- About the Author (Wikipedia).
- The Haunted Bookshop Wiki page.
- Complete text of book online.
Consent and deception
3 hours ago
13.1.11
The Haunted Bookshop -Christopher Morley
- About the Author (Wikipedia).
- The Haunted Bookshop Wiki page.
- Complete text of book online.
The Roads to Modernity; The British,French, and American Enlightenments -Gertrude Himmelfarb
- About the Author.
- Review (The New Criterion)
- Review: Peter Berkowitz in Policy Review
- Review (Claremont Review of Books)
"The separation of church and state, however interpreted, did not signify the separation of church and society. On the contrary, religion was all the more rooted in society because it was not prescribed or established by the government. This is why, Tocqueville explained, religion and liberty coexisted and reinforced each other. And this is the meaning of one of his most profound paradoxes: "Religion, which among Americans, never mixes directly in the government of society, should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not give them the taste for freedom, it singularly facilitates the use of it." Religion was "the first of their political institutions" because it was the prerequisite of both freedom and morality - thus of republican government itself.
12.1.11
True Grit - Charles Portis
- About the Author (Wikipedia)
- True Grit Page on Wikipedia
- Video: Fr. Barron's review of the Coen Bros movie.
- Movie review (National Catholic Register)
Of Judge Parker, Mattie declares that:
“His manner was grave. On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife’s religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need of some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make. It is something to think about.”
The Truth of Catholicism: Ten Controversies Explored -George Weigel
-About the Author (wikipedia)
- George Weigel article archive at National Review Online..
"I was once seated at a table with Weigel before I knew anything about him. He was probably the most pompous, boorish and shallow conversationalist I've ever encountered. He just assumes that he can make up stuff and nobody will challenge him because he's such an 'expert.' A most irritating evening" - Comment Box post on a very anti-Weigel article in the National Catholic Reporter.
"To believe in this God, the father of Jesus Christ, is to believe that order and reason, rather than chaos and indifference, are at the root of things. To know this Father, through Jesus Christ, means to know "that love is present in the world, and that this love is more powerful than any kind of evil."
We "cannot live without love," Pope John Paul writes. We cannot understand ourselves, we cannot make sense of life, unless love comes to us and we "participate intimately" in it. We sense our profound need for love instinctively. The God whom Jesus reveals is the guarantor that this intuition is one of the great truths of the human condition, not a psychological illusion." (8)
11.1.11
3.1.11
28.12.10
27.12.10
Aquina; A Beginner's Guide -Edward Feser
26.12.10
Foundations of Thomistic Philosophy - A.G. Sertillanges, O.P.
-About the Author (wikipedia)
"Outside God and ourselves, an idea is a thing, while a thing, in us and in God, is an idea. At this stage, this will serve as a reasonably accurate resume of Thomism"
Guide to Thomas Aquinas - Josef Pieper
-About the Author (Ignatius Insight)
-About the Author (Wikipedia)
-Author's Obituary (First Things)
Aquinas Wikipedia page.
"The intellectual dynamics of the early thirteenth century was...determined chiefly by two forces, both revolutionary and both of tremendous vitality: on the one hand the radical evangelism of the voluntary poverty movement, which rediscovered the Bible and made it the guide to Christian doctrine and Christian life; and on the other hand the no less fierce urge to investigate, on the plane of pure natural philosophy, the reality that lay before men's eyes. This latter movement in the direction of a hitherto unknown and novel "worldliness" found ammunition in the complete works of Aristotle, which were at that time just beginning to be discovered.
Both movements contained within themselves sufficient explosive force to shatter the whole structure of medieval Christianity's intellectual order. Both appeared in extremist form - theologically speaking, in the form of heresies. The remarkable thing about St. Thomas, who was exposed to these two intellectual currents while he was still a student at Naples, is that he recognized and accepted the rightness of both approaches; that he identifies himself with both; that he affirmed both, although they seemed mutually opposed to one another; and that he attempted to incorporate both in his own spiritual and intellectual life. The paradigmatic, the exemplary quality of St.Thomas is, as we have said, contained precisely in his refusal to "choose" between the two extreme possibilities. Instead he "chose" both - and did so not by merely tacking one onto the other in a mechanical fashion, but by grasping and demonstrating their inherent compatibility; in fact, by showing the necessity for fusing these apparently contradictory and mutually exclusive approaches to the world."
( 30)
23.12.10
The Mind of Chesterton -Christopher Hollis
- About the Author (Wikipedia)
- Chesterton Wikipedia page.
"It is curious that Saint Thomas should be saddled with the responsibility for those purely mechanical and demonstrative proofs of the existence of God i which modern metaphysicians from Kant onwards have been so ready to point out the insufficiences. It is of course true that you cannot demonstrate the existence of God by the mere assertion that it is a condition of thought to believe that everything must have a cause. What then, ask the objectors, can be the cause of God? Such questions may be of force against many of the later, debased scholastics, concerned only to produce the mechanical demonstration and to leave the lecture before a hearer can confront them with a question. They are of no force against Saint Thomas who showed himself as fully aware of such difficulties as any modern skeptic. As Chesterton shows, far from saying that the existence of a creating God was absolutely demonstrable he confessed that, were it not for revelation, he knew of no reason to prefer the belief that the universe was created by God to the belief that it had always existed. But even supposing that it had always existed there must still, he argued, have been in it some inhabiting and creating spirit directing the developing forms which its objects took, and this, in any event true, is yet the more clearly true if, as we are now told, this universe is an expanding universe. Whence comes the expansion? Matter clearly cannot be the creator of mind. The ultimate direction must be with a Mens Creatrix.
Yet among the creatures of the universe Man is so obviously different in kind from any others, and has so much more obviously a moral nature that it is according to reason and not contrary to it to imagine that he has some share in the divine nature as other creatures do not possess. Christian teaching describes this share by saying that Man was made in the image of God and that God in the person of Christ became Man. The fact that these claims, if true, explains the universe as nothing else can explain it, does not in itself prove them to be true as matters of history. The Christian before he accepts his faith is under obligation to examine the evidence of Christ's life and to decide from it whether there is any other explanation that can account for the facts. In the same way, if there is nothing beyond this life or if the future is only the future of Buddha's Sorrowful Wheel, then this life in which we have such obstinate certainties of the value of virtue and of happiness as the end of man, and in which so often virtue does not lead to happiness, does not make sense.
21.12.10
20.12.10
15.12.10
30.11.10
30.9.10
Reason to Believe; Why Faith makes Sense -Richard Purtill
-Buy this book.
- About the Author
-Richard Purtill Page at Ignatius Insight.
"...a universe without God is a universe without reason, a universe without moral values, a universe without hope of lasting happiness. It is precisely that the modern atheist or agnostic inhabits, precisely this world that the modern theater of the absurd, novel of the absurd, art of the absurd, shout, whine, and snivel about. If reason left us no alternative to such a view, intellectual honesty might force us to accept it. But if this view is true, reason has no force. If morality impelled us to take such a view, integrity might make us choose it. But if the view is true, morality has no force. If the deepest needs of our nature were satisfied by this view, then our nature might compel us to accept it. But if this view is true, the deepest needs of our nature are illusory. In sum, there can be no reason for accepting the absurdist view of the universe, for that view destroys all reasons." p.119
22.9.10
The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy -Etienne Gilson
- About the Author (Wikipedia)
"In order to know what God is, Moses turns to God. He asks His name and straightway comes the answer: Ego sum qui Ait ; sic dices filiis Isreal ; qui est misit me ad vos (Exod. iii. 14). No hint of metaphysics, but God speaks, causa finita est, and Exodus lays down the principle from which henceforth the whole of Christian philosophy will be suspended. From this moment it is understood once and for all that the proper name of God is Being and that, according to the word of St. Ephrem, taken up later by St. Bonaventure, this name devotes His very essence. Now to say that the word being designates the very essence of God, and the essence of no other being but God, is to say that in God essence and existence are identical. That is why St. Thomas Aquinas, referring expressly to this text of Exodus, will declare that among all the divine names there is one that is eminently proper to God, namely Qui est, precisely because this Qui estnon significat forman aliquam sed ipsum esse. In this principle lies an inexhaustible metaphysical fecundity ; all the studies that here follow will be merely studies of its results. There is but one God and this God is Being, that is the corner-stone of all Christian philosophy, and it was not Plato, it was not even Aristotle, it was Moses who put it in position." p.51
20.9.10
10.9.10
The Rage Against God; how atheism led me to faith -Peter Hitchens
1.9.10
Newman and The Modern World - Christopher Hollis
-Newman (Wikipedia)
" The Grammar of Assent derives from Pope Paul's judgment an increased significance because in it Newman, rejecting the purely intellectualist approach to the problem of God, talks a language much more like that of Duns Scotus than that of St. Thomas. It is also much more like that of the modern analyst and existentialist and we can see that growth of tolerance reflected in the present language of the Church. Where the early nineteenth century Popes had been only concerned to denounce, the modern documents are concerned to explain and understand. Contrast for instance Pius IX's full blooded denunciation of all enemies of the Church with the careful and reasoned attempt to discover what had led atheists to become atheists of John XXIII in Mater et Magistra or in the Schema XIII of the Church in the World Today; contrast Gregory XVI's denunciation of freedom of opinion as 'insanity' with John XXIII's assertion of its rights in Pacem in Terris; compare the Syllabus Errorum's advocacy of a literal interpretation of the Scriptures with the assertion of a duty of hermeneutic exposition of them in Pius XII's Divino Afflante Spiritu; or the earlier Pope's denunciation of liberalism, progress and democracy with the Council's assertion of the autonomous rights of science and it's endorsement of democracy in it's judgment that 'admirable is the practice of those nations in which the greater number of citizens take part with true liberty in political life.'
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