Preface This entry is the core of a larger work. It’s sketchy and incomplete but possibly worth the read. Introduction In the Gospel of St. John, we read: As [Jesus] passed by, he saw a man blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he … [Read more…]
In an earlier posting, The Liberal Mind: What is politics?, I addressed the obvious question, “What is Politics?”. I covered a lot of ground to start off a line of reasoning tightly tied to my current goal of enriching our store of words and concepts for discussing our moral and social lives. While it’s true … [Read more…]
About 20 years ago, a Ph.d. psychologist working for an executive placement firm told me that, out of all the people he’d ever tested or interviewed, I was the one least suited for life in a corporation. Some might say that to be good news in terms of the potential for good moral character, but … [Read more…]
While reading an abridged version of the cosmological sections of Pierre Duhem’s massive study of Medieval science, Medieval Cosmology — published by the University of Chicago, I paid closer attention to some mathematical discussions by later Scholastics. As Duhem noted, those discussions were very sophisticated anticipations of the concept of limit which matured in the … [Read more…]
You have weight when you’re not in free-fall, that is, you have weight when you are kept from traveling the shortest path, or geodesic geodesic, from your current location to the center of gravity of whatever system you’re in. When you’re weighed down, by your own bodily mass or that of other entities you are … [Read more…]
Are we determined by our genes or by our environments? Yes. But, it’s not so simple as that. Those genes are us and we are part of those environments which are hardly independent of human technology — culture in general — these days. But the complications are still more than that. We are what’s shaped … [Read more…]
Flannery O’Connor was a devout Catholic Christian who no mercy on those who preached what she once labeled “Pious Crap.” Sometimes, that might even mean poking fun at the ways in which a truth is held or rejected. One truth she clearly held is: The body is the temple of the Holy Ghost. She wrote … [Read more…]
Or rather, our moral disorder lies outside of us because we inhabit morally disordered human communities. But let me start from a ways back… Recently, I posted an article about some hormonal matters which work from our insides to shape our personality characteristics — The Resurrected Will Need to Be Flooded With Oxytocin and Vasopresin. … [Read more…]
The brain-scientist and philosopher Patricia Churchland is giving some lectures on a specific and partial answer to the question: What can neuroscience tell us about morality? A short news article about these lectures can be found here. Her main point according to the article is hardly a surprise to those who’ve been keeping up at … [Read more…]
I’m in the midst of revived efforts to explore modern knowledge of time, space, and matter to create an enriched and enlarged Christian understanding of Creation. My patterns of learning, contemplating, and writing are often interrupted by the horrifying spectacle of the United States decaying at a rapid rate and dragging with it a world … [Read more…]