One of pot shots that Hillary Clinton and her operatives made at conservative Catholics is that they used terms like “subsidiarity” that no one understood. Since they may be right about that, I think an illustration is in order. Many of you know that I teach Civil Engineering. Six years ago, my department head (who …
When Catholic Academia Bails on Philosophy, We're All in Trouble
Which is what some of it, at least, has done: A similar crisis has shaken the philosophical estate within the church. Before 1970 philosophy enjoyed an enviable prominence in the curriculum of Catholic colleges. This Neo-Scholastic philosophy was certainly structured around the perennial questions—Does God exist? What is virtue?—but it was an odd, manual Thomism …
Continue reading "When Catholic Academia Bails on Philosophy, We're All in Trouble"
"Garbage In Garbage Out" Works for the Soul, Too
From Bossuet's Elevations on the Mysteries, IV, 8: To correct the abuse and distraction of our wandering and dissipated imagination, it is necessary to fill it with holy images. When our memory fills up, it will only take us to those religious ideas. The water wheel pushed by the flow of a river always goes, …
Continue reading ""Garbage In Garbage Out" Works for the Soul, Too"
When the Social Justice Warriors Get in Their Own Way
As the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland is doing: The Church’s wooing of the SNP is largely to blame. It started when Cardinal Winning clashed with the then Labour Executive over their social liberalism. Winning and many of the other people in charge convinced themselves that the nationalists were going to be more onside on issues like abortion. There was absolutely …
Continue reading "When the Social Justice Warriors Get in Their Own Way"
Women Deacons in the Catholic Church? Not the First Time They've Thought About It
My mother used to tell her unretentive sons that geese "get up in a new world every morning." While I can't speak to geese, that's certainly a problem with our press: Pope Francis has created a commission to study the possibility of allowing women to serve as deacons in the Catholic church, following up on …
Continue reading "Women Deacons in the Catholic Church? Not the First Time They've Thought About It"
Pro-Life Democrats: If You Knew the Priorities…
@timothypomalley is lachrymose for his party's call to repeal the Hyde Amendment: I had hoped for this. Until this week. Like many pro-life Democrats, I had been dispirited by the inclusion in the 2016 Democratic Party Platform of the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which has previously disallowed federal funds to pay for abortion except …
Continue reading "Pro-Life Democrats: If You Knew the Priorities…"
Texas A&M Newman Association 1975-6
I've alluded to my years in the Catholic Students Association in pieces like this. Now you can get a little more flavour of what that was like in the following video. Thanks so much to Jeanne Geidel-Neal for the music for this video. As noted elsewhere, the "straight outta Irondale" folks won't like this, but …
The "Arabs" of Thomas Aquinas Weren't Arabs At All
Returning to the site Ite ad Thomam, I saw an advertisement for the "Annual Fall Workshop on Aquinas and the 'Arabs'" at Marquette University (not, these days, an ideal venue for such a traditional Catholic conference.) For someone like myself who started the Summa as an undergraduate and finished it as a PhD candidate, it …
Continue reading "The "Arabs" of Thomas Aquinas Weren't Arabs At All"
When One Steals From A Church, One Sins Twice
Never gave this much thought, but from the "Ite ad Thomam" site: So stealing from a church is actually two sins, theft and sacrilege? Or is it still one – sacrilegious theft? Two sins. And both have to be confessed. In other words, it's not enough to say merely "I stole something from a building," …
Continue reading "When One Steals From A Church, One Sins Twice"
Sometimes It Pays to Think
Like in this, from A.B. Bruce's The humiliation of Christ, about Eutyches, the Monophysite fanatic: It is plain from those representations that Eutyches had no distinct definite conception of the constitution of our Lord's person. He felt rather than thought on the subject of Christology. He did not pretend to comprehend the mystery of the …
Positive Infinity 