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prshockley.org

"Welcome to Doc Shock's website!"

Here you will find a wide & growing array of topics integrating rich, textured areas of study in the liberal arts tradition: aesthetics, history, philosophy, religious studies, & worldview thinking. 

Exciting News! Thinking With Excellence now available in print & Kindle
This book is designed for first generation students will give students critical thinking and application skills for entering into college and university studies, whether ungraduate or graduate. A Spanish language edition will be made available later this year.
Here is an interview about the origins and purposes of Thinking with Excellence: click here 
(Book is now available
(Click on above book cover to learn more about this philosophical analysis of practical aesthetic problems many churches face)

"Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men [and women] have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things."  ~ Blaise Pascal, Pensees (133).

"Our lives are empty. We cannot face the vacuum. So we fill our lives up with junk, with trash, with refuse.... we divert ourselves from our real needs.... We invent little problems and hold them close, fixating on them to block us from seeing the bigger problems." ~ Thomas V. Moore, Making Sense of it All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life, pp. 32-33.  

"You [God] stir man to pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." ~ Augustine, Confessions, 1.1. 

"The only good thing for men therefore is to be diverted from thinking of what they are, either by some occupation which takes their minds off it, or by some novel and agreeable passion which keeps them busy, like gambling, hunting, some absorbing show, in short by what is called diversion" ~ Blaise Pascal, Pensees (136).

“The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.” ~ Malcolm Muggeridge. 

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within." ~ Historian Will Durant.

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"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us." ~ Marshall McLuhan