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 [...]
Once the thought of Plato and Aristotle had a home — the Greek city-state. Once the thought of St. Paul and St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas had a home — Western Civilization. The two situations were different because the Greek philosophers struggled to find the best way to inhabit a home built by their [...]
We need to develop a healthy fear of what passes for education in the current age because that form of mental development is, in fact, little more than deformation of the pliable student into a trained monkey. To speak first of abstract thought, book-centered learning is best done by minimal years spent on basic reading [...]
Recently, I had reason to refer to Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, a book which had a good deal of influence upon my thoughts, upon my views of how human beings are embodied creatures and not body-soul chimeras and also upon my views of the way that human beings are embedded in [...]
So what freedom do we have when we’re strongly constrained by our genes and the rest of our body, by our upbringings and our social and political circumstances, by the very nature of space and time and causality? Whatever the result of the various debates about nature versus nurture, there are certainly some strong constraints [...]
This article, Six ‘uniquely’ human traits now found in animals, will be worrisome to those who think to secure the moral worth of the human being by appealing to some claim to uniqueness of the human race amongst biological species. Some of us aren’t bothered much at all by such articles because we see human [...]
A few days back, I uploaded an entry with the above title to my other blog: To See a World in a Grain of Sand. That was a mistake. It was written for this blog. I may eventually move it over, but interested readers can read it there for now: What We Can All Learn [...]
The usual mantra amongst Christian thinkers is faith and reason, implying that faith should be united to and disciplined by products of the human mind. The problem is that Christians are bound to believe that God was not only free to create or not, but also that — once He chose to create — He [...]
“Larvae, the immature forms of many animals, are distinct from adult forms by definition. In many life histories–caterpillars and the trochophore larvae of clams and sea snails are examples–larvae and adults bear no resemblance to each other. Biologist Donald I. Williamson has proposed that larvae are juvenile forms acquired through hybridization–the fusing of two genomes, [...]
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