See this for a discussion of Pope Benedict’s speech on 2010/11/07 during his pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. For those who’ve not heard of this place, it’s said by some to be the burial site of St. James the Apostle, brother of St. John the Apostle. The traditions are too recent, Medieval Age, … [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…]
Nearly all human beings, nearly all the time, think only thoughts which have been thought already within their sphere of knowledge, typically some level and region of a particular culture. Few and far between are the identifiable creative thinkers, though we must remember that creative thinkers are also members of specific communities which provide the … [Read more…]
As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger noted years ago, western Christians built Western Civilization as a home for the churches united to Rome. St. Augustine and St. Benedict and St. Gregory the Great laid the foundations and many others built upon those foundations. For centuries, Western Civilization was a home for the Catholic Church and then for … [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…]
There is no such book as Civilization for Dummies though it’s what a modern man might hope to find if, that is, he were aware of the nature or even existence of such a complex entity as a ‘civilization’. In fact, modern man has decayed into that barbarian child foreseen by Jose Ortega Y Gasset, … [Read more…]
Human knowledge is embodied knowledge, embodied in the relationships of brain-cells to one another and groups of brain-cells to one another as well as being embodied in the habits of our muscles and peripheral nerves and also in our clothing and our houses and our tools and machines, in our ways of making our livings … [Read more…]
[This entry is part of a work-in-progress which will deal with the evolution of the human mind as we can see it in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, Albert Einstein, and other great thinkers — an entity capable of shaping itself to empirical reality in such a way that it can draw forth abstract … [Read more…]
This article, Immaturity Of The Brain May Cause Schizophrenia, talks about one of the possible causes of a disease which may actually be “several biologically distinct heterogeneous populations,” that is, a set of symptoms caused by various diseases. This was the case for ‘consumption’ in the 1800s — TB or lung cancer or some variety … [Read more…]