Here is the beginning of a Vatican Information Service news-item: ROMANUS THE MELODIST: FAITH CREATES BEAUTY VATICAN CITY, 21 MAY 2008 (VIS) – During this morning’s general audience, Benedict XVI dedicated his catechesis to Romanus the Melodist, a Syrian “theologian, poet, composer and permanent deacon who resided in a monastery on the outskirts of Constantinople … [Read more…]
Before commenting, I’ll quote an entire news item from the “WEDNESDAY, 14 MAY 2008” newsletter of the Vatican Information Service (EIGHTEENTH YEAR – N. 91): =============================================================== PSEUDO-DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE: MEDIATION AND DIALOGUE VATICAN CITY, 14 MAY 2008 (VIS) – In today’s general audience, held in St. Peter’s Square, the Holy Father resumed his series of … [Read more…]
Recent centuries have seen a mysterious retreat from the mainstream of modern thought on the part of Catholic clergymen and also Catholic laymen whose intellectual work is oriented directly to the needs of Christianity. I’m far from being a well-read historian but I’ve read enough survey works to see the retreat of Catholic thinkers into … [Read more…]
While reading, Ernst Cassirer’s The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, I realized I’ve been guilty of a major oversight in my discussions of ‘hellenistic metaphysics’. Cassirer doesn’t speak much of Christianity or the Church in that book, but he does speak of swings between various forms of Hellenistic metaphysics. And there are indeed … [Read more…]
I have put a completed book, not published in paper, on this website for free downloading. I’ve only put an informal copyright and no legally binding license on the work. See Unpublished Books for Download for details.
Where do I go from here? I probably should go more slowly than I did in my previous entry: Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: The Ascent of the Human Mind. In that posting, I was unleashing my mind and imagination, trying to map the entire path from here to there in one image. … [Read more…]
Minutes after posting a critique of Pope Benedict in which I claimed he needs to develop a stronger appreciation for modern empirical knowledge (see Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: The Need for Respectful Criticism), I received a newsletter from the Vatican News Service in which the Holy Father spoke in complimentary terms about … [Read more…]
As I noted in a previous entry, I believe that Pope Benedict is open to respectful and meaningful criticism of the sort which might be given by one competent scholar to the work of another or by one devout Christian thinker to the thoughts of another — else why would he go out of his … [Read more…]
A news story about an international meeting of the Jesuits, [ Cardinal Rode Exhorts Jesuits to Love Church], includes these paragraphs: [Cardinal Rode, prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life at the Vatican] also mentioned the “feeling of ever growing separation between faith and culture, a separation which … [Read more…]
In his first encyclical and in his book Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict has invited criticism of those parts of his thought which deal with speculative thoughts, including the nature of the human being. What is a speculative thought? Roughly speaking, it’s the result of an act of the imagination, a faculty stunted very badly … [Read more…]