We have to learn to move forward in our thought by trying to honestly perceive reality and to openheartedly respond to it while becoming aware of the distortions of the preconceptions we always bring to such tasks. This is a logical development of the insight we have inherited from Aquinas and a few of his [...]
We’re told that David Hume proved that values can’t be drawn from facts. Most recently, I read of this alleged proof in an interesting and mostly unobjectionable book about the relationship between Protestant ways of reading texts and the origins of science: The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science by Peter Harrison [Cambridge [...]
In one of his novels about the American Empire, Gore Vidal quotes the American-English novelist Henry James as claiming, circa 1900, that it was the United States which was corrupting political systems around the world. The Irish political scientist, William E.H. Lecky, wrote in the 1890s of the great divide in American morality, the citizens [...]
I’ll be writing articles on some aspects of politics and the history of government which interest me and doing so in terms of my concepts of created being. I’ll concentrate on American politics and will cover some interesting phenomena often seen as indicative of conspiracies. These articles will reflect both some of my reading of [...]
While thinking of the suffering endured by patients in the modern medical quest for miracles, I grew depressed and sought to cheer myself up by thoughts of hospices which allow human beings a bit of dignity as they approach death. And so it was that I turned to Flannery O’Connor’s insightful and Thomistically funny introduction [...]
I’m going to propose a full-blooded organic understanding of the Body of Christ. This is intended as an expansion of the teachings of St. Paul rather than a new way of thought about that Body. It would seem appropriate to expand those teachings now that we have a deep and wide knowledge of organisms, including [...]
Nearly all human beings, nearly all the time, think only thoughts which have been thought already within their sphere of knowledge, typically some level and region of a particular culture. Few and far between are the identifiable creative thinkers, though we must remember that creative thinkers are also members of specific communities which provide the [...]
As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger noted years ago, western Christians built Western Civilization as a home for the churches united to Rome. St. Augustine and St. Benedict and St. Gregory the Great laid the foundations and many others built upon those foundations. For centuries, Western Civilization was a home for the Catholic Church and then for [...]
There is no such book as Civilization for Dummies though it’s what a modern man might hope to find if, that is, he were aware of the nature or even existence of such a complex entity as a ‘civilization’. In fact, modern man has decayed into that barbarian child foreseen by Jose Ortega Y Gasset, [...]