I’ll be honest with you. I’m not a fan of C.S. Lewis. He is immensely overexposed and it drives me nuts. But I generally love the other Inklings, especially the nonfiction of Charles Williams (The Descent of the Dove and He Came Down from Heaven). Barfield’s Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry is an unjustly forgotten major philosophico-theological tour de force. You know what? There’s a nearly 700 page biography of the Inklings coming out on the 2nd of... Read more
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and contemporary culture. He is the author of 9 books, including The History of Jazz and Delta Blues, both selected as notable books of the year by the New York Times. His most recent book is Love Songs: The Hidden History, which completes Gioia’s trilogy on music as a source of enchantment in day-to-day life. The two previous books in this series, Work Songs and Healing Songs, were both honored with the ASCAP-Deems Taylor... Read more
They say that correlation does not imply causation. However, when you continually see a pattern develop between two seemingly different types of events, you start wondering whether there isn’t an internal relation between them. I noticed something of the sort recently. The historian of the Catholic Enlightenment (yes, there was such a thing!), Ulrich Lehner, posted a reflection on the Irish gay marriage referendum. For me it became a catalyst to thinking about the internal relation between the Clergy Sex Abuse... Read more
Let’s take an askew view of Memorial Day by recalling a long forgotten piece of intellectual history. Some of you might vaguely known Henri Bergson through readings of Deleuze imposed upon you by college professors. Bergson, at the start of the 20th century, was once the world’s most famous intellectual. Everybody knows Einstein. I know Bergson vaguely through his writings on religion. I’m pretty sure Maritain was a former student of his, but then so was everybody (including T.S. Eliot).... Read more
Pentecost with all its fire and surprises is conducive to poetic expressions. For whatever reason, as you will see from my list below, Anglican poets (Anglo-Catholic, to be more precise) have mined these themes in an especially rich way. The best thing I can do is get out of the way and give you a foretaste of these poems. I hope they will encourage you to mine the poets for more theological insights. Toward the bottom of the page there... Read more
In the video below Steve Martin claims atheists might have nothing metaphysically and musically. What a shame. If you come up with that one John Lennon song, you’re unimaginative. Plus, one song does not a hymnal make. Nonetheless, I’ve written a something or two in dialogue with atheism. 0. Nether Nye or Gopnik: 10 Atheists Who Engage Religion Charitably 1. Just Another Atheist Jewish Catholic: An Interview With Damon Linker 2. Famous Atheists Who Aren’t Atheist: Hold off on Papism... Read more
I spent an afternoon, and the better part of the evening, in the ER yesterday. The whole episode started with an episode of internal bleeding first observed on the porcelain throne. I’ll spare you the details. All I’ll say is that the bleeding hidden within my innards since Goodness knows when escaped the probing of the doctors. I’ll need to go back for further testing. Now, Rene Girard caused a furor when his probing book-length interview, Things Hidden Since the... Read more
Ross Douthat specializes in writing very, very, very long pieces recycling the old secular-sociological theory that conservative churches grow. The essay he wrote for The Atlantic “Will Pope Francis Break the Church?” is based upon this old rational-choice religion theorist thesis of choice. It comes from Dean Kelley’s Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, which argues that smaller conservative churches keep more members because they screen out free-riders who take benefits without producing social and material goods for their churches. In The Atlantic piece Douthat draws... Read more
The rediscovery of imitative (mimetic) desire of nature is one of the most important philosophical-anthropological breakthroughs of the last thirty or so years. Aristotle famously defined human beings as distinctly human because they imitate more than other animal species. Rene Girard, a French thinker who reverted to Catholicism as he was working out the implication of mimetic desire, is the man who single-handedly brought this element of human behavior into clear focus. His theories seemed far-fetched until it was discovered... Read more
Aquinas said something to this effect many times in his copious publications: The eternal Father’s Word, comprehending all things in his immensity, in order to recall human beings weakened by sin to the height of divine glory, willed to become small by taking on our smallness, not by laying aside his majesty. He compressed the teaching on human salvation in a brief summary for the sake of those who are busy. Conveniently enough, this passage comes from his Compendium on... Read more
Cosmos The In Lost
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