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
…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
The events of 1968 had a strong bearing on his shift to a more conservative outlook. Excerpted from “POPE BENEDICT XVI: A Biography of Joseph Ratzinger.” (c) 2000 by John L. Allen, Jr.The Continuum. Joseph Ratzinger arrived at Tübingen [University] in 1966, still enthusiastic about the promise of Vatican II and ready to take his… Read More How the ’60s Changed Ratzinger
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.
Before there was Gloria Steinem or Michel Foucault, there was Dada. And it was deadly serious. Kickoff, Demolition time. “Dada thrives on contradictions. It is creative and destructive. Dada denounces the world and wishes to save it.” So says one narrator of journalist-filmmaker Mick Gold’s Europe After the Rain, a 1978 Arts Council of Great Britain documentary… Read More 1914. Europe After the Rain.
Traditionally called St. Patrick’s Breastplate. I arise today Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,Through belief in the Threeness,Through confession of the Onenessof the Creator of creation. I arise todayThrough the strength of Christ’s birth with His baptism,Through the strength of His crucifixion with His burial,Through the strength of His resurrection with His ascension,Through… Read More Courage and Strength Through the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Attacking the prevenient natural order, finitude itself, gender theory is ground zero. Dr. Margaret McCarthy, interviewed by Dr. Larry Chapp here, “received her doctoral degree in theology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute at the Lateran University in Rome (1994), with a dissertation on the contemporary theology of predestination. Since then, her teaching and writing… Read More Gender Theory: “The Atomic Bomb of Nihilism”
This is no ordinary talk / book (perfectly narrated here). It is extraordinary even by Fulton J. Sheen’s standard. Lay persons and clergy both need to hear its message in our troublesome time. A time which assaults our very souls: “Day after day, Christians struggle to do good, to avoid evil, and to take up… Read More Spiritual Warfare: Victory Over Vice by Archbishop Fulton J Sheen
“…she tells us that “of course” she could “provide good arguments as to why looking at gender this way is wrong. Tempted as she might be … it turns out that she’s not going to bother with that stuff much. Instead, she wants to give the people what nobody was really asking for: a deconstruction of the… Read More What is Judith Butler afraid of?
As a Christian I’ll eagerly go as far “Left” as seeking to meet the needs of a person’s physical hunger, injury or homelessness; but never so far “Left” as approving absolute “equality” (so-called “equity” today!) in wages; or approving promiscuous immigration, or the supposedly “equitable” availability of abortion, automobiles, personal video games, pornography, sex changes,… Read More Going Left
Aldous Huxley stated plainly, “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption [SH: note that desire preceded investigation]. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with… Read More Huxley’s Faith and Confession
“Karl Marx was intent on fomenting war between economic classes; Cultural Marxists have expanded the scope of his target to races, genders, and religious Christians. Identity Politics, or Cultural Marxism, has been the core curriculum of American public and private schools for several generations now. “To distance themselves from the Communist atrocities they made possible,… Read More Fake and Dangerous “Social Justice”
John Gerassi, author of Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century, writes, “Sartre thought that my spontaneity in politics meant that, like a woman, first I reacted, then I acted, and only then did I try to justify. To most readers trained by bourgeois rationalizers to “think before you act,” what I’ve just said will… Read More Sartre: “Throw It In His Face!”
Catholic Critique 