The late philosopher, William Barrett, in his famous book on Existentialism entitled Irrational Man, writes of faith and reason, “THOUGH strongly colored by Greek and Neo-Platonic influences, Christianity belongs to the Hebraist rather than to the Hellenist side of man’s nature because Christianity bases itself above all on faith and sets the man of faith… Read More Whose Wisdom? Whose Reason?
“What is man, that thou art mindful of him: or the son of man, that thou visitest him? Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels: thou hast crowned him with glory and honour, and hast set him over the works of thy hands: Thou hast subjected all things under his feet”—Heb 2:5-7… Read More The Image of God vs. the Myths.
… you are almost certainly a literate person with an interest in history. And this man was a lot more than brilliant and merely batschlit crazy (though he was very likely that, since he certifiably popped most of his buttons between the World Wars of the last century). He was also extremely influential, impacting for… Read More If you know who this is…
From The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis., 15th Century. God help us. “… a humble tiller of the land who serves God is better than a proud philosopher who neglects his soul to study the course of the stars. He who knows himself well becomes mean in his own eyes and is not… Read More On Striving to be Small Towards Christmas.
“Chesterton challenged the common belief that previous generations were foolish.” By Shane Parrish. Chesterton’s Fence is a principle that reminds us to look before we leap. To understand before we act. It’s a cautionary reminder to understand why something is the way it is before meddling in change. The principle comes from a parable by… Read More Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Thinking
Dr. Arthur Holmes, History of Philosophy : This is an excellent series, it is very informative and fair to the ancients, to Catholic, Protestant and Enlightenment philosophies from Thales to Sartre and beyond. 81 comprehensive episodes. One can learn something new with every listen, or relisten, of any episode in this History of Philosophy series.… Read More History of Philosophy
I’ve always loved Camus. But his shadow side must be faced. In his novella, The Fall, the Algerian-French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus stops lamenting social injustice for a moment as well as the “meaninglessness” and “absurdity” of an empty Nietzschean universe in general, and turns instead to biography, specifically to his own cruelty. Camus was a… Read More The Falls of Albert Camus
“Without wonder, men and women would lapse into deadening routine and little by little would become incapable of a life which is genuinely personal”—Pope John Paul II Fides et Ratio,” meaning “Faith and Reason,” is an encyclical by Pope John Paul II published on September 14, 1998. It emphasizes the essential relationship between faith and… Read More Encyclical Letter ‘Faith and Reason’. Pope John Paul II.
“God is Dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we – we still have to vanquish his shadow, too. — Frederich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 109. The Forerunners: 2015: For the Neo-modernist or Progressivist Catholic today, the traditional understanding… Read More Progressivist Theology. What it is.
Or, where the Left would take us. by Roger Kimball.The New Criterion. On The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller. Michel Foucault’s personal perversions involved him in private tragedy. The celebration of his intellectual perversions by academics continues to be a public scandal. The career of this “representative man” of the twentieth century really represents one of… Read More The Perversions of Michel Foucault
…and Epistemology. [P]hilosophy and religion deal with the same basic questions. Christians, and especially evangelical Christians, have tended to forget this. Philosophy and religion do not deal with different questions, though they give different answers and in different terms. The basic questions of both philosophy and religion (and I mean religion here in the wide… Read More Francis Schaeffer on the Philosophy of being
Good Fences, Shared Bounty. Can it ever be wise to separate compassion, reasonable limits and common sense? If you have followed the immigration debates in the West in recent decades you will have long ago gotten a glimpse of the fears, greed, fanaticism and wars which, often enough, make many peoples in our post 9/11… Read More Immigration, Birds of a Feather and Trojan Horses
“I appeal also to philosophers, and to all teachers of philosophy, asking them to have the courage to recover, in the flow of an enduringly valid philosophical tradition, the range of authentic wisdom and truth — metaphysical truth included — which is proper to philosophical inquiry — John Paul II, Fides et Ratio # 106… Read More John Paul II’s Battle Against Nihilism
Put the news aside for a time. If unhappiness is growing consider it a reset signal to return to philosophy where all education and earthly wisdom began. …This is an excellent series, very informative and very fair to Catholic, Protestant and Enlightenment philosophies. Thales to Sartre and beyond. 81 comprehensive episodes. One can learn something… Read More Dr. Arthur Holmes Lectures. A History of Philosophy.
“We’ll get you through your children.” —Allen Ginsberg, 1958 The core of the heresy of the Free Spirit lay in the adept’s attitude towards himself: he believed that he had attained a perfection so absolute that he was incapable of sin. Disclaiming book-learning and theological subtleties, they rejoiced in direct knowledge of God- indeed, they… Read More The Beat Generation… cultural catastrophe. By Roger Kimball
“God is dead but given the way of men there may be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we will have to vanquish his shadow, too.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, # 109 At the very dawn of the 20th century, on 25 August in the year… Read More “Straying, as through infinite nothingness”: The Collapse of Nietzsche
“The word “God” exists. Thus we return to the beginning, to the simple fact that in the universe of words with which we build our world and without which even the so-called facts do not exist for us, the word “God”, too, occurs. Even for the atheists, even for those who say: God is dead,… Read More Karl Rahner* on the Word “God”
Apropos of everything: Because Martin Heidegger forsook his early roots in Thomistic [objective] Christian philosophy, the unapologetic Nazi who enjoyed philosophy was forced to create a new and eccentric philosophical superstructure [undecipherable and irrelevant to most human beings] to dodge the consequent existential void. It was necessary because his system toppled the Holy Trinity in… Read More Being and Bunk.
Recusal from case with huge implications for education could tilt scales in cause her friend spent a career defending. Linda Jacobson | The Guardian | Opinion / CC. On 30 April, the court will consider a legal question that has defined her career: can explicitly religious organizations operate charter schools? At the center of the dispute… Read More How Amy Coney Barrett’s close friendship could affect future of major supreme court Ed case
Cynical news media daily turn many a local story, especially calamities, into national or international stories for political and financial purposes. The media bosses reap all the profit by spreading fear and shattering nerves. Motives are often far from noble despite all the self-righteous pretense. Henry David Thoreau anticipated this and there is lesson in… Read More Thoreau on “News” Media As the “Ruling Powers”
“We ought not to be swayed by the authority of the writer, whether he be a great literary light or an insignificant person, but by the love of simple truth. We ought not to ask who is speaking, but mark what is said.” — Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Bk. 1 Ch.5 A… Read More You quote dubious Catholics!
Dr. Kreeft is one of the most prolific, respected, and influential Catholic writers of the last fifty years. He is the author of nearly a hundred books (he doesn’t keep count, but says it’s somewhere around there), more than forty of which have been published by Ignatius Press—with more coming along all the time. Peter Kreeft,… Read More Peter Kreeft: “Why We’re Not Saving Western Civilization”
Note: Mary Daly died in January 2010. It is good to be tolerant, even of incoherent things, we are told today. The devil himself ought to be given a seat at the table. So the courts have ruled. But that can’t stop us from noticing that Mary Daly represents the meltdown of the dissident transgressive… Read More Mary Daly: The Witch of Boston College
Is A Personal God Improbable? Or is it we who are improbable?Atheism has traditionally scoffed at belief in a God who is Personal or SupraPersonal. I’ve always found their position to be a counterintuitive curiosity. One of the reasons why is that I find myself, a personal being, to exist. I am here. You are… Read More I Am Therefore I Think
Brad S. Gregory is Dorothy G. Griffin Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Notre Dame, a world-class historian, and award-winning author of Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe and The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard… Read More The Reformation: Historical Conditions, Unintended Consequences
“Hegel is the ideological nexus where the Gnostic scientific dictatorships of Nazism and Communism intersect.” — Phillip and Paul Collins, The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship. “All the worth which the human being possesses – all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State. … For Truth is the Unity of the universal and subjective… Read More Hegel, the Idolatry of the State, and the Cunning of [his] ‘Reason’.
There is scarcely a Catholic philospher (of the Left especially) who does not consider the Catholic apostate Martin Heidegger a brilliant philospher whose teachings in no small way show us the way out of the restraints of biblical literalism and philosophical realism (in other words, the Christian revelation of God in Christ Jesus, the Incarnation),… Read More Heidegger in Ruins
See Dr. Mark Miravalle talk below. Pope Leo XIII wrote, “… as soon as the constitution and the spirit of the masonic sect were clearly discovered by manifest signs of its actions, by the investigation of its causes, by publication of its laws, and of its rites and commentaries, with the addition often of the… Read More St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Popes & the Masonic Sect
“The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in… Read More G.K. Chesterton on The “Church of Science” and Tyranny
Aquinas by Edward Feser. Exquisitely written and narrated. St. Thomas died on March 7. One of the most influential philosophers and theologians in the history of Western thought, St. Thomas Aquinas established the foundations for much of modern philosophy of religion, and is famous for his arguments for the existence of God. In this cogent… Read More Aquinas by Edward Feser
For some reason I thought it was another book about our frivolous TV shows and general culture (Seinfeld, Larry David’s vicious Curb Your Enthusiasm —pick your nonsense— and I already knew this about the culture. But then things got darker. Very recently I somehow bumped into this reading. I listened. I couldn’t have been more… Read More I’ve had the book for decades. But I never read it. “Shows About Nothing.”
Modern de facto Paganism often caves to the passions, but in ancient times it was not always so. Stoic wisdom is not theology, but is often good psychology in harmony with Christian ideals. The Magi also brought their gifts. “Finally, brethren, whatsoever is true, whatsoever is honorable, whatsoever is just, whatsoever is pure, whatsoever is… Read More Stoic Gems: The Porch and the Cross
The stoics were important pre-modern psychologists. “It was in Greece that the most sublime wisdom flourished, as it is said in the Epistle to the Corinthians: “The Jews require signs, and the Greeks seek after wisdom.” — St. Albert the Great “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever… Read More Gleaning The Wisdom of the Ancients. On Depression.
“Know this, that in the last days shall come perilous times.” — 2 Tim. 3:1 Excerpts from Pope St. Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis: “First of all they lay down the general principle that in a living religion everything is subject to change, and must in fact be changed. In this way they pass to… Read More Pope St. Pius X on Progressivist “Evolution”. From “Page to Page.”
This war is not like any other war. A revolution … involve[s] ideologies, dogmas and creeds. 1914 The so-called “Age of Reason” was really an Age of Unbelief for its strongest protagonists were corrosive men like Hume, Kant, Voltaire, who measured the growth of reason by its alienation from God Who Alone could guarantee its… Read More Fulton J. Sheen, 1943. War Against Christians and Jews.
Pinned 2.15.23 —Auctorem Fidei, August 28, 1794, is a papal document issued by Pius VI in condemnation of the Gallican and Jansenist acts and tendencies of the Synod of Pistoia (1786). In the introductory text the Pope exposes the “art of deception,” just as Pius X did again at the dawn of the twentieth century… Read More When Popes Exposed and Denounced Doctrinal Ambiguity, the “Art of Deception.”
Truth does not change with the changes in political parties, current philosophies or trends. ” a thing cannot be and not be at the same time”— St. Thomas (Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 1, chap. 84) “…reason’s first principle is the principle of contradiction. He who denies this principle affirms a self-destructive sentence. To deny this principle… Read More Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange on Reason and The Law of Non-Contradiction.
Why “faith and culture”? Do they go together? Can they be separated? Can faith exist without culture? Can culture exist without faith? In the broadest sense of the word, faith and culture are inextricably connected because a culture is always an expression of the faith which informs it. If a culture is animated by a… Read More Faith and Culture by Joseph Pearce
‘In him we live and move and have our being’…‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ — Acts 17:28. A Breviary of Philosophy from the Works of St. Thomas Aquinas by Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper. The Creature is vanity in so far as it comes from nothingness, but not in so far as it is an… Read More St. Thomas On Being and Nothingness.
By Karl Keating, New Oxford Review “…I have a favorite line from Pope Leo XIII. It’s from Rerum Novarum (1891), the first of the social encyclicals. Nearly every pope since his time has written one or more social encyclicals. The line I remember isn’t quite as Leo wrote it. Often we remember lines a little… Read More A Life’s Worth of Failure, an Abundance of Gratitude
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