Recently I got the following comment from Sophia Sadek on one of my Aquinas posts. The beloved of Aquinas is the prime mover of Aristotle. Ever since the days of Copernicus, it has been known that such an entity is neither necessary nor sufficient. Someday, the fans of Aquinas will wake up and realize the error of their ways. I don’t usually respond to these; I’m never sure whether Sophia regards this as the prelude to a real discussion or... Read more
Thomas says that the beloved draws the lover to it. And the more perfect the love engendered by the beloved, the more strongly the lover is drawn. Read more
The above is the sort of picture that makes my wife sigh and say, “Yeah, that looks like a picture you would take.” My favorite way to do photography is to take my camera and go for a walk. I look for anything that catches my eye and then try to take an attractive picture of it, and one of the things that catches my eye is what you might call “infrastructure”: the stuff that keeps everything working. There are... Read more
We’re blogging through St. Thomas Aquinas’ Compendium Theologiae, sometimes called his Shorter Summa. Find the previous posts here. Having described the generation of the Word by the Father, Thomas now goes on to discuss the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son. As the object known is in the knower, to the extent that it is known, so the beloved must be in the lover, as loved. We can only love what we know, though we might know it very... Read more
For each of His saints God knows best how to bring the pure metal out of the ore, the beautiful grain out of the log, the cut diamond from the rough diamond. And so too for each of us, because He calls each of us to be a saint and be formed in His workshop. The process differs for each of us, because we are made of different materials. But beauty is His goal. He knows His materials and His tools perfectly and will unfailingly make each of us a thing of transcendent glory—if only we will let Him. Read more
I just ran across this post, “Beyond Mansplaining: A New Lexicon of Misogynist Trolling Behaviors“, and I have to ask what misogyny has to do with it—leaving completely to the side the question of whether obnoxious behavior toward a specific woman counts as “misogyny”. I’ve seen most of the behaviors described here performed by people of both sexes toward bloggers of both sexes. Trolls gotta troll, I guess, but I’d love to know what makes “sealioning”, “gaslighting”, “gauntletting”, “in-citing”, “man-handling”,... Read more
We’re blogging through St. Thomas Aquinas’ Compendium Theologiae, sometimes called his Shorter Summa. Find the previous posts here. My plan is to faithfully step through each of the chapters in the Compendium Theologiae, one each week, until I’ve gotten through the whole thing; otherwise, I’d be mightily tempted to skip the current chapter as it offers very little that’s new. However, things are busy just now, and the previous chapter took me three weeks to get through, so I’m going to take my... Read more
My posts about suffering have revolved around the notion of “free will”, and that has led to a number of questions, such as, “If suffering is possible on Earth because of free will, and if we still have free will in Heaven, then shouldn’t there be suffering in Heaven as well?” And so the time has come to define the term “free will” more rigorously. I hasten to add, this is an area where I am very much a student,... Read more
I’ve just completed the second day of a three-day series of all day meetings. And these aren’t the kind of meetings where I can sit in the back and listen with half-an-hear for things that concern me; they are the kind of meetings where I need to be paying close attention throughout. So, here’s a picture. Read more
Given that I’m taking pictures again, I wanted a way to make nice looking prints of my favorites so that I can show them off and see what other folks think. We’ve got an all-in-one inkjet printer that’s not bad, but it’s also shared with everyone in the house, and everyone in the house expects it to have 8.5″ by 11″ paper in it at all times. It’s not so much that they would try to print to it while... Read more
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