In reviewing A war for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars by Andrew Hartman, Seth Bartee writes: In A War for the Soul of America Hartman argues that the late 20th century’s cultural conflicts were born out of the tumultuous 1960s. To most observers this might not seem a particularly provocative … [Read more…]
We of the modern West can’t deal with the complexity of human communities nor with the complex world implied by our modern empirical knowledge. We can’t produce proper `global’ understandings of human being, individual and communal, nor of this world with all its realms only partly reconciled and made coherent at even the `purely physical’ … [Read more…]
Let’s do a Plato-update. Mathematics is the key, as it was for that heavyweight wrestler (according to some rumors which even hint at championships). Very roughly speaking, philosophy to Plato was a generalization of the thinking done in geometry and arithmetic. It may not be true that Plato’s school (the Platonic Academy Academy) had a … [Read more…]
What is truth? Where is truth to be found? There are a few starting points for a Christian willing to consider the opinions of Thomas Aquinas and all the great thinkers before him as well as opinions derived directly from the works of the modern scientists including sometimes just their empirical or mathematical findings and … [Read more…]
I’ve pondered a problem for years. How is it that premodern thinkers, such as the 4 A’s: Aristocles (`Plato’ is a nickname which might mean `Chubby’) and Aristotle and Augustine and Aquinas, produced so many true insights into the nature of reality, the nature of contingent being and even of the empirical and concrete realms … [Read more…]
Rod Dreher posted an interesting essay on March 23, 2016: Millennial Landslide. I’ll start with a snippet of a quote he provided from another source: The percentage of Americans who prayed or believed in God reached an all-time low in 2014, according to new research led by San Diego State University psychology professor Jean M. … [Read more…]
I’d like to return to an essay I wrote in 2009, Darwin, Einstein, and the Totemic Mind: In the totemic mind of ancient hunters of elk, we see the possibility of modern hunters of the secrets of God’s Creation, hunters who carry out their quest in the acts of shaping their minds to embody the … [Read more…]
I’ve made the claim in various ways that all of our knowledge and thought comes from God’s thoughts as manifested in Creation, including this universe with its concrete thing-like being. This claim implies the further claim which I would strongly support: even the structures and basic elements of our most abstract systems (say those of … [Read more…]
Once again, I’ll state a standard Jewish and Christian view of man: man can be usefully and truthfully seen as a creature made of mind and heart and hands. This points to state of unity which is not achieved by men in this mortal realm but might be achieved by the resurrected who share the … [Read more…]
One of the main themes of my writing has been a tripartite understanding of the human being, individual and communal, as mind and heart and hands. We think and we feel and we do. The triad of mind and heart and hands is like the Real Presence in being somehow a way of speaking of … [Read more…]