www.selectsmart.com/PHILOSOPHY
My results (I would've preferred more Aquinas):
1.  Augustine   (100%)  Click here for info
2.  Aquinas   (75%)  Click here for info
3.  Spinoza   (63%)  Click here for info
4.  Ockham   (57%)  Click here for info
5.  Plato   (54%)  Click here for info
6.  Mill   (45%)  Click here for info
7.  Sartre   (43%)  Click here for info
8.  Kant   (42%)  Click here for info
9.  Rand   (41%)  Click here for info
From EWTN's Philosophy maven:
"I get along with St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas very well. St. Augustine is very concrete. After all, he wrote an autobiography. Anyway, he never held that man is totally corrupt. At the same time Augustine is a realist when it comes to human nature. He believes that man is a sinner, not a very popular position today." - Richard Geraghty

Received this email on the St. Margaret mystery:
Our patron saint officially is St. Margaret of Cortona,
although she is not the saint the parish founders had
in mind in the beginning, nor is she the St. Margaret
who appears in the Stained Glass Window. How did the
mix-up happen? The Italian families who emigrated
to the United States from Pettorano sul Gizio wanted to
dedicate the parish church and the parish itself to the
St. Margaret they knew as the patron saint of their home
town (which would actually be St. Margaret of Antioch).
They simply knew her as St. Margaret. Presumably,
when asked which St Margaret she was, the founders of the
church could not say. Bishop Hartley, who was aware
of several St. Margarets, apparently concluded that the
patron saint of Pettorano sul Gizio would have to be
St. Margaret of Cortona, since she was an Italian.
The Parish was named St. Margaret of Cortona, but the
window and the statue of St. Margaret that is carried in
the Festival Procession are both St.Margaret of Antioch.
The Feast day of St. Margaret of Antioch is July 20,
hence, our parish festival is the last weekend of July.
The feast day of St. Margaret of Cortona is on February 22.
The mix up was never corrected, thus our parish which
should have been named St. Margaret of Antioch, is
actually called St. Margaret of Cortona.
There is a picture of St. Margaret of Cortona that was
brought back from Cortona Italy in 2001, in the Vestibule
of the church, and the statue directly in front of the church
is of St. Margaret of Cortona, who dedicated
her life to prayer and penance.

Many of my mother's ancestors immigrated from Ireland during the height
of Irish immigration - the 1840s. Similarly, my great-grandmother on my
father's side immigrated from Germany during the height of German
immigration - the 1880s. Our Irish forebears left because of the potato
famine - why did she leave?

The name "Hatti" is very rare among German surnames, but the Old High
German spelling of Hatti, "Hesse" is common. Why she was "Hatti" and not
"Hesse" isn't clear, but to begin the story of our ancestor we begin with
the fall of Troy in 677. The Assyrians migrated out of Anatolia
northwest up the Danube into Europe. Roman annals within a few centuries
were filled with the name Chatti, or Hatti, which later was changed to
"Hesse". The people of Hatti were numerous in the current areas of
Hesse-Darmstadt, Hesse-Kassel, and Hesse-Humburg, which happen to be in
southwest Germany, about 100 miles north of Baden-Baden, the reputed
birthplace of Amelia. Fifty years before Amelia's birth, an Anastasia
Hatti was baptized at the Gamshurst Catholic Church in Baden, Baden.
Could she be a great aunt of Amelia's? (See here and here. )

We don't know Amelia's parents birthdates, so they might've been
somewhere between young children or older teens when the German
Revolution hit Baden, not far from the romantic Black Forest and Rhine
River. It was the year 1848, and riots broke out in the streets and for
months 'the monarchies of central Europe looked as fragile as a house of
cards'. Poor harvests, which drove the price of bread sky high, was the
proximate cause. Germany was just a collection of states then and was
not yet a nation and Catholics were only about a quarter of the
population. The mighty Prussian state in the north of Germany began
exercising its power, and in the year Amelia was born Prussia and Austria
won a war against Denmark and gained the northern territories of
Schleswig-Holstein.

In 1866, when Amelia was two years old, Prussia looked south and declared
war on her state. Baden was quickly swallowed up in what was called the
"Six Weeks War". The German nation now existed in theory if not in fact;
that would come five years later when Wilhelm was crowned and Otto von
Bismarck was made the Prime Minister. Bismarck disliked the recently
formed Catholic political party known as the "Centre Party". "He
objected to the existence of a religious party because it seemed to stand
for allegiance to an authority other than the national state," said one
biographer, and considered Catholics a "separatist" group and, along with
social liberals & Jews, as 'enemies of the Reich'. He attempted to end
parochial education, expelled the Jesuit order and deported many clergy,
but ended up uniting Catholics even more strongly and by 1880 Bismarck
had had enough. The hatred of these laws (known as the "Kulturkampf")
was still felt over the nation, especially in the southern Catholic state
of Baden, when Amelia was sixteen and about to emigrate. The religious
situation didn't give many Catholics a reason to stay. And Germany's
economy at that time was weak at best. The reason most Germans immigrated
then was due to this economic situation, especially when compared to the
United States. It was made worse in part because of very high birthrates.
Germany was by far the youngest country in Europe, and there were too
many mouths to feed on most farms and not enough of an industrial base
yet. Southwest German inheritance laws forced parents to divide their
farms equally among their children, which quickly resulted in properties
too small to live on. America looked pretty attractive.

Amelia must not have been too hung up on her Germanness. Or maybe she
got tired of waiting for a Prince Wilhelm. Unlike most of her fellow
immigrants, she would marry outside her nationality - to an Englishman
(or Irishman?) named James H. Smith. Eleven long years passed in
America before she married at the age of 27, which at that time was very
long in the tooth. (I think it's far too young).

Ohio is debating whether to teach evolution and/or intelligent design in schools.
Historically, I think that both sides in the school debate have reason to be defensive.
The scientific side has ample evidence of religious blindness going back
to the Scopes trial. But what is less known is that the religious side
also has good reason to be on the defensive. As Thomas Dubay points out
in his book, "Faith and Certitude': "members of the secular academe are
assumed to be free to think and say and publish just what they wish. Not
so. Scholars must hew the officially accepted line in their fields or
they are consigned to the sidelines by their peers who organize
convention programs and publish journals....The eminent physicist and
astronomer Robert Jastrow finds strange the reaction of scientific minds
to the accumulating evidence that the universe did begin with the 'big
bang'. 'All recent evidence points to this scenario', says Jastrow, 'but
scientists are unhappy with it. It turns out that the man of science
reacts as the rest of us do when our beliefs conflict with the evidence.
We paper it over with meaningless phrases.'"

"Paul made the breakthrough between the universal destination of the
Gospel and the universal condition of sin. Christian theology would call
Paul's synthesis the doctrine of "original sin". Christian theologians
and preachers have, unfortunately, not yet succeeded in developing and
presenting a coherent anthropology of original sin. Part of this
challenge is to derive a correct exegesis of the highly symbolic creation
narratives which contain fundamental truths in a very sophisticated,
ficitional genre. Despite the evident commonness and frequency of sin,
it reamins something of a mystery, still dominating us rather than we
dominating it." - Msgr. Herron in Catholic Times.

From the time I was a child, I loved oxymorons. I relished terms like
"jumbo shrimp", "military intelligence" and "giant dwarf". Some have a
weakness for puns, I liked oxymorons and collected them. How fortunate
then to be a Christian and a lover of oxymorons, for how rich is the
bible in them. Mary is the Virgin Mother.
Christ is God made man. Moses was an Egyptian-raised Jew. David was
the runt of the litter made king. Abraham and Sarah were the infertile
couple with descendents "as numerous as the stars of the sky". Paul was
a Pharisee-Christian.

It was my great secret. The time Mom was right. I couldn't bear to tell
it, couldn't bear that she could say "I told you so". And so I thought
it would be buried with me, but I shall tell it now.

On October the 30th, 1987, the water towers next to the Continent
Apartments were sabotaged by Iranian fundamentalists upset that America
had a higher standard of living than Iran. They punctured gaping holes
into the towers and flood waters surged toward my apartment, number 319.

I had just arrived home that evening, preparing for the two or three
trick-or-treaters I expected and hoping to play some basketball on the
court out front given the freakish 70 degree temperature. A frozen pizza
was unfreezing in the oven, while last night's Letterman played on the
VCR. Larry "Bud" Melman was involuntarily touring Tierra Del Fuego.

I was reclining on my gray couch, (a couch that incidentally was saved
and still exists in my present home) when I noticed the ominous sight of
a wall of water climbing the big picture window next to me. I leapt out
of the couch despite a lunchtime 4-miler (of course I was a 25-year old
in the prime of life) and saw the water surge to the top of the window,
such that I felt like a goldfish trapped in an aquarium. Water seeped
into the corners of the apartment and the carpet became soaked.

I had no windows to look out of but the southern exposure, so I couldn't
get a good grip on where the water was coming from, though I almost
immediately suspected the water towers that Mom had warned me about on my
very first day (-May 16, 1985, as well as on the 18th, 23rd, 31st, etc..)
The towers lay just to the northwest, and that was the only explanation I
could come up with to cause water flooding well-nigh over thirty feet
high.

I ran to the kitchen for what I supposed was my last meal; the pizza was
not quite done but still good, thank you very much. Frozen pizza has an
unnecessarily bad reputation. I will admit it was hard to concentrate on
eating while being underwater and hearing sirens.

I skipped dessert in favor of rescue. It occurred to me that some of my
baseball cards might be getting wet, so I ran to the bedrooom and pulled
out the huge wood case I stored over 10,000 cards in, and, to my great
relief found that none were wet though the case itself was soaked. I
stuffed my Rose rookie card in my pocket, the sentimental one I bought at
a card show because Pete wouldn't answer my letter begging him for one.

I ran to the Sauder bookcase and wasn't sure which books to try to save.
The Baseball Encyclopedia was too big and Thoreau's "Walden" was already
wet. I saved "The Main Spark", a biography of Sparky Anderson, mostly
because it was handy. My failure to plan was a direct result of not
taking Mom's warning about the possibility of the water towers coming
down. I wrapped "The Main Spark" quickly in Reynold's Wrap, tucked it
under my arm, and fled.

I tried to open the door but the water pressure was too strong, so I went
in my bedroom and broke the window and swam through it. Years of
Fairfield YMCA swimming lessons had prepared me for this very moment, and
I was ready. At last I knew why it was important for me to graduate from
"Minnow". I held my breath and fought for the surface while holding "The
Main Spark" to my rib, the torrent carrying me past the basketball nets
to the roof of the Continental Athletic Club where I sat and waited for
rescue.

The damage to the Continent Apartments was $1.3 billion for insurance
purposes, $50,520 in actuality. Fortunatly, since I lived on the top
floor, most of my possessions were salvegable. My grey Cavalier was
located two miles away but seemingly no worse for the wear. She started
on the second try.

The wire services never picked up this story and so was mostly not known
outside Columbus. Many think that the reason the national news didn't
pick up on it was because the perpetrators, Ahmed and Muhammed, were
pro-choice Democrats who believed that Michael Dukakis should be the next
President. This was the time before O'Reilly. There is little doubt in
my mind that FoxNews would've covered this.

"The storyteller is a pale metaphor, I have often thought, for God who
creates our world and us, falls in love with his creatures, even obsesses
over us because we don't act right, and always reserves the right to say the
final word.

Does God really obsess over us? Anyone who claims to be God and doesn't
obsess over us (and the birds of the air and the flowers of the field) is a
fraud and a phony. As Elie Wiesel remarked somewhere, God made humans because
he loves stories, and our lives are the stories he tells.

I would like to think that the illumination in my story is that we live in a
cosmos that is finally, however oddly, implacably forgiving; that it is never
too late to begin again; that there are always second (and more)
chances; that it is possible, Ulysses-like, to go home again; that we will
all be young again and all laugh again; that love is always and necessarily
renewable; and that life is stronger that death." - A.G.

Sweat, Blood
on me a little
Garden Blood
find me
estranged
a Pharisee
mired in debts
calling in debts.

Blood crimson
seek me out
find my hovel
my eyes defect
they cannot see
else I would come
to thee.

That I cannot be John
let me be Andrew
or Thomas
anyone
but
Judas

Oh but the inconsolance
the unbearableness
of the Wait
of not knowing where I stand
Of having no art
to influence You
no sophistry, argument, excuse, no beauty
of having no weapons
but which thou hast given.

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again; and now,
under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor
loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our
business. - T.S. Eliot

Saw the Mark Twain special on PBS and was struck that a four-hour
two-part special could omit a book Clemens spent twelve years
researching, two years writing and later called his "most
important book" - his story of Joan of Arc. I was curious
what their 'spin' would be on such a seemingly unusual undertaking for a
secular ex-river boat captain. But they simply ignore it. How like PBS.
And Ken Burns.

"From what troubles we are saved, my God, by the vow
of obedience! The simple religious, guided by the will
of her Superiors alone, has the joy of being sure that
she is on the right path; even when she is sure that
her Superiors are mistaken, she need not fear. But the
moment she ceases to consult this infallible compass,
she goes astray down barren pathways, where the waters
of grace soon fail her." - St. Theresa of Lisieux

Quotes from or about Bishop Sheen

"'I think the closer we get to Christ the closer we get to one another.
That is why one feels very much at home with a real Christian. Our
differences as Protestants and Catholics are lovers' quarrels.'"

While fully aware of modern biblical scholarship, he chose, as did the
Church, to reject almost all of it. Fulton wrote simply, 'He will not
allow us to pick and choose among His words, discarding the old ones, and
accepting the ones that please our fancy.'"

"Sheen could not repress his basic optimism. 'There are wonderful times
in which to be alive because 30 years ago, and in other days, when we
were moral, when we had a spirit of work in the United States, not a
spirt of sloth and avoiding responsibility, it was easy to be good, it
was easy to be American, it was easy to be Christian. Today it's hard.
You're being tested. Dead bodies float downstream - it takes a live body
to resist the current. And that's why these are great days. They are
struggle, and I love them."



from the author, Thomas Reeves:

"The True Believer is, of course, a familiar character in history. It is
important to observe that he is capable of great good as well as great
evil. There is nothing intrinsically bad in seeking meaning to life and
trusting wholeheartedly in an institution or book or philosophy that
claims to have the whole truth. By the same token, cynicism, doubt,
indifference and selfishness are not always, as some believe, evidence of
enlightenment and goodness."

We pulled in the parking lot with some trepidation. We'd heard that
the friend of Mryt's had had her car broken into on a Sunday night in
this very parking lot. The neighborhood was poor but had the cache of
charisma about it, like a movie set. The church was called "Higher
Ground Always Abounding Asssembly" and we were there to hear the choir
"High Praise Company".
We walked in feeling self-consicous given our extreme whitness. Three
black youths stood by the doorway and looked us over. Once inside, we
took our conspicuous seats in the sanctuary, which was dominated by a
circular stained glass window of Christ tending sheep and huge twin glass
structures on either side with large amounts of water streaming though
them. It was hypnotizing. The concert was scheduled to start at 7pm,
but Carole, the black friend of Myrt's, warned us that these things don't
start on time. That was the first thing I noticed - the laid-back
attitude towards time. The Irish used to be called the black Englishmen,
in part because of a similar relaxed attitude towards time. By 7:40
things started up. I felt like an extra in an Eddie Murphy movie.
We started up with a praise and worship service. Much clapping, lots of
following directions on lifting hands up (and they say the Mass is hard
to follow?). We had to turn to our partner and repeat to them
spiritual-slang phrases that the pastor had expressed. I turned to
Steph. But then the leader had us do it to the person on our right, who
in my case was a large black guy. He was probably thinking, "damn my
luck."
A large black man in an all-brown, shiny leather soon strode up to
the front and said "Y'all know I have the hardest job today. I got get
some money out of you. Colored folks need to support their own." (Steph
later told me that she thought this meant we wouldn't have to
contribute).
"Will every man here willing to give $50 or $100 please stand up."
No one stood for a bit, then three or four extremely well-dressed
men stepped up and put money into a purple-clothed inlaid basket. (Of
course nearly everyone was very well-dressed; the gent beside me was in a
suit and tie and cufflinks while I wore dockers and a denim shirt).
"Will every man here willing to give $20 please stand."
After some uncomfortable moments, ten or twenty men made their way
to the front.
"Okay. Now, I want everyone here who is not a woman to stand up."
Hmm…how do I get out of this one? I stood up. I was now triply
conspicuous - I was white, ill-dressed and standing.
"Who is willing to give $5 or $10 to the Lord?"
Most went up, including a rare white man. (I'd guess there were 3
or 4 besides us out of a couple hundred or so people). I went up too,
and donated $5.
I sat down with relief and was surprised that he asked for $3, $2,
or $1 donations. Three or four younger guys came up and donated that.
They then did the same routine with the ladies, though Steph and Myrt
cheated by giving their $5s for Carole to bring up.
By 9:00 the choir finally came up and began their set. The songs
were not your daddy's gospel - they were much speeded up with lots of
percussion. No "Amazing Grace" here. They were all self-written tunes
that allowed the singers to display the range of their voices, which was
spectacular. The songs often expressed lines like "Praise and Glorify
Him" over and over and over that had an almost mesmerizing effect, like a
chant almost.

One Thanksgiving weekend, my wife, her three sisters, and mother
ventured to a cabin deep in the woods of Hocking county in the
Appalachian foothills of southeast Ohio. They would be renting it for
just two nights and so drove up the long, gravel drive so typical of
country residences with a sense of anticipation. Unknown to them,
nestled in those hills lived a stray tomcat, redneck-thin and just shy of
two years. He lived by his wits and little else, and surely not for
long.
On the first day, my wife's sister Karen walked down that long
spirally drive and noticed the plucky tomcat walking towards her, begging
for attention and food, whichever came first. The owner happened to be in
the vicinity and warned Karen he'd soon be putting a bullet in the cat's
head since he didn't much like strays. She didn't doubt him; he looked
like he was born with a gun and an appetite for killing. She brought him
up to the cabin, and they noticed with amazement the little eight-pound
wonder was not intimidated in the least by our hundred-pound dog, a
German shepherd-mix my wife rarely leaves behind.
The new member of the cabin had dark tiger stripes down the length of his
back and humorous tall legs, one of which was nearly all white and the
other white only to the ankle sock. He looked like he'd gotten up late
for work and put on a calf-length tube sock on the right foot and an
ankle-sock on the left! A respiratory infection had him sniffling and
snorting; his eyes leaked and gave off a shiny glow.
By a process of elimination, all the sisters but one - my wife -
offered reasons they couldn't take the stray in. My wife called and
asked if we could add a second cat to go along with our dog and I
couldn't say no. She returned with the strikingly beautiful new animal
in tow.
The country cat was tough and routinely drove our dog Obi to the
point of insane barking. The little piker was afraid of nothing. But
what name to give him? Long whiteboard sessions led to fruitless
results. Winston, Seamus, Sir Tuneces, Hobbes, Piker, Lazarus all came
and went. His behavior had noticeably cooled since being locked 24-7 in
the family homestead, so it was finally decided that Mr. Hyde would suit
this Jeckel puss. The name was picked hours before his Great Escape,
when he found the door open at 2a.m. and calmly strolled out with the
insouciance of …well, a cat. Our son had not completely closed the back
door and the cat was nothing if not an opportunist. The timing was
especially fortunate for him given that he was scheduled to go under the
knife the next morning and experience the pangs of becoming half a cat -
i.e. neutered.
And so the days went by and an at-large Mr. Hyde made himself
scarcer than a dime in Scrooge's outstretched palm. My wife put Mr. Hyde
on the FBI's Most Wanted Pet list and littered the neighborhood with
posters. She also visited the death camp, I mean kitty shelter, to see
if he had turned up there. Given her obvious determination (and threat
to get another cat), I went to a childhood friend, St. Anthony - the
saint who helps find lost things - and asked if he might help. She went
directly to the Father, a bit sheepishly but knowing that not a hair on
our heads goes uncounted.
The next afternoon, six days after Hyde's disappearance, my wife's
brother Joe was delivering packages for UPS about a half-mile away from
our house and across a busy thoroughfare. A stray tomcat walked right up
the drive towards him, begging for love or food, whichever came first.
Joe, a cat-lover, thought it a disgrace that someone would leave a tomcat
run loose. He remembered my wife Steph was missing her new stray, so he
made a mental note to check a picture she'd emailed him. He went home
and checked it and that was the positive ID he needed. He called Steph
at work and she called me and then rushed to pick up her still sniffling,
still snorting cat. He was back, back from the seeming dead, and
rechristened "Lazarus" for his remarkable rebounding abilities. He
wasn't able to avoid his rescheduled date with the knife though, and so
now Lazarus is less interested in the lady cats in the neighborhood.
Obi, meanwhile, is sharpening his barking abilities while experiencing
the downside of a cat not de-clawed!