In the last Book of Augustine’s City of God his rhetoric shines forth as he considers what we may hope for in the next life. His argument takes the form of an extended a minori (from the weaker). Such an argument is seen when Jesus says if God cares so much for the birds or for … Continue reading On the Glory to Come
According to the laws of time, a mother who sends her child off to school can never receive back that very little one. A father who bids farewell to his brood for some space, not only forfeits the time betwixt them, but even the past, which becomes what he had and not what he has. … Continue reading On Sending Children and Loved One’s Off
Persuasion is not well read, but it is perhaps Jane Austen’s best work. Yet it is not one I would recommend for a first time reader. Its deep moral sentiments, its understated conversations, its complexity of situation amid deep simplicity make it perhaps a more difficult novel to appreciate. Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility … Continue reading Felicitous Construal in Jane Austen’s Persuasion
Two central motifs which shape John Donne’s Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward make the poem challenging for contemporary readers: cosmology and liturgy. To some degree, they are a single motif, as the poem seems to argue. The poem, a meditation on the Crucifixion and the narrator’s spiritual condition, is set in the context of the motion … Continue reading Direction in Donne’s Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward
Our passions draw us out into “engagement with the world.” This engagement is not random or according to the whim of the subject, but is already ordered by an apprehension of the good, either sensible or intelligible. Love is the primary passion toward the good. All other passions in some manner depend on love, insofar … Continue reading Passions and Engagement
A Few Poems by Beatrice Spun (age 9) The Whale; The whale had a bump; the whale had a hump. Their were two whales; each had a bump: each had a hump: each had a lump. One went away. The whale had a hump: the whale had a bump. The Tree A tree starts out … Continue reading Poems from a Guest Writer
If we thought like angels or God, we could wake up in the morning and immediately know that dad was in the kitchen making breakfast. We would not need to move through the senses, reflect on things, refer to memory, analyze, make inferences, and draw conclusions. We would simply know. Instead, there is an order … Continue reading Someone’s in the Kitchen: On the Order and Beauty of Human Learning
In adjudicating between two opposite errors of political (and thus anthropological) philosophy, Jacque Maritain capitalizes on the distinction between our material individuality and our personhood. These are not, as he points out, two separate realities, but two aspects of one reality. By the fact of our materiality, we are individuals: needy, fragile, and insufficient of … Continue reading On Maritain’s Person and the Common Good
Aristotle does not begin his treatise On the Soul by declaring that we are made in the image of God. Rather, he begins with the stunningly obvious observation that among all of the things which exist, we distinguish those which live from those which do not. Each of those things which live (plants, animals, and human beings) … Continue reading This is what we call a Soul
Judges 16:23-31 “Our god has delivered Samson, our enemy, into our hands,” said the Philistines. But Samson prayed and received the Spirit of God. He stretched forth his arms and allowed the Temple of Dagon to crush him, that he might bring down that house, so that the house of Israel might rise. Continue reading Samson and the Cross
Same & Other 