In a recent article, Freedom and Structure in Human Life — When Do We Become Persons?, I quoted a summary of a view of man developed by the theologian Metropolitan John Zizioulas of the Greek Orthodox Church. I see much good in that view as stated in the summary and didn’t go into a detailed … [Read more…]
In a recent newsletter, (Letter #50, 2010/09/24, see Inside the Vatican magazine), Dr. Robert Moynihan, a journalist covering the ‘Vatican beat’, discusses a recent meeting in Vienna of high-level church officials from the Catholic and Orthodox churches. At least some of those officials are also theologians. It would seem good that there are serious movements … [Read more…]
Analogies can be taken too far and too literally, yet I wonder if we can apply to the human social organism, ultimately the Body of Christ, the example of a long-ago and primitive immune system ‘spinning off’ a neurological system. As I understand this particular line of speculation in evolutionary biology, and it was years … [Read more…]
So goes the claim in an antiphon somewhere in the “Christian Book of Prayer” (one-volume version of the liturgy of hours, Catholic version). Man was made to glorify God. This statement points to a great truth for sure, but we have to understand that all truths, even the greatest of truths revealed by God are … [Read more…]
We have to learn to move forward in our thought by trying to honestly perceive reality and to openheartedly respond to it while becoming aware of the distortions of the preconceptions we always bring to such tasks. This is a logical development of the insight we have inherited from Aquinas and a few of his … [Read more…]
We’re told that David Hume proved that values can’t be drawn from facts. Most recently, I read of this alleged proof in an interesting and mostly unobjectionable book about the relationship between Protestant ways of reading texts and the origins of science: The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science by Peter Harrison [Cambridge … [Read more…]
I’ll be writing articles on some aspects of politics and the history of government which interest me and doing so in terms of my concepts of created being. I’ll concentrate on American politics and will cover some interesting phenomena often seen as indicative of conspiracies. These articles will reflect both some of my reading of … [Read more…]
I’ve come to the position that created being exists across a spectrum going from abstract to concrete or particular. A thing, a particularized form of being, still has its abstract being in it the way that a vase has still the raw materials of its clay and glazing. In fact, as you penetrate the stuff … [Read more…]
While thinking of the suffering endured by patients in the modern medical quest for miracles, I grew depressed and sought to cheer myself up by thoughts of hospices which allow human beings a bit of dignity as they approach death. And so it was that I turned to Flannery O’Connor’s insightful and Thomistically funny introduction … [Read more…]
I’m proposing this principle: A Creation meeting the plausible criteria of unity, coherence, and completeness, would most likely behave in a manner consistent with the manner in which it was created. In other words, if the evidence strongly tells us that the world and the entities within it develop at the level of individuals and … [Read more…]