Soulless, by Gail Carriger, is an exceedingly silly novel of a sort I don’t usually read. I can best describe it as a steam-punk (i.e., Victorian plus weird technology) paranormal (i.e., vampires and werewolves) bodice-ripper (lots of…well). I picked it up because I’d been seeing it on the shelves for some years (it was first published in 2009), it’s part of a complete series, and the bodice-ripper aspect wasn’t apparent in the segments I sampled at the bookstore. The conceit... Read more
We’re blogging through St. Thomas Aquinas’ Compendium Theologiae, sometimes called his Shorter Summa. Find the previous posts here. So far Thomas has shown that there is a First Mover, that this First Mover is an Unmoved Mover, utterly unchanging, and that this First Mover is eternal, outside time. Thomas continues, The same line of reasoning clearly shows that God necessarily exists. Necessary and contingent are philosophical terms of art. An existent being is necessary if it must exist, and contingent if it might... Read more
Chapter 3 of Lumen Fidei (yes, we’ve finally made it to Chapter 3!) is about the spread of the faith, which goes from person to person as light reflects from one surface to another. Pope Francis describes it thus: It is a light reflected from one face to another, even as Moses himself bore a reflection of God’s glory after having spoken with him: “God… has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of... Read more
Previous Parts: I, II, III, IV. I’ve always maintained that the only way to really learn a programming language is to code up some kind of project using it: not something out of a book, but something of my own, something that’s fun. For many years, my project of choice was the old fashioned text adventure. I got started with computers in the mid-1970’s, when we all we had were dumb-terminals and today’s beautifully 3-D rendered games were not even... Read more
Here’s another song that comes across my Pandora regularly, by a Spanish heavy metal band called Mägo de Oz. I know almost nothing about the group, and I haven’t heard anything of theirs except this one piece, “La Leyenda de la Llorona”, a delightfully energetic flute, violin, and guitar piece that reminds me of Jethro Tull in their heyday. The title refers to a legend of a woman who is doomed to wander the earth forever, weeping for her children,... Read more
Miss Hisselpenny found most of the books in Alexia’s father’s library shameful to read. She covered her ears and hummed whenever Miss Tarabotti even mentioned her papa, but she never hummed so loudly she could not hear what was said. — Gail Carriger, Soulless Souless is what you might call a steampunk paranormal romance novel. I can’t precisely recommend it, but it made me laugh despite the plethora of refrigerator moments. I might have more to say about it on... Read more
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry wrote a while back about the role of sacrifice in the worship of God, and says that sacrifice is all about gratitude, certainly in the New Testament, and probably in the Old Testament as well. He’s clearly on to something; the central sacrifice of the Christian faith is Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, which we participate in through the Blessed Sacrament, the Holy Eucharist; and the word “Eucharist” means “Thanksgiving”. However, I’ve also read (I’m sorry, I cannot... Read more
I was named to be my Lay Dominican chapter’s formation directory last month, filling out the end of a term for another member, and yesterday I had my first meeting with our two novices. Formation in the Dominican Laity is like this: First you come a meeting or two or three, and see whether you want to pursue a Dominican vocation. Assuming you do, you become an “inquirer” (“postulant” is the older term), and at the appropriate time of year... Read more
We’re blogging through St. Thomas Aquinas’ Compendium Theologiae, sometimes called his Shorter Summa. Find the previous posts here. As we saw in Chapter 4, God, as God, is utterly unchanging. (Jesus, God Incarnate, is a man and so is clearly subject to change: he is conceived, born, grows, dies, and is raised. But we’re not nearly there yet.) And since God is unchanging, then, Thomas argues that God must be eternal. The further conclusion is evident that God is eternal. For everything that... Read more
Theology, everyone knows, is the study of things divine, or, at least, the study of things human beings have called divine. More cynically, one might say that theology is what is taught in the theology departments of large universities, or in other words, things that men have made up about God in order to get tenure. But Catholic theology, properly understood, is no such thing. In Catholic terms, theology is the study of the God who is, a God who... Read more
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