Hebrew, an ancient word for hyena came to mean cheetahWhen Hebrew was brought back as an everyday language, old words were drafted into new jobs. Bardelas, a hyena in the Mishnah, became the cheetah; the word for jujube became plum; …
788. A Byzantine emperor tried to hold his empire together with a theology of one willIn the 7th century Emperor Heraclius faced provinces split over the nature of Christ, and in Egypt about 30,000 Chalcedonian Greeks lived among some five million Copts who rejecte…
789. M. G. R. won his first assembly seat campaigning from a hospital bedIn January 1967 a fellow actor shot Tamil film star M. G. Ramachandran during a meeting about a movie. He survived with a permanently altered voice, fought that year's election fr…
790. Herod's massacre of Bethlehem's infants appears in only one ancient sourceMatthew's Gospel says Herod the Great, outwitted by the Magi, ordered the death of Bethlehem's boys aged two and under. Yet Josephus, who catalogued Herod's crimes down to the kil…
791. A teenage Phish fan who became a Hasidic reggae starMatthew Miller dropped out of high school on the first day of senior year to follow the jam band Phish around the country. A few years later he was studying Torah all day in Crown…
792. Mary, Queen of Scots, checked the time on a silver skullMary, Queen of Scots, carried a watch carved as a silver skull and engraved with Horace's lines about death knocking equally at huts and royal towers. It was a fashionable object …
793. The Catholic Church rejects most reported sightings of the Virgin MaryReports of the Virgin Mary appearing to believers have drawn crowds of 70,000 and built shrines that attract 10 million pilgrims a year. Yet the Catholic Church, which accepts suc…
794. Saint Mark may not have written the gospel that carries his nameTradition names Mark as the author of the shortest gospel, founder of the church of Alexandria and first bishop of Christian Africa. Most modern scholars, however, treat his gospe…
795. The Talmud blamed Job's suffering on his silence before PharaohThe Book of Job never explains why a righteous man loses his children, wealth and health, beyond a wager in heaven. One Talmudic tradition supplied a reason: Job sat on Pharaoh's …
796. The fiercely anti-Zionist Satmar Rebbe escaped the Holocaust on a Zionist-organised trainJoel Teitelbaum spent his life denouncing Zionism as heresy and forbade any contact with Zionists. Yet in 1944 he survived by boarding the Kastner train, an evacuation arranged by…
797. Jonah's 'whale' was never a whale, and he sulked when God forgaveThe Hebrew text says Jonah was swallowed by a 'large fish', not a whale. And the real twist comes afterwards: when the city of Nineveh repents and is spared, the prophet is furiou…
798. In John's Gospel, raising Lazarus is what sets Jesus's crucifixion in motionJesus hears his friend Lazarus is gravely ill and deliberately waits two days before setting off. By the time he reaches Bethany, Lazarus has been entombed for four days. The mira…
799. One writer, traditionally a doctor named Luke, produced over a quarter of the New TestamentLuke's gospel and the book of Acts were written as one two-part work that makes up 27.5 percent of the New Testament, more than any other author. Tradition names him Luke, a physi…
800. Rosalía sang in 14 languages, each tied to a female saint, on LuxFor her fourth album, Rosalía spent two to three years learning to sing in languages she does not speak, from Ukrainian to Mandarin, starting with rough drafts in Google Translate…
801. America's 'mainline' churches may be named after Philadelphia's railway suburbsIn 1970 mainline Protestant churches claimed most American Protestants and over 30 percent of the whole population. By 2009 they had fallen to about 15 percent of adults. Even the…
802. Jim Lovell reached the Moon twice and never set foot on itA temporarily high bilirubin reading cost Jim Lovell a place among NASA's first seven astronauts. He applied again, got in, and became the first to make four spaceflights. He circ…
803. Joan of Kent married in secret twice and became a king's motherAt about twelve, Joan of Kent quietly wed a 26-year-old knight without royal permission, then let her family marry her to an earl's heir while he was abroad. A papal ruling sorted…
804. Herod Antipas built a capital on a graveyard and lost a war over a divorceThe Herod who judged Jesus and had John the Baptist killed was a Roman client ruler of Galilee for 42 years. He named his new capital after the emperor Tiberius, found that devout…
805. How a persecuted sect became the biggest landowner in the WestWithin three centuries Christianity went from a small Jewish movement to the Roman Empire's state religion. Constantine's gifts of land, cash and tax breaks were so generous that …
806. Three Rhine towns once formed the heart of Ashkenazi Jewish learningThe earliest document about Jews in Germany is a Roman record from Cologne in 321 AD. Centuries later Speyer, Worms and Mainz, known together by the Hebrew acronym ShUM, became th…
807. Why was Ignatius of Antioch marched all the way to Rome to die?Condemned Christians were normally punished where they lived. Yet the bishop of Antioch was escorted by ten soldiers across Asia Minor and the Aegean to Rome, taking a strangely r…
808. A Jewish historian named Jesus's brother James, and scholars accept the passageJosephus, writing about Judea in the 1st century, mentions the trial of the brother of Jesus called Christ, a man named James. Most scholars accept the line as genuine, not a late…
809. Jeremiah, the weeping prophet who kept predicting Jerusalem's fallFor roughly four decades Jeremiah told the people of Judah that invaders from the north would take their city, while rival prophets promised peace. He was plotted against by his o…
810. How seven Paris students became the Catholic Church's largest men's orderIn a crypt at Montmartre in August 1534, a wounded Basque ex-soldier and six fellow students at the University of Paris promised poverty, chastity and obedience. Their decision to…
811. Rome's emperor Geta was erased from marble but survived on coinsAfter Geta was killed in December 211, his brother Caracalla ordered his memory wiped out, and the job was done so thoroughly that hardly any marble portraits of him remain. His f…
812. Einstein co-founded a university that nearly taught in German instead of HebrewAlbert Einstein and Chaim Weizmann co-founded the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in July 1918, three decades before Israel existed. Its early planners fought over whether the youn…
813. An indie YouTube cartoon about imps in Hell landed an Amazon dealHelluva Boss follows a small firm of imps in Hell who sneak into the living world to carry out hits ordered by damned souls. Vivienne Medrano put it on her own YouTube channel, pa…
814. Medieval anchorites were bricked into tiny cells built against churchesOnce an anchorite moved into their little cell beside a church, the local bishop often held a ceremony to brick up the door. One small window let them hear Mass through the wall, …
815. Banned from church pulpits, George Whitefield preached to 50,000 in fieldsIn February 1739 parish priests in Bath and Bristol barred George Whitefield from their churches as a dangerous enthusiast. He went outside instead, preaching to coal miners at Ki…
816. Jacob Frank drilled his followers in armour for a future kingdom of their ownIn the 18th century a self-declared messiah named Jacob Frank gathered perhaps 50,000 followers across Poland-Lithuania and beyond, then told them to break every law. He organised…
817. A Catholic bishop beat Frank Sinatra in the TV ratingsIn 1952 the DuMont network put Bishop Fulton Sheen on at 8pm on Tuesdays, opposite Milton Berle and Frank Sinatra. With no script and only a chalkboard, his show Life Is Worth Liv…
818. Kurt Gödel wrote a logical proof of God and hid it for decadesThe first draft of Kurt Gödel's proof that God exists dates from around 1941, yet he told nobody until 1970, when he believed he was dying. Even then he refused to publish, report…
819. Gabriel is barely in the Bible yet became heaven's best-known messengerOnly one book of the Hebrew Bible names Gabriel, and neither it nor the New Testament ever calls him an archangel. The promotion came from apocalyptic writings of the Second Templ…
820. King David appears outside the Bible on just one broken stoneThe House of David shaped Jewish hopes for a messiah and Christian claims about Jesus, yet evidence for David himself beyond scripture comes down to a single inscription. The Tel …
821. Francis of Assisi was a deacon, never a priestThe founder of the Franciscans stayed a deacon all his life, an order that began, tradition says, when the apostles chose seven helpers including Stephen. For centuries the Wester…
822. A defrocked Catholic priest can still perform valid sacramentsRemoving a priest from the clergy does not, in Catholic teaching, erase what ordination gave him. Sacraments he performs afterwards count as valid, though forbidden. Some Orthodox…
823. An early Christian handbook vanished for centuries, then turned up in 1873Church writers quoted it, argued over whether it belonged in the Bible, and then lost it. In 1873 a Greek metropolitan found a complete copy of the Didache, made in 1056, in a mon…
824. Irenaeus waited more than eighteen centuries to be named a Doctor of the ChurchThe Catholic Church has granted its highest teaching honour to only 38 saints. Alphonsus Liguori got it 84 years after his death; Irenaeus of Lyons waited over 1,800, partly becau…
825. Dorothy Day went from bohemian radical to the Catholic Worker's founding editorIn 1933 a one-cent newspaper appeared on New York streets promising that the Catholic Church had a social program. Its editor had picketed the White House for suffrage, befriended…
826. Salazar's Estado Novo ran Portugal for four decades on Catholic corporatismFor more than forty years Portugal was governed by a regime that rejected parties, unions of class struggle and liberal democracy alike, drawing its blueprint from papal encyclica…
827. King Faisal modernised Saudi Arabia after decades as its chief diplomatAt thirteen, Faisal was sent to London in place of an older brother who had died of Spanish flu, becoming the first Saudi royal to visit England. He went on to run his country's f…
828. Mexico's biggest state hides a canyon system deeper than the Grand CanyonChihuahua is famous for a desert and a tiny dog, but Mexico's largest state is also its second most forested. Its Copper Canyon system is bigger and deeper than the Grand Canyon, …
829. Christianity's holiest church was built over a Roman temple to AphroditeAround AD 135 the emperor Hadrian filled in a rock-cut tomb in Jerusalem and built a temple to Aphrodite on top. Two centuries later Constantine had the temple torn down to uncove…
830. Castile gave the world the Spanish language and claimed the AmericasThe Crown of Castile began in 1230 as a union of two Iberian kingdoms. Within three centuries it had sponsored Columbus, absorbed the Aztec and Inca empires as Castilian possessio…
831. Roman and Jewish historians independently confirm Jesus was crucified under PilateScholars disagree about much in the Gospels, but almost all accept that Jesus was crucified, most likely in AD 30 or 33. Part of the reason is that non-Christian writers mention i…
832. The first millennial saint was a teenage coder from MilanCarlo Acutis taught himself programming, built websites for his parish and catalogued Eucharistic miracles online before dying of leukaemia at fifteen in 2006. In September 2025 h…
833. Did the Cathars exist, or did the Inquisition invent them?Medieval churchmen described the Cathars as heretics who worshipped two gods and believed human souls were angels trapped in matter. Thousands died in the crusade and inquisition …
834. The fireworks Catherine wheel honours a saint who may never have livedCatherine of Alexandria, the scholar-princess said to have out-argued 50 pagan philosophers, was one of the most revered saints of the late Middle Ages. Her spiked wheel even name…
835. Why a Catholic Bible has seven more books than a Protestant oneOpen a Catholic Bible and you will count 73 books; most Protestant Bibles have 66, while the Ethiopian Church recognises 81. The difference lies largely in seven Old Testament boo…
836. America's bishops built one university, and Yeats came to admire itThe Catholic University of America is the only college founded by the US Catholic bishops, chartered by a papal encyclical in 1889 and started with a heiress's $300,000 pledge. It…
837. Billie Jean King bought her first racket with eight dollars of savingsHer parents steered her away from softball towards something more ladylike, so at 11 Billie Jean Moffitt saved $8, bought a racket and took free lessons on Long Beach's public cou…
838. The Bible book that tells you both to answer a fool and not toProverbs 26:4 advises against replying to a fool in the fool's own terms. The very next verse advises doing exactly that. Contradictions like this nearly got Proverbs dropped from…
839. Luther coined a word to condemn followers who took him too farMartin Luther taught that faith, not good deeds, saves. Some followers concluded that believers were therefore free of God's moral law altogether. Luther was horrified, invented t…
840. Archangels rank second from the bottom of heaven's hierarchyThe title sounds supreme, since arch means chief. Yet in the angelic ranking drawn up by Pseudo-Dionysius in the 5th or 6th century, archangels are the second-lowest order. The Ne…

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