Here and There

• Christopher Hitchens Wasn’t Great, by Meir Y. Soloveichik. Commentary February 2022:

  ... what are we to make about statements that are contrary to all obvious evidence—evidence that even rudimentary research would reveal? Are Hitchens’s assertions against obvious evidence not evidence itself that his assaults are expressions of deliberate dishonesty?

  Some admirers of Hitchens on the right concede how troubling this is. Former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson said he had always known that, on religion, “Hitch could be unfair—willfully so—and quite capable of presenting as fresh and new arguments that had grown stale a century ago.” Robinson added, “What I hadn’t quite realized, though, was that Hitch was also deeply ignorant—in particular, that in discussing the scriptures Hitch simply had no idea what he was talking about.” Robinson’s admiration for Hitchens, as he wrote in 2011, stems from the fact that Hitchens “held his head up for a flag of all the free.” Similarly, Continetti concludes that the lesson of Hitchens’s life is that “freedom needs champions.” Indeed it does, but Hitchens’s comments about faith illustrate that he learned the wrong lessons from a 20th century marked by battles between liberty and tyranny.

  His penchant for intentionally eliding evidence was reflected in his description of faith as “the origin of all dictatorship.” These were words written by a man who had witnessed a century marked by militantly atheist Communist dictatorships that murdered more members of humanity than any faith community in history. His brother, Peter, has powerfully pointed out that Hitchens’s religion writings were recycled talking points of the very regimes he claimed to oppose.

• The Return of the Manuals, by John Brungardt. Thomistica 06/26/21 (reviewing R.E. Houser's Logic as a Liberal Art: An Introduction to Rhetoric and Reasoning and Michael J. Dodd's The One Creator God in Thomas Aquinas and Contemporary Theology):

  In past unenlightened ages, it was a trope—and then a cliché—to denigrate a philosophical or theological view as bearing too much a resemblance to the “schoolmen” or the “scholastics.” In the last century, and even in this one, if you wish to dismiss summarily the mode or content of a book, simply call it a “manual” or its author a “manualist.” Surely you know the kind: those “Neo-Scholastic” manuals, written in a cramped Latin parceled out into enumerated paragraphs, all crested with a “nihil obstat” and appropriate "imprimatur."

  However, there is a lot about manuals that is simply a myth that needs to be quashed. This is because, as in any age in literate human history, there were good and bad books for students. Manuals overlapped with both. Furthermore, their use and abuse coincided with teachers both good and bad, and was incidentally tied to academic and ecclesial politics that either no longer apply or which now train their focus on other controversies. Blaming “the manualists” for the tribulations of philosophical and theological education partly overlaps with—and is about as accurate as—personally blaming Christian Wolff for the limitations of early Neo-Scholastic philosophy.

• Scheler vs. Nietzsche on Ressentiment Part 1 / Part 2. "The philosopher Max Scheler (1874-1928) wrote a striking book titled Ressentiment, in which he explains this feeling in dialogue with Friedrich Nietzche (1844-1900). I read passages of both philosophers and comment on them to bring out the meaning of Ressentiment and where the two men agree and disagree. Both philosophers saw Ressentiment not only as a struggle for individuals, but as a growing sociological/cultural phenomenon, and perhaps their work can shed some light on our times."

• Sagan's Pale Blue Dot vs. The Christ Child Just Thomism 12/25/21:

  Sagan’s silence arises from his own awareness that the summum bonum is intrinsically and infinitely meaningful, and human love participates in it, notwithstanding the evident insignificance of human life. When we preserve both the truths that he says and leaves unsaid, therefore, what we get is not Sagan but Pascal. Human life is the paradoxical union of utter insignificance and infinite meaning, and our basic stance to life is both abject humility grounded in a true awareness of our nothingness and confidence that we exist to possess a good greater than the common good of the whole physical and angelic natural order. ...

• Was Vatican II a Bad Seed? ChurchLife Journal July 29, 2020 - John Cavadini responds to the latest screed from Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who "reduces Vatican II to a seedbed of contemporary error animated by the spirit of "Masonry."

• Radioactive - a 6-part biographical podcast on Father Charles Coughlin from The Tablet. See also: 1996 C-Span interview with Don Warren, author of Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, The Father of Hate Radio, which I read some time ago.

• Ashley K. Fernandes, associate director of the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities at The Ohio State University, asks: Why Did So Many Doctors Become Nazis? The Tablet 12/10/20.

• The Raven is an "open access online magazine"

  ... of original philosophy written for intellectually curious readers with or without academic training in the discipline. It aims to revive an essayistic style of philosophy that was more common in academic venues as recently as thirty years ago but has gradually disappeared — that is, to publish contributions to the “literature” that deserve to be called literature.

• Discerning the Real John Ehrett reviews David Schindler's The Politics of the Real: The Church Between Liberalism and Integralism University Bookman. 06/27/01:

  ... Schindler’s critique of contemporary integralism (from within the Catholic tradition) is probably the best one on offer anywhere. For Schindler, leading integralist Edmund Waldstein’s foundational definition of integralism—which centers on the subordination of the “temporal power” to the “spiritual power”—erroneously confuses the contingent historical forms of medieval Christendom for an enduring theological principle. Specifically, the definition treats the Catholic Church and temporal state as entities subsisting on the same ontological “level” and so in some sense vying for control of the same monopoly on coercive power. Schindler insists that this mischaracterizes the essentially analogical relation between church and state: the Church is relevant to all of life, and the political order is relevant to all of life. The temporal order is not neutral or second-order ground, but ought to be understood as “theological” through and through, with the Church serving as an enduring witness to transcendent truth.

  Agree with his arguments or not, virtually no one engaged in debates over “liberalism” has thought as deeply as Schindler about the fundamental metaphysical questions involved, and yet it’s those questions that must be addressed for any conversation to meaningfully progress.

• Remembering Michael Novak’s “Democratic Capitalism”, Bradley J. Birzer. The Imaginative Conservative 09/27/21.

For Fun ...

• A Library the Internet Can’t Get Enough Of - New York Times 01/15/22.
• How Different Cartoonists Draw Water – Part II, by Ben Towle. In this post -- a continuation of an ealier 2008 post -- Ben Towle gives a fascinating tour of various comic artist's creative depictions of the element of water in their strips.

Here and There

• J.I. Packer: A Great Puritan, by Hans Boersma. First Things 07/21/20:

  ... Packer’s signing of the 1994 ECT ["Evangelicals and Catholics Together"] statement again led to sharp disagreement with evangelicals—influential leaders such as John MacArthur and R. C. Sproul—who felt that Packer had sacrificed doctrinal integrity. Packer, however, did not flinch. He published an article on “Why I Signed,” and pointed out that his continuing disagreements with Rome ought not stand in the way of making common cause. Today’s deepest division, he claimed, was not that between Catholicism and Protestantism. Instead, it was the division “between theological conservatives (or ‘conservationists,’ as I prefer to call them), who honor the Christ of the Bible and of the historic creeds and confessions, and theological liberals and radicals who for whatever reason do not.” Appealing to Francis Schaeffer’s concept of co-belligerence and Billy Graham’s cooperative evangelism, he threw down the gauntlet, insisting that it was high time to make common cause, even in evangelism and church education: ECT was merely "playing catch-up to the Holy Spirit," Packer insisted.

• Francis Beckwith on Reading the Summa Theologia Cover to Cover: Mission Accomplished
• Bill Vallicella (Maverick Philosopher) on the Profitable Study of Philosophy (01/01/21).
• Walker Percy’s Prescient Dystopia, by Collin Slowey. Public Discourse 11/05/20. Love in the Ruins speaks to our present moment in the United States like few other books. Most important is what Percy has to teach us about the dangers of moral superiority, ideological idealism, and the capacity of intellectual humility and hard work for achieving genuine progress.
• Overlooked in 2020 -- non-aggression pact or "truce" between the oft-sparring Edward Feser and David Bentley Hardt:

  David Bentley Hart and I have had some very heated exchanges over the years, but I have always found him to be at bottom a decent fellow. That remains true. During our recent dispute over his book on universalism, the one thing I took great exception to was the accusation of dishonesty on my part, and I let David know this privately. He sent me the following statement to post here, for which I thank him. I would also like to reaffirm my longstanding admiration for much of his work, such as his books Atheist Delusions and The Experience of God....

• The Question of Catholic Integralism: An Internet Genealogy, by John Brungardt. 05/22/20 (a helpful roundup for those interested in the subject)
• Joseph Ratzinger on the Creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople excerpt from Joseph Ratzinger’s Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology
• Pruning the Mind During a Crisis, by Margarita Mooney. The Hedgehog Review 04/16/20. "The great danger is to come to love what we know more than to love the pursuit of knowledge as an end in and of itself."
• William Faulkner's Demons, by Casey Cep. New Yorker 11/30/20:

  What if the North had won the Civil War? That technically factual counterfactual animated almost all of William Faulkner’s writing. The Mississippi novelist was born thirty-two years after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, but he came of age believing in the superiority of the Confederacy: the South might have lost, but the North did not deserve to win. [...] In contrast with those ["Lost Cause"] delusions, Faulkner’s fiction revealed the truth: the Confederacy was both a military and a moral failure.

  [...]

  "Faulkner the man shared many of the closed society’s opinions and values," Gorra writes. "But when the novelist could inhabit a character—when he slipped inside another mind and put those opinions into a different voice—he was almost always able to stand outside them, to place and to judge them."

  Faulkner was unwilling in his own life to adequately acknowledge the evils of slavery and segregation, but he did so with savage thoroughness in his fiction.

• John le Carré, Best-Selling Author of Cold War Thrillers, Dies at 89 New York Times 12/13/20.
• An Interview with Historian Gary Gallagher, with Clayton Butler. "Thoughts on the state of current Civil War scholarship and the compelling nature of Civil War history." Gallagher thinks "Catton is best narrative writer who’s ever written about the Civil War. Better than Shelby Foote", and after reading Catton's This Hallowed Ground: A History of the Civil War, I would agree. At least Catton serves as an alternative to Foote's "Lost Cause" nostalgia. To that end, here is David Blight on the career and influence of Civil War historian Bruce Catton (video).

Here and There

• The Mass Is Still With Us Even Under Quarantine, by Timothy O'Malley. 03/19/20.
• In Behold the Pierced One(pp.97-98), Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) wrote: "Joseph Ratzinger on fasting from the Eucharist (Catholic World Report 03/19/2020):

  “When Augustine sensed his death approaching, he ‘excommunicated’ himself and undertook public penance. In his last days he manifested his solidarity with the public sinners who seek for pardon and grace through the renunciation of communion. He wanted to meet his Lord in the humility of those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for him who is the Righteous and Merciful One. Against the background of his sermons and writings, which are a magnificent portrayal of the mystery of the Church as communion with the Body of Christ, and as the Body of Christ itself, built up by the Eucharist, this is a profoundly arresting gesture. The more I think of it, the more it moves me to reflection. Do we not often take the reception of the Blessed Sacrament too lightly? Might not this kind of spiritual fasting be of service, or even necessary, to deepen and renew our relationship to the Body of Christ?"

• Thoughts on the obligation to attend Mass during times of pestilence In the Light of the Law 03/12/20.
• A Catholic Debate over Liberalism, by Park MacDougald. City Journal Winter 2020. "Is it a guarantor of religious liberty or an imperial ideology incompatible with the Church?"
• Thomas Merton on Henry Thoreau Maverick Philosopher 02/27/20.

• Speaking with the Barbarians: Maritain, MacIntyre, and Christendom 02/19/20. The Public Discourse 02/19/20. "Contemporary Christians are called to infuse procedural liberalism with substantive language and concepts rooted in Christian tradition. We ought not spend our time despairing over supposed barbarians at the gate, or lurking within us—and not simply because it distracts us from our work, but also because it saps us of hope."

Here and There

• Why I’m Not a Cosmo-Globalist and other Musings of a Politically Homeless Philosopher, reflections from Daniel A. Kaufman (The Electric Agora):

  ... The subjects around which the most contentious political disputes revolve are extraordinarily complex and the views one takes are heavily dependent not just upon “the facts” involved but on the values one brings to the table, which themselves are contestable and contentious. Even more so than in philosophy itself, rarely if ever is there a demonstrably “correct” view on such matters and regardless, in a democracy — in which we all should be so lucky to live — one’s views may not prevail on this occasion or, perhaps, ever. It is not just inadvisable, then, but flat-out stupid to hold one’s relationships hostage to political agreement, and our increasing and lamentable inability to recognize this is just a further testament to the collective juvenility that seems to have descended upon us, like some horrible, disfiguring fog.

  Speaking of which, I find his 2018 assessment of the pathetic state of the political life of this nation is remarkably on-point going into the 2020 electoral season.

• From the Age of Persuasion to the Age of Offense Los Angeles Review of Books 12/23/19. Colin Marshall reviews David Bromwich's American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us:

  ... Bromwich falls squarely into the generation of professors now watching in astonishment as their students, most of whom grew up in the 2000s and 2010s, blithely dismiss and even display undisguised contempt for what once seemed like the settled values of liberal democratic society. He ascribes this state of affairs to several recent developments; one of the most important and least surprising is "the soft despotism of social media," that distinctively 21st-century technology almost as enthusiastically resented as it is adopted. ...

• Philosopher in the Ring: The Existentialist's Survival Guide" by Stephen Knepper. Commonweal 12/21/19:

  Gordon Marino teaches philosophy at St. Olaf College and curates the Hong Kierkegaard Library. He has spent decades writing about the existentialists. His passion for them did not begin in the classroom, though. After a failed relationship, with derailed careers in both boxing and academic philosophy, a young Marino struggled with suicidal thoughts. While waiting for a counseling session, he spotted a copy of Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love on a coffee-shop bookshelf. He opened it to a passage in which Kierkegaard criticizes a “conceited sagacity” that refuses to believe in love. Intrigued, Marino hid Works of Love under his coat on the way out the door. He credits the book with saving his life. ...

• The Historian of Moral Revolution by David Brooks. Gertrude Himmelfarb 12/31/19. David Brooks' fitting tribute to the late Gertrude Himmelfarb, who passed December 30th:

  ... Accordingly, Himmelfarb didn’t fear immorality so much as demoralization, the sense that our age has lost a moral vocabulary and with it the ability to think subtly about moral matters. A great deal, she wrote, is lost when a society stops aiming for civic virtue and is content to aim merely for civility.

• The post-Vatican II civil war Catholic Herald 11/20/19. In his new book, The Irony of Modern Catholic History, George Weigel traces the root of debates at the recent Amazon synod to a fracture within reformist theologians at the Second Vatican Council. [Tangential note: does it count as ironic as well, that Weigel continues to praise DeLubac, but especially after reading the likes of Lawrence Feingold my impression of him has been rather more critical in recent years?]

• "From Kung to Catholicism" Russell E. Saltzman on Hans Kung, the relic of progressive Catholicism. Catholic World Report 11/25/19. I too admit to having an initial interest in Hans Kung, born of curiosity, and much like Saltzman becoming bored with the theologian's perpetual entreaties to fashion the Church to his own liking ("I simply didn’t care to read him anymore ... he had begun to repeat himself").

• ‘The Two Popes’: What’s fact and what’s fiction?, by Joseph McAuley (America 11/27/19). The release of "The Two Popes" on Nov. 27 brought renewed attention to the papacy of Benedict XVI (played by Anthony Hopkins) and the 2013 election of Pope Francis (played by Jonathan Pryce). But does the movie get the facts right? Yes and no.
• How a 20th century theologian became a quiet prophet for our distracted age Tim Reidy on Romano Guardini (America 11/1/19).

• Long overdue and warranted: A Catholic Conservative Considers Rod Dreher, by Tom Piatak. The Agonist 12/31/19. (contributing editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture and was formerly a contributing editor of The American Conservative).

Here and There

• Edith Stein, Phenomenology and Analytic Theology, James Orr, interview with Richard Marshall. 3am Magazine:

  Stein sympathised with Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein as ‘thrown’ into the world and his claim that the radical contingency of my existence—the brute fact that I might not have been—attends my every mood, my every project, and that in some fundamental way my existence is not something I can control any more than I can fix beforehand the conditions into which I have been thrown. At the same time, she had read enough Augustine and Kierkegaard by this point to recognise that Heidegger was overplaying the originality of this insight. And she also saw that it was at least an open question whether the sense that I am in no way responsible for my existence means that I am alienated from the source of my existence, or that there could be nothing more fundamental on which my existence might depend. It is here that Stein rehearses Aquinas’s early modal argument in De Esse et Essentia, but gives it a striking phenomenological twist. Phenomenological awareness of my ‘thrownness’ into the world presupposes, she insists, a dependence on something more metaphysically robust. Stein saw that phenomenologically attuned introspection of the kind we find in the finest mystical writings suggest that our finitude in time need not exclude (as Heidegger insists it must) the possibility that we participate in the infinite fullness of the divine life. [...]

  Stein’s resistance to the rejection of essence [in Heidegger] taps into various strands of the Christian theological tradition—especially Augustine and Kierkegaard—to show that the essence/existence dichotomy is a false dilemma. If we take seriously French existentialism’s later stress on ‘alienation,’ Stein would have asked: alienation from what? She claims that it could not be the ‘thrown’ phenomenological subject that sustains its conscious life; consciousness is, rather, received being, being as a gift, the paradigmatic acte gratuit that places me in my world and sustains me from moment to moment.

• Poetic Injustice and Performative Outrage, by Clint Margrave. Quilette 02/14/19:

  It used to be that the people who wanted to censor artists were members of powerful institutions like the church or the government, but these days, they are more likely to be artists and professors and publishers themselves. The same people who, at one time, testified against the state of California and saved publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti from going to jail during Allen Ginsberg’s obscenity trial for “Howl” in 1957. So, half a century later, what do we do now that they are the ones calling for censorship? “Even if you are truly offended by a poem, then all I want to say is fine, that’s your right. Be offended. You know what adults do when they are offended? They feel offended and move on,” says Custer. “I am offended in my very spirit by people who use their power to try to silence the art of others, under some guise of righteousness.” ...

  The probability that someone will misinterpret your work and react negatively is, of course, just part of the vulnerability to which one necessarily exposes oneself when making art. There will always be critics willing to denigrate an artist’s work due to a lack—or a surfeit—of sensitivity. Critics, academics, and colleagues have always challenged and objected to the work of their peers, be it on aesthetic, political, moral, or historical grounds. But what seems to be different now is that the critics are behaving in bad faith, less interested in debating a work’s merit than assassinating the artist’s character and clamoring for censorship.

• Unique from Day One: Pro-Life Is Pro-Science, by Anna Maria Dumitru. Public Discourse 01/17/19. "The main dividing line between pro-life and pro-choice is not which side cares more about women, families, and their basic freedoms. It's how each group applies the scientific facts to determine what constitutes women's rights."

• In Defense of Reading Pagans: Why I assigned The Kingdom, by Stephen E. Lewis. 01/18/19:

  Last week, a controversy erupted over a book I assigned in a five-student advanced literature seminar at the Franciscan University of Steubenville (FUS) during the Spring 2018 semester. Not wishing to further divide our university community, I trusted that my superiors at FUS would handle the matter appropriately and I refrained from public comment. But many observers have assumed that Franciscan University’s decision to remove me from my role as chair of the English Department confirms that I assigned the book out of hostility to orthodox Catholic belief. Because nothing could be further from the truth, many friends have urged me to explain why I put Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom on my syllabus in the first place. Now that some time has passed, I feel a duty to the Franciscan University community and others concerned by the uproar to provide an account.

• Remembering Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, by Wilfred M. McClay. Public Discourse 01/12/19. "Fr. Richard John Neuhaus got to the central question facing us: Is it true that postmodern liberal societies are incapable of sustaining the religious values without which they could not have been born, and without which they cannot long function? Neuhaus was unwilling to surrender to that proposition. Neither should we be."

• Richard J. Neuhaus: Teacher, by Fr. Vincent Druding. First Things This essay was originally delivered on January 8, 2019, as a homily for the Richard John Neuhaus Memorial Mass at Church of the Immaculate Conception in New York.

• The End of Traditional Civil Rights?, by Daniel A. Kaufmann (The ELectric Agora):

  In my essay “Self-Made,” I described identificationism (though I didn’t name it such) as a simultaneously anxious and hubristic deformation of the modern conception of the self, whose origins lie in the philosophies of Descartes, Locke, and Kant. (1) The reasonable version of this conception entails a rejection of the pre-modern idea that a person is defined entirely in terms of his or her position in a social framework that is governed by a normatively thick conception of natural law, in favor of the notion that (to a substantial degree) who we are is a matter of our internal consciousness and thus, is determined by us. It was an idea whose ultimate aim was to ground the moral and political autonomy of the individual necessary for life in a modern, democratic polis.

  What the reasonable version of this conception never entailed, however (substance dualism and noumenal selves aside), was a complete rejection of material or social reality, but this is precisely what contemporary identificationism does, maintaining that the individual is entirely self-made; that who and what I am is a matter of my own consciousness and will alone, irrespective of nature or social consensus. The result is an incoherent, unstable ground, on which identity and civil rights as traditionally understood can no longer be sustained.

  [...]

  Identificationism presents itself under a progressive banner, but is essentially a form of hyper-individualism and is thus an extreme variety of liberal, rather than progressive politics. If one follows the logic of contemporary gender-identificationism, according to which there literally are scores upon scores of self-identified genders, then there really aren’t any men or women or anything else, but only self-defined individuals. (6) Apply this logic to race or ethnicity and one gets the same result, and it becomes hard to see what a civil rights movement, as traditionally conceived, would be about. I think it’s fair to say that taken to its logical conclusion and stripped of all of its civil rights trappings, contemporary identificationism is essentially a form of liberal utopianism, for it denies that material realities place us into groups, the rights and prerogatives of which may need to be fought for in civil and political society, and insists instead that the only groups to which we belong are those of our choosing and that the only realities impinging upon those choices are those existing within the consciousness of each individual. Ultimately, this is a rejection of the very basis on which the need for civil rights movements rests, with the only remaining “cause” being that of getting people to accept other peoples’ self-identifications. Now, perhaps we have reached the point at which we no longer need the traditional civil rights movements. Perhaps, we have reached the point that Martin Luther King hoped we would one day reach, at which every individual is judged solely on the basis of the content of his or her character, rather than on his unchosen, material condition, but it seems to me that before we jettison the traditional conception of civil rights, we should probably have a serious, public conversation about whether that is, in fact the case.

• Huumanity Dehumanized: Hegel’s Reflections on the Enlightenment & the French Revolution, by David Lawrence Levine. The Imaginative Conservative This essay was originally given as a lecture at St. John’s College, Santa Fe on February 3, 2016 and November 3, 2017, dedicated to Dr. Eva Brann of St. John's College, Annapolis.

• Martin Heidegger and Catholicism: The Unexpected Enemy in the Black Notebooks by Judith Wolfe (Publication originally printed by The Tablet in 2017, re-published with permission):

  One of the most striking lessons of the Notebooks is the extent to which Heidegger’s attraction to Nazism – and his later rejection of it – was animated by a quarrel with the Catholic Church. “Contemporary Catholicism”, Heidegger wrote to a friend in 1929, “must remain to us a horror”. The history of that quarrel is, to a large extent, the history of Heidegger’s philosophical life.

• Wojtylan Fantasies, Revisited, by George Weigel. First Things 02/07/19:

  For almost three decades the Catholic left has turned intellectual somersaults arguing that John Paul II didn’t write, and indeed couldn’t have written, what the rest of the literate world recognizes as a guarded endorsement of regulated markets in the 1991 encyclical, Centesimus Annus. The further charge from the fever swamps is that I, along with several friends and colleagues, willfully distorted the pope’s teaching in an effort to spin him into some sort of papal libertarian or neo-liberal. Alas, for those who continue to chew this cud, their argument implies that the man whose teaching they claim to be defending was a fool who didn’t know who his friends were or what they were doing.

• You Don’t Really Believe That, Do You, Andrew Cuomo? - David Mills takes on the specious claims of the Governor of New York that he "[doesn't] believe that religious values should drive political positions".

Here and There

• Something to look forward to in the new year, the release of a new book by the prolific Edward Feser: Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science. (See link for table of contents).
• The Brilliant and Profoundly Catholic Daredevil, Bradley J. Birzer. The American Conservative 12/11/18. Not sure if I'd herald it as "the single most positive portrayal of the Catholic Church in our present culture" -- other television shows and movies have dealt substantially with Catholic themes -- but I did appreciate the series and the serious attention with which it regarded its subject matter (even for a comic book character).
• The Ignorant Hounding of Roger Scruton, by Douglas Murray. The Spectator UK 11/8/18.
• Memo to the Left: You'll Never Be Roger Scruton Cool, by Stephen Hayward. Powerline 11/9/18.
• Vox populi, vox Dei was never a Catholic doctrine. The first cry of the people recorded in the New Testament was “Crucify him!” I expect it will be the world’s last cry too. - Anthony Esolen, Catholic Thing 11/10/18.
• A Searcher Discovers Thomas Aquinas , by Thomas J. White, O.P. and Hope Kean (The Public Discourse) :

  St. Thomas’s philosophy of nature, metaphysics, understanding of the human person, epistemology, logic, and ethics make sense even independently of divine revelation while being deeply compatible with it. He also articulates an understanding of revelation that assimilates his realistic philosophical approach to the world. Of course, it’s not that you can just read Aquinas and then never have to read anything else or that he provides a system resolving every problem. He does not offer a system but insights into the structure of reality that you can see are true. ... Aquinas is a deeply grounded philosophical realist, a deeply grounded theological realist, and a mystic; it’s a very powerful combination.

  [Excerpted from a longer interview with Fr. Thomas Joseph White, OP. It appears as one of sixteen interviews with converts in Mind, Heart, and Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome, edited by Robert P. George and R. J. Snell].
• I am late to the game -- at least in terms of becoming aware and reading up on once-famous theologians falling into disrepute on account of moral failings, predominantly of a sexual nature. Most recently Karl Barth (circa. 2017) and John Howard Yoder (circa 2015). Wrestling with such revelations, Tobias Wingright ponders "I Was John Howard Yoder's Graduate Assistant. Should I Still Use His Work?", while Dr. Matthew Emerson weighs in on "What do we do with Karl Barth?"
• Via Rorate Caeli, news of the passing of philosopher Robert Spaemann. Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.

Here and There

• Michael Liccione is blogging again, this time at Patheos. Highly recommended!

• "A Nice Pair" - Paul Zummo (CrankyCon) reviews Jonah Goldberg's Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy and Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos. "It’s gratifying when a book you’ve been looking forward to reading lives up to lofty expectations. It’s even more gratifying when a book you read on spec turns out to be better than the hype."

• John Courtney Murray via Rick Garnett):

  I suggest that the real enemy within the gates of the city is not the Communist, but the idiot. Here I am using the word "idiot" not in its customary, contemporary vernacular usage of one who is mentally deficient. No, I am going back to the primitive Greek usage; the "idiot" meant, first of all, the private person, and then came to mean the man who does not possess the public philosophy, the man who is not master of the knowledge and the skills that underlie the life of the civilized city. The idiot, to the Greek, was just one stage removed from the barbarian. He is the man who is ignorant of the meaning of the word "civility."

• Defending Classical Liberalism - Vincent Phillip Munoz responds to Patrick Deneen's radical admonishment to be "suspicious of, if not hostile to, the liberal political project, including the American experiment in ordered liberty."

• Schall at 90, tributes from the friends of Fr. James V. Schall.

• The Dead End of the Left?: Augusto Del Noce’s Critique of Modern Politics, by Carlo Lancellotti. Commonweal 04/16/18:

  To Del Noce, the religious dimension meant that human beings are not reducible to sociological, economic, and biological factors. As Domenach had put it, “in man there is always something more.” To be human means to be able to raise questions of meaning that transcend our historical-material context—including religious questions.

  By insisting that the true fault line of contemporary history ran between those who affirmed man’s religious dimension and those who denied it, Del Noce offered an unusual perspective on Catholic participation in the public arena. He thought its focus should be neither on protecting the power of the institutional church, nor on some list of religiously neutral ethical concerns, but rather on a conception of human flourishing that reflects the religious dimension. This would include an idea of education that is not just utilitarian but respects the deeper human need for beauty and knowledge as ends in themselves; respect for work as an expression of the human desire to build and to serve, not just a tool at the service of profit and economic growth; love for what Simone Weil called “rootedness”—namely “the real, active, and natural participation in the life of the community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future”; a passion for freedom, not as empty self-determination, but as protection of the most specifically human sphere, which is precisely the religious dimension, the search for meaning. A Catholic political orientation based on the awareness of the religious dimension would also allow—and indeed require—us to struggle for justice, but the justice we struggled for would not be our invention, much less a convenient fiction. It would be a moral reality that we recognize inside and outside of ourselves and to which we must ascend.

• Erasing Robert. E. Lee, by R.M. Stangler. The Imaginative Conservative 06/05/18:

  What a pity that a whole generation of students will know Robert E. Lee not as a complex man, not as a nuanced man, and not, like all of us, as a flawed man. They will know him only as the man who was erased…

• A Review of “Malcom Muggeridge: A Biography” by Gregory Wolfe, by Jeff Culbreath:

  Generally speaking, modern people choose their religion so as to conform to the lives they are living. They believe as they live, rather than live as they believe. This attempt to quiet their consciences can seem like a brave act of individual liberty in a society that glories in religious pluralism. But in a more Christian age, men did not deny the incongruity of their faith with the follies of their own lives. They knew that truth wasn’t going to change to suit them, and they forced themselves to live with the tension in the hopes that one day they would reform. Malcom Muggeridge was this pre-modern type of man. He lived badly for many years, but God refused to permit him the illusions modern men seem to enjoy.

• Pappy for the Pope: Kentucky priest delivers bourbon to Vatican, by Janet Patton. Lexington Herald Leader. 04/06/18. "Father Jim Sichko personally delivered a bottle of 23-year-old Pappy Van Winkle to Pope Francis." Truly, a bourbon fit for a pontiff -- I sure hope he realizes it!

• 9 rules for civility from the Catholic tradition by David A. Zubick. America 06/25/18:

  We all know that something is gravely wrong with our public conversation in the United States. The lack of civility is so pervasive that it is pointless to assign blame. We each have a responsibility to change the game, to treat each other better, particularly when we disagree. Catholic tradition has much to teach us about civility. ...

• How to Not Receive the Eucharist Crisis 07/03/18. Most Catholics will, at some point in their lives, be unworthy to participate in the Eucharist. Acknowleding that "the Church used to have a better handle on this," James Healy provides some helpful pointers should you find yourself resisting the pressure to confirm rather than sinning against the body and blood of The Lord (1 Cor. 11:27-30).

• Grace and the Grotesque: Flannery O'Connor on the page and screen, by John M. Sweeney. America 06/22/09.

Here and There

• “Submission”: The Crumbling of the Secular West, by Jane Clark Scharl. The Imaginative Conservative A straightforward reading of Michel Houellebecq’s book shows that the author wants to consider the possibility that religion—not spiritualism, not some kind of therapeutic deism, but true, practiced, day-to-day religion—soothes our longings and grants us some measure of peace and satisfaction, a measure withheld by secular liberalism.

• Michael Novak: A Model for Social Scientists, by C.R. Pakaluk. Public Discourse 11/09/17. The “real human person” was the persistent subject of Michael Novak’s life’s work. Novak wanted real, gritty, ordinary persons, in ordinary life, and he wanted a political and economic order for those real, gritty, ordinary persons.

• Who Are You? Alt-Right "Identitarianism," Violence, and the Intellectual Roots of Western Civilization, by Jordan Wales. Public Discourse 12/20/17. By making our common humanity irrelevant to the question of identity, Richard Spencer sets himself in diametric opposition to the intellectual roots of the “Western” civilization to which he would lay claim.

• Romano Guardini’s Diagnosis of the Modern World, by Jeremy Knee. The Imaginative Conservative 11/27/17. "As one looks at the modern landscape, one sees that each of these men is still with us. Man is no less lonely, less technologically-minded, or less oriented towards the mass than he was in Guardini’s time."

• Free Love, But No Lovers Wheat and Weeds 11/30/17:

  Among the things that make me sad about the apparently bottomless pit of unseemly revelations about our celebrities (in every field) is that for all of "free love's" promise of beautiful, healthy, unrepressed sexual experiences, the actual experiences people are having are ugly, tawdry, solipsistic, and self-ruining.

• Clocking Out, by J.D. Daniels. N+1 :

  FILE UNDER DIONYSUS the feelings a rock concert aims to induce: careless ecstasy and careless unity, dissolving in the careless crowd. Is Dionysus all-embracing or is he instead all-consuming, all-digesting, reducing all to homogenous shit-stink? Why has no one mentioned that John Lennon’s “I hope someday you’ll join us and the world will live as one” is a sentiment suitable for chanting at a Nuremberg rally?

  The solution to mass-market Dionysianism is the obvious corrective tilt toward the Apollonian. Apollo is the contrary principle of form, clarity, precision, and individuation. Sculpture is the art of saying No to the rest of the mountain.

  Apollo and Dionysus need one another, but only Apollo seems to understand this; Dionysus is busy vomiting into the toilet ...

• Andy Warhol’s [Catholic] devotion was almost surreal Catholic Herald 02/09/18. The Vatican Museums exhibition will be something of a homecoming for the artist.
• Who would have predicted that Slayer fans would have the Catholic church to thank, for rescuing Dave Lombardo's parents from the Castro regime? -- Revolver magazine on Dave Lombardo's Emotional Return to Cuba after 50 Years 03/22/18. Original Slayer drummer left the country of his birth when he was 14 months old. He recently traveled back for the first time to reconnect with his roots.

Here and There

• Young Hemingway's Wound and Conversion, by Matthew Nickel. PILGRIM: A Journal of Catholic Experience:

  "If I am anything I am a Catholic. Had extreme unction administered to me as such in July 1918 and recovered. So guess I am a super-catholic.... Am not what is called a ‘good’ catholic.... But cannot imagine taking any other religion seriously." - Hemingway, 1927

• Chris Cornell - 1964-2017 Unam Sanctam Catholicism reflects on the passing of the frontman for Soundgarden. 05/28/17.
• The Sufis: Islam’s Anti-Terrorists, by Robert Carle. The Public Discourse 07/13/17. "Growing numbers of Muslims are adopting Sufi practices that promote peace, hope, and harmony among religions."
• Stop Donald Trump From Colonizing Your Brain, by Anne Marlowe. The Tablet 05/21/17. "Like a Libyan dictator of old, the leader is everywhere, including inside your head."
• The Saint You Hate, by Chase Padusniak. Jappers and Janglers 11/29/16:

  In fact, Merton came to love her, to be truly devoted to her: how? Well, he recognized that she took what she was given, took the world she knew, and sanctified it. Even if she "kept everything that was bourgeois about her […] her nostalgic affection for a funny villa called 'Les Buissonnets', her taste for utterly oversweet art, and for little candy angels and pastel saints playing with lambs so soft and fuzzy that they literally give people like me the creeps," she transcended these things. Merton struck up a spiritual friendship in appreciation precisely of his differences with the Little Flower, and this blossomed into fruit in his own life; he entrusted his brother to her and came to see her as “the greatest saint there has been in the Church for three hundred years.”

• Catholicism in an Age of Discontent, by Thomas Joseph White. First Things November 2016.

  We need both Balthasar and de Lubac rather than the one or the other. Balthasar helps us recognize that only the fullness of Catholic wisdom that arises from a Christocentric focus can heal our fallen, God-forgetful human culture. With de Lubac, and against postmodernity, the Church must restore to the human person a sense of the natural human capacity for the universal, and with it the possibility of an ennobling unity based on shared metaphysical truth rather than the negative peace of nonjudgmental tolerance. Our postmodern age needs both the radiant light of Christ’s theological wisdom and encouragement to venture out in search of decisive philosophical understanding.

  Along with these two imperatives we must adopt a third, one brought to the fore in the current pontificate. Our theological and philosophical efforts to overcome postmodern fear of—and despair about—truth must be accompanied by spiritual charity toward those who live disoriented and loveless lives in today’s secular culture. ...

• Caleb Bernacchio offers an interesting take on Macintyre and Dreher: MacIntyre, Dreher, and American Politics. Ethika Politika 05/23/17:

  ... American conservatives were never really interested in MacIntyre’s politics. There was no discussion of MacIntyre’s extended account of the social relationships and political institutions of local communities in Dependent Rational Animals (published in 1999) nor was their any consideration of his earlier text Marxism and Christianity. Instead, conservatives Catholics were reinterpreting MacIntyre’s brief discussion of St. Benedict in the closing pages of After Virtue — a passage intended to highlight the importance of a local politics of community building — as a call for fidelity to the Magisterium after Vatican II. In other words, they were equating MacIntyre’s brief sketch of a renewed politics of community building with his later defense of the Catholic intellectual tradition (primarily outlined in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry). [...]

  [Rod Dreher's] The Benedict Option must be seen as another episode in the political reception of MacIntyre’s work among American conservatives. Ironically, as I have noted, this reception has involved the least political portion of MacIntyre’s work, his defense of the Thomist tradition, rather than his explicit discussions of local politics (which seems to be largely irrelevant to the American conservative political project). This is why academic critics of Dreher are mistaken to think that it is sufficient to argue that Dreher has misunderstood MacIntyre. [...]

  If MacIntyre is correct, American conservatives will not be able to develop a coherent and plausible identity without rediscovering a local politics of associations, municipalities, and activism within social movements. (See MacIntyre’s recent defense of municipal government as an important locus of political activity.) Dreher’s vision in The Benedict Option is too narrow because it fails to recognize the relationship between local politics, issues-based activism (fighting for labor rights or health care), and national party politics [as expressed in his latest, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity].

• Breaking Free of Identity Politics, by Stephen Adubato. Ethika Politika 05/11/17:

  The inconvenient truth about us humans is that we are complex, we are mysterious, and there is always more to the story. You can slap an easily comprehensible label onto a person that may only tell you very little or even nothing at all about that person’s unique experience. We need to be able to open a space for a way to make sense of that “something more” that defines us as humans. Perhaps we can begin by ceasing to reduce religion to a mere identity category that is equated with others like race and gender, and affirming it as the complex phenomenon that it really is.

• Francisco Romero Carrasquillo (Ite ad Thomam):

  As of late, I have been searching the internet for downloadable PDFs of works relevant to Thomism and to pretty much anything else related to traditional Catholic thought. Highlights include much of St. Thomas' Leonine Edition and lots and lots of works by Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. and Santiago Ramírez, O.P. in various languages. And I'm just getting started; there's lots more out there. ....

Here and There

• Faith and doubt in the films of Martin Scorsese, by Filip Mazurczak. Catholic World Report 02/24/17.
• Two citations from Von Balthasar and Benedict XVI on Anti-Semitism Sancrucensis 11/16/16.
• Anything Dennett Can Do, Scruton Does Meta Standpoint March 2017. Adam Zeman reviews Roger Scruton's On Human Nature (Princeton UP, 2017).
• The great debunking by Mene Ukueberuwa. The New Criterion December 2016. A review of The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction by Mark Lilla.
• Trump & Credibility, by Mike LaBossiere. Talking Philosophy 01/27/17. An examination of the POTUS's "routine embrace of the untrue."
• By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of the Death Penalty, forthcoming from Dr. Edward Feser and Joseph Bessette:

  ... This timely work recovers, and calls for a revival of, the Catholic tradition of support for capital punishment. Drawing upon a wealth of philosophical, scriptural, theological, and social scientific arguments, the authors show that it is the perennial and irreformable teaching of the Church that capital punishment can in principle be legitimate -not only to protect society from immediate physical danger, but also for purposes such as retributive justice and deterrence.

• The Wall Street Journal on Robert George’s Conservative Thinking in the Age of Trump 02/24/17.

Here and There

• Artur Rosman () has a two-part interview with Thomas Pfau, Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English and professor of German at Duke University and author of Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge: Part I: Threatening Naturalism’s Universal Authority (08/13/15) | No Theology, No Phenomenology of the Person? (08/14/15).

• Letter to a Friend on Ressourcement and the New Theology The Paraphasic 12/01/14:

  A friend of mine, a student in a very prominent graduate program in theology at a major Catholic university in the US, wrote to me recently. In his letter he expressed confusion and dismay at the hostility to Western theology and liturgy since the Middle Ages which he has encountered among his professors, and asked me for some thoughts on the matter. ...

• Bishop-elect Fr. Robert Barron (via Alisdair MacIntyre): "We've lost the capacity even to have a coherent moral conversation..."

• Would Alasdair MacIntyre Live in a “Benedict Option” Community?, by Dr. Adam J. De Ville. "For all the intriguing ideas that seem to huddle under the capacious canopy of the “Benedict option,” and for all my sympathy towards it, there are three lingering doubts about it."

• A Quick Guide for Doctrinally Classifying Contemporary Catholics Paraphasic Catholic. 05/04/15.

• The Conversion of Paul Ryan, by Timothy Kirchoff. Ethika Politika 05/21/15. On Ryan's involvement with community activist Bob Woodson in Comeback, a documentary series sharing "the inspiring, true stories of real-life Americans overcoming adversity in our nation’s cities and communities."

  Over the course of the 2012 presidential campaign, Ryan eagerly employed the language of Catholic social thought, invoking subsidiarity alongside solidarity and arguing that the preferential option for the poor does not imply a preferential option for big government. It may once have been possible to read his use of such terms as a cynical attempt to twist the Church’s teaching to support Republican economic policies, but Ryan seems to have taken these principles to heart and sought out the opportunity to see them lived out.

• The new Pope Benedict Roundup and Pope Francis Roundup of news and commentary are live on their respective blogs.

Here and There

• Interviewing Ikons: Fr Aidan Kimel - Interview with Fr. Kimel - one-time Catholic convert from Episcopalianism, now Orthodox and living "a tranquil retired existence in the foothills of Roanoke, Virginia, where he writes articles no one reads (or so he thinks) for his blog, Eclectic Orthodoxy." Kimel's post-conversion experience as a Catholic in contemporary times is, alas, may ring all too familiar to some readers: "My conversion to Catholicism had largely occurred in my head with my books. I knew very little about the Catholic Church on the ground level. Speaking only for myself, I increasingly came to realize that I could not spiritually survive in the Catholic Church."

• 'The Classical Moment': Author Q&A with Father James Schall, S.J. Sean Salai, S.J. interviews the prolific Fr. James V. Schall on his latest book, The Classical Moment: Selected Essays on Knowledge and Its Pleasures (America 07/14/14):

  When you write, you write among both friends and antagonists. Of the latter, you want, as Aquinas would advise, to find the truth in what they are trying to say. Of the former, you are grateful that someone else has seen a truth before you did, or explained to you why it was so. So to “mix” these references is simply to be honest. Someone else really did guide you to some truth or insight that you might have otherwise never noticed.

• Cultural-warrior Ryan T. Anderson in action (+ Q&A). Methinks this is how debates of this nature should be conducted, sans vitriol from either side.

• How Husserl changed Catholic attitudes toward Judaism - Artur Rosman (Cosmos in the Lost) traces connections between phenomenology and Catholicism.

• "A Word in Favor of Ideology" Throne and Alter 08/28/14,the author expresses his affinity with the Marxists' historical perspective, in an age where "libertarianism is not an ideology in the old sense. It is a dogma," (Mark Lilla), the blogger explains his affinity for the Communists of yore.

• Recently published and translated by David Bentley Hart, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics- Original Structure and Universal Rhythm (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. February 2014)| Reviewed by Christopher J. Malloy (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews):

  Although Erich Przywara (1889–1972) was one of the preeminent Catholic theologians of his time and a profound influence on such people as Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger, he has remained virtually unknown in North America. This volume includes Przywara’s groundbreaking Analogia Entis, originally published in 1932, and his subsequent essays on the concept analogia entis -- the analogy between God and creation -- which has currency in philosophical and theological circles today.

• In "The Rock Star of One First Street", Stephen Presser suggests that Bruce Allen Murphy's recent intellectual biography of Justice Antonin Scalia makes him out to be more honorable than the author may have intended, whose "jurisprudence is not really cherished by Professor Murphy, but he does a creditable job in explaining it and offering it a grudging respect."

• "A Secular Age 2.0" - Matthew J. Milliner reviews Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (Books and Culture):

  ... like Charles Taylor (A Secular Age) and Brad Gregory (The Unintended Reformation), Pfau is a man equipped for the enormous cartographic task of remapping the rise of modernity. Sweeping narrative retellings such as Pfau's are frequently accused of being unfocused, tangential, historically selective, or insufficiently edited. Pfau, however, deftly avoids dilettantism by never quite leaving his realm of professional training even while he ranges widely beyond it. Which is to say, Minding the Modern is no history, nor is Pfau a historian. Instead, it is an extended, historically grounded close reading of texts that an accomplished literature professor is well equipped to provide. As he puts it, "any account of competing or intersecting intellectual traditions has to rest on the kind of close, textual analysis that, at its best, has always been the bread and butter of literary studies." Such an approach enables Pfau to seamlessly move, for example, between Shaftsbury and Heidegger, Augustine and Arendt, Levinas and Cardinal Newman, or Marion and Aquinas, on the same page. This stems not from indecision but from a premeditated attempt to intertwine historical and philosophical, or horizontal and vertical, approaches with a sustained argument. In addition, Pfau focuses his wide-ranging account by choosing the (admittedly enormous) category of human personhood, and its corollaries of will and agency, as the vehicle in which he takes his tour of the ages. His express aim is "to capture the intrinsic idea of will and person through a series of forensic readings of representative arguments."

• Lastly, why am I just now hearing about this?!? -- The Grand Inquisitor, a comic book from the fevered imagination of Catholic blogger John Zmirak:

  The tale is simple, but all its permutations are profound. Sometime in the near future, a papal conclave drags on as the College of Cardinals finds itself at a deadlock. Tension mounts outside the Vatican walls. The liberals stage a walkout and hurl their scarlet robes to the crowd below in protest. The few remaining electors choose a complete unknown as the next pontiff, an African monk from a forgotten Traditionalist order. (Think Hadrian the Seventh, but with real saints and real sinners facing off rather than an empty conflict of aesthete poseurs and vulgar bureacrats). Unfortunately, one prince of the Church, possessing his own strange and alarming agenda, arranges a mix-up at the new pontiff's airport pickup. The vast bulk of the story deals with the confrontation between the cardinal--incidentally, a dead ringer for Teilhard de Chardin--and the simple priest, now imprisoned in the mental ward of a Roman hospital along with a dozen or so deranged papal claimants of a less legitimate nature. What happens next will decide the fate of the Church, and with it, the world.

  

Here and There

• The Blessings of Religious Burnout, by Benjamin Mann. Catholic Exchange 04/28/14:

  I will never forget the half-joking remark conveyed to me by a friend, made to him by a priest, about zealous Catholic converts having a "five-year shelf life." After that point, presumably, one’s faith must mature – beyond that initial, largely natural zeal, toward a supernatural wisdom and charity – or perish.

• Edward Fester on "What We Owe the New Atheists" Prepared text for a lecture he presented as part of Thomas Aquinas College’s St. Vincent de Paul Lecture and Concert Series, endowed by Barbara and Paul Henkels. 04/05/14.
• Natural Law and the Challenge of Liberal Secularism - Glen Austin Sproviero reviews Robert P. George's Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism. The University Bookman Spring 2014.
• The Ricochet of Thought The Sensible Bond 05/04/14:

  We cast our attention across a plethora of news stories or information sources, like some pebble skimming over the surface of water. We get Twitter updates, Facebook news feeds, email, text messages, voicemails and Instagram. If we boast a certain culture, we have a pile of half-thumbed but unread books awaiting our short attention on the coffee table. We cannot grasp it all, and yet we have the half-formed, unexamined assumption that we should make a stab at doing so. Is it hubris? Is it naivety? Or a toxic mixture of the two?

• The Search for Soul in a Fallen World, by Jerry Salyer. Catholic World Report 05/22/14. Philosopher Roger Scruton's new book, The Soul of the World, examines the tension between the sacred and modern science.
• Fr. Schall’s Latest Literary Treasures, by Gerald J. Russello. Crisis 05/16/14.
• Spiritual Insights Into A Holy War Catholic World Report 05/19/14. Fr. George Rutler's book, Principalities and Powers: Spiritual Combat 1942-1943 is an unconventional and gripping excursion through the pivotal two years of World War II.
• Responding to Tim Park's Reading: The Struggle New York Review of Books), Dominic Preziosi (Commonweal) asks: Would it kill you to read a book? 06/19/14.

Here and There

• The Dorothy Day Few of Us Know, by Stephen Beale. Crisis March 19, 2013:

  he lamented the encroachment of the state and the perils of the welfare system. She once compared abortion to genocide and the U.S. government to Nazi Germany. She cheered on income tax resisters, dismissed the benefits of the minimum wage, and worried about the decline of freedom in an increasingly bureaucratic society.

• My Camille Paglia Interview: The Outtakes, by Emily Esfahani Smith. On the feminist author's playing the negro spiritual "Go Down Moses" to her students:

  ... as the students read these words, and as Paglia talked them through the spiritual, there was something wrong. The students were not connecting with the song. “It was hard going,” she explains. “There was a disconnect as I kept talking and talking. I felt I was struggling, and I didn’t know why. And then it struck me with horror that of a class of twenty-five students, only two seemed to recognize the name ‘Moses’ and understand what I was saying—and they were African-American students.” A few others had heard the name “Moses” before, but it was clear that they did not know his story of bondage in Egypt or anything about his role as the liberator of the Jews.

  “They did not know who he was,” she tells me in disbelief. "If you are an artist and you don’t recognize the name of ‘Moses,’ then the West is dead. It’s over. It has committed suicide."

• "The Death of Facebook February 19, 2013. On one Catholic blogger's decision to abandon social media:

  I canceled my account because there was nothing about Facebook that was leading me towards Christ. I was wasting my time browsing people’s favorite quotes, judging people’s musical tastes and political views, and engaging in long-winded debates that were at times civil and beneficial, but more often than not robbed me of my inner peace. It was time to get out.

  Not that I've forsaken Facebook myself. I find it a convenient resource for keeping up with my extended family and friends from all walks of life (Boy Scouts, college, etc.). In old days my parents had what used to be called the "Round Robin", a circular package of letters that would make its way via U.S. postal mail through the entire family, everybody contributing an update of what was happening. The downside of course is that by the time you received the package, the "family updates" you were reading were dated by weeks or months. So I appreciate and prefer the immediacy of Facebook in this sense, insofar as it's confined to immediate acquaintances.

  George W. Bush is smarter than you, by Keith Hennessey, Stanford University. April 24, 2013:

  One of my students asked "How involved was President Bush with what was going on?" I smiled and responded, "What you really mean is, ‘Was President Bush smart enough to understand what was going on,’ right?"

• The Ambiguity of Islam Homiletic and Pastoral Review. November 1, 2009. Fr. Schall's review of Samir Khalil's 111 Questions on Islam

• "Detheologizing" Christianity Reformation21.org. Michael Kruger's review -- and demolishment -- of hipster preacher Rob Bell's What We Talk About When We Talk About God (2013):

  In the end, my overall concern about this volume is a simple one: it is not Christian. Bell's makeover of Christianity has changed it into something entirely different. It is not Christianity at all, it is modern liberalism. It is the same liberalism that Machen fought in the 1920's and the same liberalism prevalent in far too many churches today. It is the liberalism that teaches that God exists and that Jesus is the source of our happiness and our fulfillment, but all of this comes apart from any real mention of sin, judgment, and the cross. It is the liberalism that says we can know nothing for sure, except of course, that those "fundamentalists" are wrong. It is the liberalism that appeals to the Bible from time to time, but then simply ignores large portions of it.

  Little wonder, then, that Pastor Bell is a "bestselling author, international teacher, and highly sought after public speaker and New York Times' bestseller.

• Ayn Rand: Architect of the culture of death, by Donald DeMarco. National Catholic Register "No philosopher ever proposed a more simple and straightforward view of life than the one Ayn Rand urges upon us."

• Church as Sacrament, by John Cavadini. First Things August / September 2013. A review of George Weigel's Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church:

  Weigel argues that the twin criteria of truth and mission, the goal of which is sanctification, are the criteria for the reform of all of the vocations in the Church. Truth and mission both bring their gifts to bear, in a spirit of continuing conversion, on missionary proclamation of the truth, building up a culture conducive to Gospel values. The “deeply reformed” Church becomes an evangelizing presence in the modern world, wherever she finds herself.

  There is much to commend in this vision of the Church. If the Catholic reader experiences some feeling of discomfort, the feeling is surely partly due to being called out of the Catholic comfort zone in which one takes one’s religion for granted, as an essentially private affair that places no particularly urgent demands for proclamation of the Gospel in word and deed.

  But it is also sometimes hard to distinguish this beneficial discomfort from the worry that, despite Weigel’s disclaimer distinguishing Evangelical Catholicism from Protestant Evangelicalism, the ecclesiology implied in his descriptions of Evangelical Catholicism threatens to leave behind fundamental features of Catholic ecclesiology. ...

• Flannery O’Connor: A Brief Introduction to Her Themes and Symbols, by Randall Ivey. Amnesis: A Journal for the Study of Tradition, Place and "Things Divine". March 2013.

• Courage in the Ordinary, by Tish Harrison Warren. InterVarsity's The Well Blog:

  I spent a little while in two different intentional Christian communities, hanging out with homeless teenagers, and going to a church called “Scum of the Earth” (really). I gave away a bunch of clothes, went barefoot, and wanted to be among the “least of these.” At a gathering of Christian communities, I slept in a cornfield and spent a week using composting toilets, learning to make my own cleaning supplies, and discussing Christian anarchy while listening to mewithoutyou. I went to Christian Community Development Association conferences, headed up a tutoring program for impoverished, immigrant children, and interned at some churches trying to bridge the gap between wealthier evangelicals and the poor. I was certainly not as radical as many Christian radicals — a lot of folks are doing more good than I could ever hope to and, besides, I’ve never had dreadlocks — but I did have some “ordinary radical” street cred.

  Now, I’m a thirty-something with two kids living a more or less ordinary life. And what I’m slowly realizing is that, for me, being in the house all day with a baby and a two-year-old is a lot more scary and a lot harder than being in a war-torn African village. What I need courage for is the ordinary, the daily every-dayness of life. Caring for a homeless kid is a lot more thrilling to me than listening well to the people in my home. Giving away clothes and seeking out edgy Christian communities requires less of me than being kind to my husband on an average Wednesday morning or calling my mother back when I don’t feel like it.

Here and There

• Father Mitch Pacwa of EWTN interviews Archbishop Raymond Burke, previously Archbishop of St. Louis (2003–2008) and Bishop of La Crosse (1995–2003) and appointed Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura -- a position roughly equivalent to that of Chief Justice of the United States. Burke is also the second-highest ranking American prelate at the Vatican after William Cardinal Levada, who took Pope Benedict's place as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

• Steven McGuire of the Lehrman American Studies Center interviews J. Budziszewski, author of The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction. See also Budzisewski's March 2010 interview with Carl Olson on the scandal of natural law and "Objections, Obstacles, Acceptance", about his conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism. (HT: Insight Scoop).

• David P. Goldman (aka Spengler) on "the Heideggar puzzle" -- "The recent publication of transcripts of Martin Heidegger’s 1934 Freiburg seminars on Being, the People and the State simply adds to the confusion over the philosopher’s relationship to Nazism."

  Further reading: Nazi or Philosopher? (Claremont Review of Books Spring 2010), by Steven B. Smith. Both responding to Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 Yale University Press (November 2009).

• Why Christianity Is "Foreign" to Japan: Annihilation of the "self," divinization of nature, rejection of a personal God. The cornerstones of the Japanese culture, explained by Kagefumi Ueno, the ambassador of the Rising Sun to the Holy See. (Sandro Magister, August 19, 2010).

• Ray Bradbury at 90 - James E. Person Jr. (National Review):

  “The thing that drives me most often is an immense gratitude that I was given this one chance to live, to be alive the one time round in a miraculous experience that never ceases to be glorious and dismaying,” he wrote to his friend Russell Kirk many years ago. He added: “I accept the whole damn thing. It is neither all beautiful nor all terrible, but a wash of multitudinous despairs and exhilarations about which we know nothing. Our history is so small, our experience so limited, our science so inadequate, our theologies so crammed in mere matchboxes, that we know we stand on the outer edge of a beginning and our greatest history lies before us, frightening and lovely, much darkness and much light.”

Here and There ...

Not to say I've been the most active blogger of late, but blogging will be impeded still further in the coming months by a new addition to the family born April 19, 2010. To tide you over, here is another compilation of eclectic links to posts and articles which have caught my attention. Enjoy! ~ Christopher

• Edward Feser on “modern nervousness” and contemporary academic style:

  The “modern nervousness” of which Stove speaks is a purported reluctance of contemporary thinkers to be too confident in asserting the truth of their opinions, in light of the overthrow of scientific theories once thought to be unchallengeable. Hence the tentativeness and modesty that is – again, purportedly – the hallmark of contemporary academic writing, and which one generally does not find in philosophers of the past. An Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, or Kant just tells you straightforwardly what he thinks is true, and why he thinks it. So too did the lesser lights -- Stove's discussion [in The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies] concerns the matter-of-fact confidence of tone that was standard in the Victorian era. Contemporary philosophers like to pretend that no serious member of their guild would ever be so rash as that – that we must hedge every claim, that all we can ever say responsibly is that such-and-such appears very plausible and worthy of consideration and further investigation, that so-and-so seems at least defensible while the opposite view seems hard to defend but hey, who the hell knows for sure, etc. etc.

• Bentham on Law and Morality, by Hunter Baker (First Things' "First Thoughts" March 31, 2010):

  Let a student announce that law and morality are separate things and that morality can’t be legislated. Many heads will dutifully bob up and down expressing agreement. Bumper sticker philosophy rules.

  Normally, one would resort to some great Christian master or other purveyor of natural law arguments to dispel the haze.

  But I came across something from Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian and opponent of natural law, that caught my attention. ...

• Donald Goodman on "the earbud" (Distributist Review March 31, 2010):

  The earbud. The final solution to that obnoxious, unpardonable peace and quiet that man has sought for so many generations. Where our forefathers spoke with one another, sang, drank, and enjoyed one another's fellowship, we are more connected with men at distant places than with those who are right beside us. This is sad. This is the sort of person who goes to a bar so he can sit in silence and drink his beer and watch a football game. He might even cheer or boo the game, and he may, conceivably, do it with someone else (if his earbud is silent, that is). But one thing that he will not, under any circumstances, do is turn away from the game and relate with the people around him. No; it's much more fulfilling to relate to people he doesn't know, playing a game he doesn't play, in a city he's never been to, through a screen that's posted on the wall.

  Thus does technology kill culture. This sort of technology, the kind that makes blogs and emails possible, is one thing. It's really just an accelerated postal service and publishing industry, when you think about it. And there's certainly nothing wrong with football games, or even telephones; I'm no Luddite. But it's downright creepy when technology and the obsession with it reaches the point that one's more inclined to talk on the phone than to tip one's hat and greet the passers-by. When men are more aware of what's going on hundreds of miles away than of what's going on right next to them, something's gone horribly wrong.

• Were the Church Fathers pacifists? asks Matthew Lee Anderson (First Things' "First Thoughts" April 28, 2010):

  f you ask noted pacifist John Howard Yoder, the answer is unequivocally “yes.” [...] That judgment has been repeated often, even by those who are sympathetic to just-war theory as a legitimate development of Christian doctrine.

  But the pre-Constantinian church’s understanding of the relationship between Christians and the police functions of the state may be more complex than Yoder and others indicate.

  So argues J. Daryl Charles in the latest issue of Logos. Contra Yoder and others, Charles contends that the early church fathers are not as unified on the issue of pacifism as is often thought. ...

• What David Frum Has in Common with Tiger Woods (And Why It Matters) - Good analysis of why pundit and former speechwriter David Frum was ousted from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

• Nathan O'Halloran, SJ (Whosoever Desires) offers some cautions while watching Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

• (Via Edward Feser): Roger Scruton’s series of Gifford lectures on “The Face of God” are available for listening online. Two of the six lectures have been presented so far. Listeners may leave comments and a recording session is planned in which Scruton can respond to some of them.

• Tocqueville on environmentalism.

• The Age of Untruth: Five Lies We Live With, by Victor Davis Hanson has a few words to say on "civility", "diversity", "stimulus", and a rampant denial of the very notion that there could be illegal immigration. "We live in an age of untruth in which millions privately shrug and nod at the daily lies of our elites."

• Thomas Merton on one's daily immersion in "reality", as noted by Jason Goroncy (Per Crucem ad Lucem).

• Joseph Bottum on "The permanent scandal of the Vatican" (Weekly Standard May 3, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 31):

  For almost 500 years now, Catholicism has been an available answer, a mystical key, to that deep, childish, and existentially compelling question: Why aren’t we there yet? Why is progress still unfinished? Why is promise still unfulfilled? Why aren’t we perfect? Why aren’t we changed?

  Despite our rejection of the past, the future still hasn’t arrived. Despite our advances, corruption continues. It needs an explanation. It requires a response. And in every modernizing movement—from Protestant Reformers to French Revolutionaries, Communists to Freudians, Temperance Leaguers and suffragettes to biotechnologists and science-fiction futurists—someone in despair eventually stumbles on the answer: We have been thwarted by the Catholic Church.

• From Robert P. George, news that the philosopher and constitutional theorist Hadley Arkes has been received into the Catholic Church. His sponsor was Michael Novak of First Things.

• "Here it is in a nutshell, folks" - Fr. John Zuhlsdorf reminds us of the facts of life.