by Thomas Storck. What is needed is a real debate on religious questions providing a rational public apologetic for the faith. “For we were not following fictitious tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his grandeur.” – 2 Peter 1:16 The… Read More The Catholic Faith Is Not a Noble Lie
By Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. | ” … dictators are not the creators of the world’s evil; they are its creatures; they are only boils on the surface of the world’s skin; they come to the surface because there is bad blood beneath. It will do no good to puncture the boils, if we leave… Read More The Wars and the Revolution
“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.
Dr. Larry Chapp and Dr. David Deane “Everyone knows there is a “crisis” in the Catholic Church and in the world around us. Some say it is capitalism gone wild. Others say it is the decay of tradition, family, and objective truth. Still others say it is the rise of radical, reactionary conservatism. Though all… Read More Nietzsche and the Crisis in the Church and World
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
How we came to where we are today. By Dinesh D’Souza “The typical socialist today is not a union guy who wants higher wages; it’s a transsexual eco-feminist who marches in Antifa and Black Lives Matter rallies and throws cement blocks at her political opponents. We see it in the riots and looting sweeping the country… Read More The Philosopher of Antifa
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.
“Society has to defend itself to a certain extent against the tyranny of the [nihilist] state.” Rocco Buttiglione (Italian: [b. 6 June 1948) is an Italian Union of Christian and Centre Democrats politician and an academic. He was a close friend of Pope John Paul II. Buttiglione’s nomination for a post as European Commissioner with a portfolio that was to include civil… Read More Rocco Buttiglione on Philosophy, Politics, and Economics
By Dr. Ralph Weimann, Forward by Robert Cardinal Sarah. The goal of this book is to provide aguide for all people of good will and to show them the way to Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God. To this end, common criticisms that are leveled against the faith and the Church are examined.… Read More Guide for Truth-seeking Christians
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
When Magicians work their tricks, people applaud, are charmed, and wonder aloud how they ever did that. But with the Lord Jesus Christ it was very different. His saving deeds elicited fear, which is the sign of a real miracle occuring in the midst of sane men and women, as witness the Gospel history: “A… Read More Jesus of Nazareth vs the Magicians and Empiricists
…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
Darrick Taylor on Galileo and Robert Bellarmine…. Years ago, the philosopher Paul Feyerabend wrote about the Galileo affair as an example of a conflict between two types of experts. On the one hand, there was the hero of Enlightenment history, Galileo Galilei, who championed the use of reason to understand the universe by dividing the physical world… Read More Against the Magisterium of Specialists
“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”- –G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, (1874 – 1936) Utopia literally means “nowhere’. But the quest for Utopian-like… Read More Futurism and Accelerationism
To be a Roman Catholic one must believe in miracles. This in itself has been a stumbling block to many. And yet the believer knows that one need only find the earth beneath one’s feet and all other genuine miracles become mere footnotes. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, originally a student of the intractable rationalist, Bertrand… Read More Wittgenstein and Existence.
“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
“For the scientist who has lived by faith in the power of his reason, the story ends like a bad dream” —Robert Jastrow, American NASA astronomer, physicist and cosmologist. “Around every circle another circle can be drawn, under every deep another deep opens” —Ralph Waldo Emerson “Someone said, “A little philosophy and science will take… Read More The Mystery That Dwarfs
“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”
By Dawn LaValle, First Things. To the Wonder follows the relationship of a French woman named Marina (Olga Kurylenko) and an American named Neil (Ben Affleck) who fall in love in Paris and then return to Neil’s American home along with Marina’s young daughter. Their relationship stalls, and another woman, Jane (Rachel McAdams), enters Neil’s life. Alongside… Read More Terrance Malick and the Fecundity of Commitment
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
“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!
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
The coming of the “Son of Perdition, the Man. of Sin” In 1954 the famous Thomist, Josef Pieper wrote: “Once, and as soon as, world dominion in the full sense has become possible, the Antichrist has become possible. To this corresponds the other coordinate fact that the Christian gospel must have reached the totality of… Read More Thomist Josef Pieper on the Pseudo-Order and World Dominion of the AntiChrist.
See also The Drama of Atheist Humanism Ignatius Press Fulton J. Sheen: “The Roots of Democracy and Peace. The word “crisis” in Greek means judgment. A crisis in history is therefore a “verdict of history” upon the way any given civilization has lived and thought, married and unmarried, bought and sold, prayed and cursed. That… Read More Democracy. Philosophies At War. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.
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.
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
What is Natural Law? The idea of natural law holds that all people, whatever their ethnicity, culture, or religion, can know the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. The idea, for example, of the Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you—is understood as a principle of moral conduct… Read More The Essential Natural Law. Samuel Gregg.
First, the Problem. The famous Thomist philosopher Etienne Gilson writes, surely accurately, in his Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, “… at the very place where the Summa of Alexander and the Commentary of St. Bonaventure undertake to show that the existence of God is evident, St. Thomas devotes an article to proving that it… Read More Gilson, Saint Thomas and The Self-Attesting God
“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’.
Rosary College is a two-year liberal arts college in the Catholic tradition offering courses in the humanities ordered toward readiness to serve within the Church and society. It finds inspiration in the Benedictine tradition of integrating prayer and work and expressing beauty for the glory of God. Immersing students in the legacy of the life… Read More The Birth of Rosary College: Application Open for Fall 2024
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
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.
“The order marked for destruction can be summed up in one word: Europe—the intellectual and spiritual synthesis of Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem. The new totalitarianism proceeds by negating every form of transcendence, especially the religious truth and universal reason which Del Noce calls “Platonism.” It reconceives reality as “a system of forces, not of values.” Being… Read More Del Noce on Liberalism & the Scientism of Marx
“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.”
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.
Catholic Critique 