-About the Author (WritersReps.com).
-Audio Interview: Between The Covers with John J. Miller
-Blog Article: Sarah Ruden; A Joyful Iconoclast by Rod Dreher
Justifiable vs. laudable
4 hours ago
30.11.10
Paul among The People; The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined In His Own Time -Sarah Ruden
-About the Author (WritersReps.com).
-Audio Interview: Between The Covers with John J. Miller
-Blog Article: Sarah Ruden; A Joyful Iconoclast by Rod Dreher
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.'
16.8.10
The Go-Between - L.P. Hartely
- The Go-Between Wikipedia page.
- About The Author.
- Opening credit shots and theme from the 1971 film staring Alan Bates and Julie Christie.
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
One of the greatest opening lines ever.
15.8.10
Atheist Delusions; The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies -David Bentley Hart
-About The Author (Wikipedia)
-Review by Paul Griffiths (First Things)
-Review by Peter Lawler (First Principles)
-davidbhart.blogspot.com
"To be entirely modern (which very few of us are) is to believe in nothing. This is not to say it is to have no beliefs: the truly modern person may believe in almost anything, or even perhaps in everything, so long as all these beliefs rest securely upon a more fundamental and radical faith in the nothing - or, better, in nothingness as such. Modernity's highest ideal - its special understanding of personal autonomy - requires us to place our trust in an original absence underlying all of reality, a fertile void in which all things are possible, from which arises no impediment to our wills, and before which we may consequently choose to make of ourselves what we choose. We trust, that is to say, that there is no substantial criterion by which to judge our choices that stands higher than the unquestioned good of free choice itself, and that therefore all judgment, divine no less than human, is in some sense an infringement upon our freedom. This is our primal ideology. In the most unadorned terms possible, the ethos of modernity is - to be perfectly precise - nihilism." (20-21)
14.8.10
No One Sees God; The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers -Michael Novack
- About the Author (Wikipedia)
- Authors Website.
- NRO's The Corner blog post: "What is the Point of My New Book?"
- Interview with Author about book (First Things)
- Review (Washington Post)
- Archive of Author's articles in National Review
- Archive of Author's articles in First Things
10.8.10
16.7.10
At the End of an Age -John Lukacs
- About The Author
"The materialist philosophy and theories of the nineteenth century were hardly more than one chapter in the history of Science, even though its consequences are still all around us, blocking our vision. Physics has ended by explaining away matter itself, leaving us with an ever increasing skeleton, a more complex but essentially empty scaffolding of abstract mathematical formulae. Meanwhile evidences accumulate of the intrusion of mind into "matter." We need not hatch our way through the verbal jungle of "post-modern" philosophers of the twentieth century, even while we recognize their, long overdue, rejection of Objectivism. Unfortunately for so many of them this means but a supermodern kind of Subjectivism, which is a very insufficient approximation of the reality that the key to the universe is mind, not matter." (131)
6.6.10
Miracles; A Catholic View -Ralph McInerny
- About the Author.
- Author article; "The Eucharist and Culture" (Catholicity.com)
- Authors obituary: Ralph McInerny (1929-2010) by Thomas S. Hibbs
"What is a miracle? ....the one feature of the miracle that I have insisted upon is that it is a wonderful occurrence essentially linked to the truths of faith. The purpose of miracle is to direct the mind to the good news of Jesus: in that it differs from all kinds of other marvels and wonders, real and natural, as well as from the performance of magicians." (22)
"there is a certain kind of mind that cannot bear the thought that the supernatural exists and that it can get mixed up in the ordinary things of daily life. Such a mentality has to ignore quite a number of things." (81)
31.5.10
The Last Superstition; A Refutation of the New Atheism - Edward Feser
-About The Author
- Author's Blog
- Short review in St. Augustine's Press
- Short review from With Both Hands
- Radio interview with Author (James Allen Show)
-Article by Edward Feser in The American; "The New Philistinism"
"...as John Searle ( who, as we have seen, is no religious believer) has argued, every form of materialism implicitly denies the existence of the mind, whether or not it intends to (John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind , 1992). Thus, every form of materialism really entails eliminative materialism, and is thus as absurd, incoherent, and false as eliminative materialism is. We have already seen in the previous chapter the deep reason why this is so. The conception of matter that modern materialism inherited from the Mechanical Philosophy, since it strips of matter anything that might smack of Aristotelian formal and final causes, necessarily strips from it also anything like qualia and intentionality, and thus anything that could possibly count as mental. Scientific materialism "explains everything" in non-Aristotelian terms only by sweeping what doesn't fit the mechanistic model under the rug of the mind. And thus the only way to deal with the lump that remains, short of Descarte's dualism, is to throw out the rug, lump and all. Hence, to say that matter, understood in mechanistic terms, is all that exists, is implicitly but necessarily to deny that the mind exists. Conversely, to acknowledge that both matter and mind exist is implicitly but necessarily to affirm either that something like Descarte's dualism is correct, or (if one wants to avoid the paradoxes inherent in Descarte's position) that something like Aristole's view really is right after all, and that the moderns were wrong to abandon it in favor of mechanism.
And this brings us to a rich irony of historical proportions, yet one which goes almost entirely unnoticed. As I have said, most materialists would like to avoid eliminative materialism if they could. They have no problem, then, acknowledging the existence of reason, truth, beliefs, desires, or the mind and intentionality in general. At the same time, they are desperate to avoid anything that smacks of Descartes's dualism; and since, in the modern period, the mechanical conception of the natural world has unreflectively come to be taken for granted, so that Descartes's position has come to seem the only realistic alternative to materialism, these materialists tend to assume that if they can formulate and defend their position in a way that avoids dualism, they have thereby vindicated materialism. What they do not realize, however, is that many of their arguments can make sense only if interpreted in Aristotelian terms, and in particular in terms of final causes. Their arguments are ambiguous between a mechanistic reading and an Aristotelian one, and it is this ambiguity that gives them whatever plausibility they have. Yet they fail to see this ambiguity because of their general ignorance of the history of their subject, and in particular their ignorance of what thinkers in the Aristotelian tradition have actually believed. While they dutifully parrot the general line that Aristotle and his Scholastic followers were all wrong and no longer worth taking seriously, they often inadvertently appeal to concepts that can make sense only if interpreted in a broadly Aristotelian way." (236-37)
26.5.10
God's Battalions; The Case for the Crusades - Rodney Stark
- About The Author (Wikipedia)
- rodneystark.com
- Interview with Rodney Stark
- Interview; from Medievalists.net
- Between The Covers; podacst interview
- Browse Inside: God's Battalions
- Article: "Four Myths of the Crusades"
- Review by Brad Miner (The Catholic Thing)
-Critical review at Amarium Magnum
19.5.10
The Forge of Christendom; The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West - Tom Holland
-About The Author (Wikipedia; needs updating)
- Review (First Things)
On the meeting of Henry IV and Pope Gregory at Canossa (1077):
"Late that January, and accompanied by only a few companions, he began the ascent of yet another upland road. Ahead of him, jagged like the spume of great waves frozen to ice by the cold of that terrible winter, there stretched the frontier of the Apennines. A bare six miles from the plain he had left behind him, but many hours twisting and turning, Henry arrived at last before a valley, gouged out, it seemed, from the wild mountainscape, and spanned by a single ridge. Beyond it, surmounting a crag so sheer and desolate that it appeared utterly impregnable, the king could see the ramparts of the bolt hole where the Pope had taken refuge. The name of the fortress: Canossa.
On Henry pressed, into the castle's shadow. As he did so, the outer gates swung open to admit him, and then, halfway up the rock, the gates of a second wall. It would have been evident enough, even to the suspicious sentries, that their visitor intended no harm, nor presented any conceivable threat. "Barefoot, and clad in wool, he had cast aside all the splendour proper to a king." Although Henry was proud and combustible by nature, his head on this occasion was bowed. Tears streamed down his face. Humbly, joining a crowd of other penitents, he took up position before the gates of the castle's innermost wall. There the Caesar waited, the deputy of Christ, shivering in the snow. Nor, in all that time, did he neglect to continue with his lamentations - "until," as the watching Gregory put it, "he had provoked all who were there or who had been brought news of what was happening to such great mercy, and such pitying compassion, that they began to intercede for him with prayers and tears of their own." A truly awesome show. Ultimately, not even the stern and indomitable Pope himself was proof against it.
By the morning of Saturday 28 January, the third day of the royal penance, Gregory had seen enough. He ordered the inner set of gates unbarred at last. Negotiations were opened and soon concluded. Pope and king, for the first time, perhaps, since Henry had been a small child, met each other face to face. The pinch-faced penitent was absolved with a papal kiss. And so was set the seal on an episode as fateful as any in Europe's history.
11.4.10
8.4.10
The Savage Detectives -Roberto Bolano
-About the author (Wikipedia)
-Review from The New Yorker
-NYTimes Sunday Book Review
"I picked up The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño with high hopes. There are few pleasures rarer than when an American publisher begins releasing translations of a foreign writer all at once. When you feel you’ve exhausted the writers you love most and become overly familiar with the establishment
"I give up. I don’t know how to review The Savage Detectives.
Everyone told me I was supposed to love this book, but I didn’t. There, that’s a review. Not a good review, but there. I can’t remember a book ever taking me so long to finish or a book that I put down so often. When I truly love a book, I am moved. Often physically. Sometimes I have to stand up to read a book, I’m so moved. That’s a good book. (I never had to stand up during The Savage Detectives, although I often had to force myself to read thoroughly and not just skim). When I truly love a book, I’m a little sad and deflated when it’s over. I know a book is great if I’m compelled to go back and immediately reread sections. (Again, with Detectives, this didn’t happen). But it looks like I’m trashing the book. I shouldn’t. It has a lot going for it." -ed biblioklept
6.4.10
The Science of God; The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom - Gerald L. Schroeder
-About the author (Wikipedia)
-Author's Official Website
-Dr. Schroeder speaking on cosmology: a 30 min. clip from the documentary, "Has Science Discovered God?"
Watch This! It's long, and poor video quality, but worth it.
"The medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides wrote that conflicts between science and the Bible arise from either a lack of scientific knowledge or a defective understanding of the Bible. This is a continuing problem. Acknowledged experts in science may assume that although scientific research requires diligent intellectual effort, biblical wisdom can be obtained through a simple reading of the bible. Conversely, theologians who have devoted decades to plumbing the depths of biblical wisdom often satisfy their scientific curiosity through articles in the popular press and then assume they can evaluate the validity of scientific discoveries. The "opposition" is viewed with a level of knowledge frozen at a high school or pre-high school level. No wonder the other side seems superficial, even naive. To relate these two fields in a meaningful way requires an in-depth understanding of both. Nobel laureate and high energy physicist Steven Weinberg is unsympathetic to the idea that ancient commentators on the Bible foresaw modern cosmological concepts regarding the origin of our universe. Yet in his recent book Dreams of a Final Theory, he readily admits, It should be apparent that in discussing these things....I leave behind any claim to special expertise."
"Here we come to a basic tension between religion and science: biblical literalism. Haven't those who demand a literal reading of Genesis noticed that Genesis is literally filled with contradictions? Two millennia ago, long before paleontologists discovered fossils of dinosaurs and cavemen, long before the data from the Hubble and Keck telescopes hinted at a multibillion-year old universe, the Talmud stated explicitly that the opening chapter of Genesis, all thirty-one verses, is presented in a manner that conceals information (Babylonian Talmud Hagigah 11b, 112a, 500 C.E.). The kabalistic tradition has come to elucidate that which is held within those verses. Kabalah is logic, not mysticism, but logic so deep that it might seem mystical to the uninitiated. Literalism is simply not an effective way to extract meaning from the Bible." (10)
"The first step in a rapprochement between science and Bible is for each camp to understand the other. Distancing the Bible from a few misplaced theological shibboleths will do wonders in furthering this mutual understanding.
I have already treated several. Earth need not be at the center of the universe for biblical religion to survive. As Genesis 1:1 stated, first came the heavens and then came the Earth. Western religion has learned to forgo its misplaced dream of a universe revolving around Earth, to accept gravity as a part of nature and not the machinations of a perverted mind, and most important, to read the Bible, as Moses insisted three times on the day of his death, as a poem, as a text having within it a subtext harboring multiple meanings (Deut. 31:19, 30; 32:44)" (11)
"The conflict between science and the Bible is ironic. Throughout the Bible, knowledge of God is compared with the wonders of nature. As stated so well in Psalms (19:2): "The heavens tell of God's glory and the sky declares his handiwork."
Eight hundred years ago, the medieval philosopher Maimonides wrote that science in not only the surest path to knowing God, it is the only path, and for that reason the Bible commences with a description of Creation. In some communities that thought was sufficient cause to burn his books.
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