Is Walker Percy justified in taking naming and assertion to be a uniquely human phenomena? This is a challenging question because it requires a certain level of abstraction. But in some sense, the very reflection upon this question is a phenomena which reveals the answer. Can I construe what I am doing right now as … Continue reading Walker Percy on Naming and Assertion
In one of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnets, she states that “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.” If one has not worked through Euclid’s Elements, it is hard to convey what is meant here, or at least what it might imply. Millay’s poem goes on to make other claims which one may take or leave. … Continue reading A Higher Order of Precision
Helen Keller’s story is fascinating insofar as it reveals a real transformation through the power language. She is not utterly without thought prior to her awakening at the well. She describes herself as sensing, as having emotions, and even as having cognizance, for instance, of the difference between being indoors and without.1 She even had … Continue reading Helen Keller, Walker Percy, and Language
Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisted, both tragic and glorious, grave and exalted, is fittingly punctuated by one of the funniest and saddest depictions of the modern man. Rex Mottram, a man of action, of savvy and power is impotent at his core. A half-formed caricature, he only happens to have a man’s body and the habit … Continue reading Rex Mottram: Why Words Alone are Not Enough
King Edwin, in 627 AD, is hesitant to embrace Christianity and forsake his pagan faith. Though he has heard the Gospel from Paulinas, he is uncertain. Here, Bede of Jarrow in his Ecclesiastical History of England rehearses a speech made by one of the King’s men: And one of the King’s chief men presently said, ‘Thus seems … Continue reading Conversion of England in Bede of Jarrow
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
