Introduction Recently, I attended my monthly men’s prayer group and made a comment about history books telling of the importance of highly educated men from warlord (sometimes royal) families in converting many of the German peoples to Christianity—some of those evangelists, such as Boniface (“Apostle to the Germans”), were themselves Germanic. The organizer of the … [Read more…]
In reviewing A war for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars by Andrew Hartman, Seth Bartee writes: In A War for the Soul of America Hartman argues that the late 20th century’s cultural conflicts were born out of the tumultuous 1960s. To most observers this might not seem a particularly provocative … [Read more…]
Matter, your own living flesh and blood or the bread and wine brought to the altar, is an essential element of any Christian Sacrament. More than that, it’s the most concrete part of a sacramental world. Even non-sacramental Christians accept baptism as a Sacrament though perhaps refusing to use the term, but I’m going to … [Read more…]
Good news from genetic research. At least it’s good news for those of us who believe in the value, and truth, of moral purposefulness. A recent article, Be Happy: Your Genes May Thank You for It, tells us: People who have high levels of what is known as eudaimonic well-being—the kind of happiness that comes … [Read more…]
In my soon-to-be updated collection of weblog writings, Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings From 2006 to 2011, I separated those essays into seven categories including Love and Stuff and, the largest of the seven by a good margin, The Narrative We Know as a World. I’ll not slight the other five sections in their … [Read more…]
I’m re-reading Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper. As Pieper plausibly, and I think correctly, discusses matters, the loss of leisure and the consequent loss of culture is bound up, at least in this age of men, with the process of proletarianization, that is, the limitation of men to their laboring aspects. Pieper … [Read more…]
I hope that William James was his usual good-natured and tolerant self when he wrote: [T]he scholastic philosophy … is only common sense grown pedantic. [The Meaning of Truth, page 44 of the Dover reprint edition] He’s right, in general, but it’s sad that Catholic neo-scholastics in recent centuries seem to be pedantic without having … [Read more…]
In Brain Performs Near Optimal Visual Search, we read of some interesting research on the power of visual search techniques used by human beings: In the wild, mammals survive because they can see and evade predators lurking in the shadowy bushes. … This ability to recognize target objects surrounded by distracters is one of the … [Read more…]
I’ve finished reading Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions but I continue to think about the issues he raised. Some of his attempts to make sense of these “scientific revolutions” involve efforts to make sense of the language used by various groups of scientists. When talking about the need to use a assumption-loaded … [Read more…]
I’ve just finished reading Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He’s quite aware of the objective nature of reality but he speaks of major changes in understanding of the world leaving scientists (or others in different conversations) as if in a new world. Elsewhere he speaks a bit more reasonably of the scientist … [Read more…]