The Protestant Imagination

Last updated on: February 4, 2014 at 11:38 am By Artur Rosman

After writing a post on the Catholic imagination a bit of Protestant dialectics “If You’re Defending Absolute Truth, You’re Defending The Wrong Thing” dropped into my lap like a cuddly baby dinosaur. In that previous post I cited the following passage from Mama Unabridged: “Choosing to become Catholic has, in part, been a realization that the way I think and see the world is already deeply Catholic. While the Protestant imagination can be said to be dialectic, thinking in terms of either/or... Read more

The Catholic Imagination

Last updated on: December 17, 2014 at 10:14 am By Artur Rosman

I recently gave a talk to the Young Adults group at my parish. George Weigel used to be a parishioner there. I have stories… Anyway, it looks like I’ll be doing a reprise at the UW Newman Center. Yesterday a friend of mine from Wipf and Stock, who’s familiar with my work on Czeslaw Milosz and the Catholic analogical imagination, pointed me to a blog (Mama Unabridged) whose interests greatly overlap with mine. They overlap so much that I think the following passages from... Read more

TOP10 New and Noteworthy Theology Books

Last updated on: January 29, 2014 at 12:44 pm By Artur Rosman

“For many years I used to think I had been born too late. Fascinating times, extraordinary events, exceptional people–all these, I felt, were things of the past, gone for good. In my early childhood, in the 1950s, the ‘great epochs’ for me were above all the 1930s and the years of the war. I saw the latter as an age of heroic, almost titanic struggle when the fate of the world hung in the balance, the former as a golden... Read more

Goodbye Cosmos! Francis the Silenus Speaks in Parables

Last updated on: January 28, 2014 at 9:10 am By Artur Rosman

Pope Francis and I would like to thank you for your enthusiasm and support for Cosmos the in Lost! It’s been one helluva eight month ride. Today marks a watershed moment as my blog, due to a hostile blogosphere takeover (I’ll spare you the details), moves to Ethika Politika and changes its name. It gets off the ground with the piece on troublemaker Francis. FYI: here’s the new banner. SYKE! I’ll be writing for EP at least once a week,... Read more

Forgiveness Wins: The Perversity of the Prodigal Father

Last updated on: January 27, 2014 at 1:15 pm By Artur Rosman

I reluctantly watched the new Arendt biopic last year. The trailer seemed to offer the same bowdlerized version of history I hated so much in The Lives of Others and Life is Beautiful. Agnieszka Holland is much more up my alley when it comes to dealing with World War II, because she puts all the rough edges of history up front and center, which is what I believe good historical cinema should be about. Her breakthrough biographical film Europa, Europa dealt with so many twists... Read more

What if Judith Butler was Ockham's God?

Last updated on: January 25, 2014 at 12:07 pm By Artur Rosman

Judith Butler‘s account of love makes her sound like some fickle nominalist God who not only leaves her subjects quaking in fear, but probably also scares herself. This is her recipe for scaring away any and all potential dates: “On occasion when I am getting to know someone — when someone seeks to know me or, indeed, find in me the occasion for love — I am asked what my idea of love is, and I always founder. There are... Read more

Everything Under the S(u/o)n: Von Balthasar's and Milosz's God Metaphors

Last updated on: January 24, 2014 at 11:57 am By Artur Rosman

Writing really is a process of discovery, a form of thinking. You don’t know what you’ll end up writing until you actually sit down and write it. My frantic Czeslaw Milosz dissertation writing reminded me of this once more last night, around midnight. I got so amped up that I was taking apart our dehumidifier (trying to fix it) at one in the morning. Admittedly, that didn’t go so well. Right now I’m rifling through the earliest poems written by... Read more

Abortion, Natural Law, and Antisemitism?

Last updated on: January 22, 2015 at 7:27 pm By Artur Rosman

This is the ancient history behind present day hot-button issues. The plurality of stances possible within orthodoxy is surprising to our uncritical post-Enlightenment prejudices. On the other hand, heresy, perhaps by definition, or at least by etymology, tends to be sterile and one-sided. Ross Douthat, captures some of this heretical reductionism in Chapter 5 (“Lost in the Gospels”) of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, “The goal of the great heresies . . . has often been to... Read more

The Cosmos Liberally Stretches Toward Aleteia and Vatican II

Last updated on: January 22, 2014 at 10:25 am By Artur Rosman

Good news folks. The Zmirak debates have returned to the pages of Aleteia where they started. Here’s how Mark Gordon summarizes them in his piece “Breaking Open the Liberal Echo Chamber“: “The writer Christopher Ferrara, author of Liberty, The God That Failed, has written that ‘Liberalism is in thought (or philosophy), rationalism; in politics, secularism; in economics, greed; and in religion, indifferentism.’ There is today a growing body of concerned Catholics who recognize that this simply isn’t good enough. These critics... Read more

The Taciturn God of the New Testament

Last updated on: December 2, 2015 at 5:52 pm By Artur Rosman

I broached the theme of silence in my last post in an extended quote from Remi Brague’s Wisdom of the World where he cites Ignatius of Antioch to the effect that, “the prince of this world was unaware of Mary’s virginity and the birth of her child, as well as the death of the Lord, three resounding mysteries that were carried out in the silence of God.” Nowhere in modern literature is God’s taciturnity more unforgettably presented than in Shusaku Endo’s Silence:... Read more