Thirteen years ago, terrorist zealots killed over 3,000 people on U.S. soil. Today, their spiritual and philosophical heirs are engaging in genocide across large parts of what used to be Iraq and Syria. I don’t pretend to know what America’s appropriate response to ISIS should be. We could move troops in and stop it for now; but I’m not at all confident that a similar phenomenon wouldn’t recur shortly after we (inevitably) pulled our troops out again. We’ve heard a... Read more
Every once in a while, on more philosophically inclined blogs, I read about the evils of nominalism; and since it has a bearing on the Aquinas series I’m posting on Mondays I thought I’d say a few things about it. According to Thomas and Aristotle, every being has an essence, what it is: a cat, a dog, a rock, a flower, a human being. Thomas and Aristotle agree with Plato that these essences are universals: all cats are cats because... Read more
J.R.R. Tolkien was the first great literary discovery of my life, and the author of the book that I’ve returned to more often than any other. I fell in love with his work when I was nine, and have never fallen out of it. Patrick O’Brian is the second great literary discovery of my life; I first made his (literary) acquaintance sometime in the mid-90’s, and have loved his work ever since. Some of you are now nodding your heads,... Read more
We’re blogging through St. Thomas Aquinas’ Compendium Theologiae, sometimes called his Shorter Summa. Find the previous posts here. Having noted that God is His essence, Thomas continues, God’s essence cannot be other than His existence. In any being whose essence is distinct from its existence, what it is must be distinct from that whereby it is. For in virtue of a thing’s existence we say that it is, and in virtue of its essence we say what it is. This is why a... Read more
Two weeks ago I looked at paragraphs 48 and 49 of Lumen Fidei, and talked about the Glorious Multiplicity of the Magisterium. The truth of the faith is too large, I said, (using rather more words) for one bishop to encompass it all; thus, we have many, so that nothing may be lost. In that post I was speaking of revelation; but the same thing is true of all of creation. God is vast, unbounded; and everything that was, and... Read more
Since last week’s release of Quill v0.2.0, I’ve been working on the documentation; which is more involved than you might think. See, I first encountered HTML probably around September of 1993, which when Mosaic was first released for the Macintosh. I was already an old hand with hypertext; around 1989 or 1989 I wrote a program (in awk for the Unix geeks in my readership) to process documentation for some C libraries I was working on. The program took the... Read more
Who? The Doctor, of course. Here’s the Dr. Who theme on cellos, just because. Read more
And here’s my latest for CatholicMom.com, on the First Luminous Mystery: The Baptism of the Lord. John recoils, as he would have recoiled if someone had suggested that he profane the Ark of the Covenant or spit on the Torah. He has lived his whole life proclaiming the holiness of the coming Holy One; and now that Holy One says, “Profane me. Lay your hands on me, and baptize me, and declare me unholy.” ____ photo credit: Lawrence OP via... Read more
I panned Jack McDevitt’s Ancient Shores a couple of days ago (I won’t add injury to insult by linking to my review); but I’m indebted to him for including a bit of World War II-era songwriting on the subject of that epic warplane, the P-38 Lighting. Here’s a ditty called “Lightnings in the Sky” (author unknown): Oh, Hedy Lamarr is a beautiful gal, And Madeleine Carroll is too. But you’ll find, if you query, A different theory Amongst any bomber... Read more
Of all God’s creatures, the ones I find to be the most inconvenient are the common “little black ants”, which a website at Texas A&M tells me are almost certainly Monomorium minimum. They are common all over the Los Angeles area, and they are the only kind I’ve actually seen invade my house. Sometimes they’ll come in for food, but more usually they seem to be seeking water. In our previous house, we learned that we needed to disconnect the... Read more
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