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…]
A few days back, I uploaded an entry with the above title to my other blog: To See a World in a Grain of Sand. That was a mistake. It was written for this blog. I may eventually move it over, but interested readers can read it there for now: What We Can All Learn … [Read more…]
“Larvae, the immature forms of many animals, are distinct from adult forms by definition. In many life histories–caterpillars and the trochophore larvae of clams and sea snails are examples–larvae and adults bear no resemblance to each other. Biologist Donald I. Williamson has proposed that larvae are juvenile forms acquired through hybridization–the fusing of two genomes, … [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 See Unpublished Books for Download for details.
In the December, 2007 edition of Brain in the News published by the Dana Foundation, there is a reprint of an article from Salon.com: I Feel Your Pain. It seems that specific brain-cells have been found which respond to distress on the part of a nearby creature. True pain is felt. What is empathy? It’s … [Read more…]
We can’t visualize Heaven, that is, the world in which the resurrected will live with the Lord Jesus Christ for time without end, but we need to try just because of the sorts of creatures we are. We’re flesh-and-blood creatures needing images to believe in the reality of a place or an entity, yes, even … [Read more…]
The [dogmatic] declarations [of the early Church] were uttered in the language of Greek philosophy because the false statements were uttered in that language. [The Power and the Wisdom, John L. McKenzie, S.J., The Bruce Publishing Company, 1965, page 129] The opponents of the Church, both the ones with good intentions and the hateful ones, … [Read more…]
Way back in the mid-1970s before the sexy term ‘chaos theory’ had ever driven books onto the best-seller lists, I took a course with a decidedly unsexy title: The Qualitative Analysis of Ordinary Differential Equations. In that course, we learned how to analyze potentially unstable systems such as a planet orbiting the sun so that … [Read more…]