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 [...]
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’ve come to the position that created being exists across a spectrum going from abstract to concrete or particular. A thing, a particularized form of being, still has its abstract being in it the way that a vase has still the raw materials of its clay and glazing. In fact, as you penetrate the stuff [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Human knowledge is embodied knowledge, embodied in the relationships of brain-cells to one another and groups of brain-cells to one another as well as being embodied in the habits of our muscles and peripheral nerves and also in our clothing and our houses and our tools and machines, in our ways of making our livings [...]
I’m stumbling along with my project to enlarge and enrich our moral discourse by drawing upon the modern mountains of partially processed empirical knowledge, including some disturbing information about our inability to anticipate or prevent the development of evil in our own societies. I’m learning or relearning — at an elementary level — some of [...]
This short article, Conformists may kill civilizations is about an effort to find, in archaeological and evolutionary biological terms, a way of speaking of the odd fact that the residents of a once successful but collapsing civilization will go on acting the same way they, or their ancestors, did when that civilization was prosperous and [...]
In this article, I’m continuing my efforts to deepen and enrich my moral self-understanding as an American born in the middle of the 20th century. These efforts run parallel to my studies of modern empirical knowledge, including the seemingly arcane mathematics used in physics, and my assumption is that normal processes of mind-shaping will result [...]