by Dietrich von Hildebrand. “Although the dethronement of truth manifests itself in the most drastic and radical way in Nazism and Bolshevism, unfortunately many symptoms of this spiritual disease are also to be found in democratic countries. In discussions we sometimes hear the following argument: “Why should your opinion be more valid than mine? We… Read More The Dethronement of Truth
Pinned 2.15.23 —Auctorem Fidei, August 28, 1794, is a Bull 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 exposed the method, the “art of deception,” 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.”
Apropos of everything: Because 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 and so… Read More Being and Bunk.
“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”
You are creating a new world, soldier!Isn’t that what you signed up to do,to kill and die for, soldier? You will…ridicule enemy cultureswreck economiesmock their traditionsterrorize their“moral absolutes” You willcut off their ballsthrow their titsinto cold tin basinsturn boys into girlsgirls into boysmothers into milfsfathers into jokeschurch into effeminate echoschildren into pin-ups! You will teach… Read More You Will Bring Liberation, Soldier!
How do we experience life? What is it to be human? How do we see? What is the relationship between reading and history, reading and science, metaphysics…empathy, philosophy, religion and art? …More. — How to Mark a Book by Mortimer Adler — The social disaster: Children who frequently check social media face significant brain changes
… excellent series, very informative and very fair to Catholic, Protestant and Enlightenment philosophies. Arthur Frank Holmes “served in the Royal Air Force during World War II. He was an English philosopher who “served as Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College in Illinois, US from 1951 to 1994…He built the philosophy department at Wheaton where he taught,… Read More Dr. Arthur Holmes Lectures. A History of Philosophy.
A stoneis not an individual.You can make little onesout of big ones. A treeis an individual.It comesfrom a germ.“Only Godcan make a tree,”says the poet. A horseis an individual.The horse is notan individualthe way the treeis an individual.It has animal life. Man is an individualand has animal lifelike the horse.Man has also reason.which the horse… Read More On Personalism. Peter Maurin.
Who needs the old Progressivist desire for a Third Vatican Council to mitigate Church teachings when they can have almost anything they want from Francis, in this instance an incremental permanent synodal Church? A lot of the infiltrators who treacherously maneuvered their way into the highest church positions by pretending to be pious and loyal… Read More Martini’s Endless Dream
There are many people who will cite the West as something which is under threat and something for which we should be prepared to fight to defend. Depending on which defender of the West is pontificating, the threat comes from Russia, or from Islam, or from China, or from some enemy within the West itself.… Read More Is the West Worth Defending? 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.
Linking antiwar, anti racism and abortion. Opinion. Bill Ayers and His Media Groupies by Cliff Kincaid. And brought up to date— especially regarding “the Catholic movement” and the abortion connection— in a Spotify podcast below (August 2022). Bill Ayers’ claim that the Weather Underground bombed property, not people, in order to protest the Vietnam War, is two lies… Read More What’s been happening?
Updated. “If you like Wokeism then Michel Foucault is your Guy… I confess I find challenging Foucault’s later work on sexuality…Can we be a little more modest about the claims we make? … The very people who gave us our Natural Law morality, it’s clear in the platonic dialogues, sex between an older man and… Read More Barron Sketches Michel Foucault
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
The following conversation took place in 2018 and it appears we remain essentially stuck where we were then. Many, of course, argue that it’s much worse today since the issues discussed here seem to have been eclipsed and complicated by bizarre psycho-sexual agendas from coast to coast. Others say not really since both the legacy… Read More Stuck ‘Twixt Him and Him
G. K. Chesterton: “In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilisation. Rome, the legend, founded upon… Read More Man could do no more… He [Pilate] “washed his hands of the world”
“Only the God of Jesus Christ is the living God [Jn. 14:16]. As has also been stated in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum (no. 3), the first God mentioned above—the God of the philosophers—is the fruit of human thought, of human speculation, and capable of saying something valid about God . In… Read More John Paul II on the Only Name Under Heaven
Cynical news media daily turn many a local story, especially tragedies, into national or international stories for political and financial purposes. The media bosses reap all the profit of off 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… Read More Thoreau on “News” Media As the “Ruling Powers”
“The Unspeakable. What is that? Surely, an eschatological image. It is the void that we encounter, you and I, underlying the announced programs, the good intentions, the unexampled and universal aspirations for the best of all possible worlds. It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the… Read More Merton on The Unspeakable
I personally think that Catholic education, combining the teaching of traditional theology, philosophy, the great books and intensive practical skills necessary to build a home, ought to be returned to holy men and women in small orthodox monastic or other communities at comparatively little cost. — Why colleges are becoming cults — Trent Horn reviews… Read More The Quicksands of “Catholic” Education and the Future.
I admire much that Jordan Peterson has done and said. Very much. But I cannot accept his thought entirely regarding the question of Meaning in our lives and times, which he and others have publicly discussed, and which many admire. To the contrary, it is Jesus Christ, “the same yesterday, today and forever” (Heb. 13:8),… Read More Jordan Peterson on Meaning
John E. Fagan “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart the desire to know the truth — in a word, to know himself — so that by knowing and loving God, men and women can come… Read More John Paul II on Faith, Reason and Nihilism
Rocco Buttiglione is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Pius V University in Rome, and a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. “… we reach the heart of the question which interests us. To appreciate its full scope, let us take G. W. F. Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of History’ as a point of… Read More John Paul II, Poland, and the Hegelian Menace
“One of the great Catholic philosophers of our day reflects on the way language has been abused so that, instead of being a means of communicating the truth and entering more deeply into it, and of the acquisition of wisdom, it is being used to control people and manipulate them to achieve practical ends. Reality… Read More Catholic Philosopher Josef Pieper: Abuse of Language — Abuse of Power
Foucault’s Child-Sex Allegations Should Shock But Not Surprise us. He elevated common criminality into a virtue. Dr. Matt Treacy. The allegations that the French philosopher Michel Foucault – who has been long admired and oft-quoted by the liberal left in Ireland [and of course everywhere] – repeatedly “raped” pre-pubescent boys in Tunisia during his time as a… Read More Where the Radical Left Would Take Us
By John A. Perricone | New Oxford Review, January-February 2021 The Deleterious Effects of a Subtle Inversion One of Hollywood’s more sybaritic starlets solemnly announced the other day that she was embarking on a 30-day “spiritual cleanse” in India. Since neither ecumenism nor eco-enthusiasm is my métier, I was bewildered. Could it be some novel… Read More “New Spirituality” & the Ghost of Catholicism
Karol Wojtyla (JPII) wrote, “A non-Catholic philosopher once said to me: ‘You know, I just can’t stop myself reading and rereading and thinking over the first three chapters of Genesis.’ And indeed it seems to me that unless one does so reflect upon that fundamental Ensemble of facts and situations it becomes extremely difficult if… Read More John Paul II on the Most Decisive Confrontation —and History’s ‘Last Lap’
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
“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. For the Neo-modernist or Progressivist Catholic today, the Traditional understanding of God is… Read More Progressivist Theology. What it is.
” 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 is to annihilate language, is to destroy all substance, all distinction between things, all… Read More Reason and The Law of Non-Contradiction.
Timothy P. Fortin, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophical Theology, earned an M.A. in Philosophy from The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, and an M.S. in Clinical Psychology from the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, Arlington, VA. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, Italy. His doctoral… Read More Whose ‘Reality’?
By Gary Potter “The Enlightenment” is the name by which are known both an intellectual movement and an historical period usually considered as having begun in the 17th century and reaching their height in the 18th. However, insofar as ideas spawned by the movement — ideas about God, authority, order and freedom — are ones… Read More The Enlightenment Is Not Over
By Timothy Matthews, Catholic InsightIssue: March 2009 “Western civilization at the present day is passing through a crisis which is essentially different from anything that has been previously experienced. Other societies in the past have changed their social institutions or their religious beliefs under the influence of external forces or the slow development of internal… Read More The Frankfurt School: Conspiracy to corrupt
“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
Plato paints the picture of a Charioteer (Greek: ἡνίοχος) driving a chariot pulled by two winged horses: “First the charioteer of the human soul drives the pair. “The Charioteer represents intellect, reason, or the part of the soul that must guide the soul to truth; one horse represents the rational or moral impulse, the positive… Read More Avoiding the Crash. Plato’s Chariot & the Passions
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