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Different hemispheres of the brain govern the propensity for intuitive artistry and inductive science. Extreme atrophy of one of the lobes can cause exaggerated aesthetism or nerdish scientism. Acute distinctions between the arts and sciences are artificial and unscientific. One dead lobe creates the National Endowment for the Arts and another dead one creates Planned Parenthood. - Fr. George Rutler, via Jeff of Curt Jester
curious what the poetry scene/s will be like. here in wexford, i've belonged to a group and found that generally poets tend to write less from their biography. which is something i knew from reading international poetries. but somehow i experience that fact differently as a workshop participant. i've been bringing in some personal lyrics and they contrast with the historical and nature-focused and community focused poems brought in by most of the other poets. my recent tendency toward the personal lyrics seem not only american but also protestant in their individualism. stray range stir angst stars sang to feel rather than merely intellectually understand the self's constructedness. - poet Heidi Lynn Staples who moved from America to Wexford, Ireland & now to Dublin
One of the principal marks of an educated man … is the fact that he does not take his opinions from newspapers... He knows that they are constantly falling into false reasoning about the things within his personal knowledge . . . and so he assumes that they make the same, or even worse errors about other things, whether intellectual or moral. This assumption, it may be said at once, is quite justified by the facts. - H.L. Mencken, via "Daily Eudemon"
Christianity is not a "religion of the book." As the Compendium shows in question 18, "The Holy Spirit inspired the human authors who wrote what he wanted to teach us. The Christian faith, however, is not a 'religion of the Book', but of the Word of God – 'not a written and mute word, but incarnate and living' (Saint Bernard of Clairvaux)." - Rich of "Ten Reasons"
A good friend of mine, a lifelong Presbyterian, introduced me to Peter Kreeft a half-dozen years ago. Because of that introduction and our subsequent conversations, my friend is at least partly responsible for my reversion, or at least my taking the Faith much more seriously. He was fond of saying that the real fault line in Christendom lies not between Catholics and Protestants but between orthodox Christians and progressive agitators. - Rich of "Ten Reasons"
Both religious leaders felt the need to reaffirm the traditional teachings of the church about an invisible spirit world to a society of, in the pope's [John Paul II] words, 'rationalists and materialists'. The similarity reminded me of how, twenty years ago, I had read the autobiography of Pope John XXIII and found in it the same piety and awe of God's presence that Increase Mather had expressed in his autobiography. It is ironic that the Puritan leader of Massachusetts, to whom the pope was the Red Whore of Babylon, and these twentieth-century popes should have so much in common. The world views of seventeenth-century New England Puritans and twentieth-century Roman popes are closer to each other than either is to the secular and materialistic world view that dominates the industrialized countries of today. - Michael G. Hall, author of "The Last American Puritan"
Cheri Mantz reports in
"Should be two kinds of men in every busy parish," Phil said. "Priest-priests and priest-promoters." The novel describes these two types, and they are both lacking. The priest-priests are those that totally and exclusively identify with their sacramental role (in the spirit of Fr. John O'Brien's book The Faith of Millions, which is still being used by Protestants to learn about Catholicism). These men are fearful and ignorant of the world and take pride in a destitution that stems from their own administrative incompetence. They tend to play up sectarian differences and are insensitive to tone when addressing books or pamphlets to the public. The priest-promoters are those like Fr. Urban: he likes good wine and food, knows how to treat businessmen, and is ambitious. Fr. Urban steers clear of controversy, proposes parish entertainment that is entertaining (without embedding moralistic content). Fr. Urban speaks the truth, not the complete truth, but the truth. An organization fueled by donations and volunteer work should be managed soundly so that the sacrifice of many will not be squandered. What's missing so far - and this may very well be the blindness of Fr. Urban's point of view - is love for Christ...The priest-priests live in fear of the world and so choose to do the sacramental bit well; Fr. Urban is not a mercenary, but really wants nothing more than to run a successful parish and to receive a little credit for a job well done. So far, I haven't heard any question in the book that only Christ is the answer to. - Fred of "Deep Furrows" on J.F. Powers's novel "Morte d'Urban"
It should be admitted that it's not a particularly Christian story. The virtues it exemplifies are natural virtues; in particular, the love that plays such a significant (and improbable) role is natural love, not Christian charity....Non-Christiany aspects are no big deal at all in a story; they only become so if the story is supposed to be somehow more profoundly Christian than any other good-vs-evil fantasy. Part of it, I guess, is what I call the Third Law of Commotion: For every action ("Rowling is an antichrist.") there is an equal and opposite reaction ("Rowling is the greatest evangelist of our generation."). - Tom of Disputations on Harry Potter
The story goes back to Sam Coleridge...Sam didn’t like the Britannica: too enlightened, too alphabetical, too Scottish. So he started his own project, the Encyclopedia Metropolitana: systematic in organization, orthodox Christian in tone, and representing the best minds of London, Cambridge, and Oxford. One of the latter was Richard Whately, who was assigned to cover two thirds of the Scholastic trivium, the Elements of Logic and Rhetoric; Whately in turn farmed out part of the Logic to a former student, the Rev. John H. Newman, then of the Established church. The Encyclopedia as a whole didn’t sell, but these two volumes did, like hotcakes. In America. As textbooks. And so the Elements of Logic found their way into the home of Professor Benjamin Peirce of Cambridge Mass. and into the hands of his precocious son Charles, who was never the same. Charles Sanders Peirce went on to become the father of American philosophy. (There are days I acknowledge Emerson; this isn’t one of them.)... For him the art of discovering reality isn’t a matter of empirical observation or rational deduction, though these are of course indispensable, but more the weighing of converging independent probabilities. This is something he had picked up from Whately’s (and Newman’s) Elements of Logic, but was now able to show is the way real work is done in the hard sciences, in which he made his living. He also argued that what passes for philosophy has been on the wrong track since the end of the Middle Ages, and that if philosophers wanted to be modern in the sense of being scientific, they needed to go back to the methods of scholasticism. - Frank Purcell
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