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
How did Rachel hide her father Laban’s idols from him? Continue reading “Mr. Spun’s Truly Terrible Awful Jokes: #41”
It is a terrible thing, the burden of living in time, that every action we take is ultimately irrevocable. We cannot undo that which we have done. As Omar Khayyam put it in his poem the Rubaiyat: The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit. Shall lure it back to … Continue reading Irrevocable
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
One of the challenges of a hylomorphic theory is articulating in what sense the soul is a spiritual substance. This is because the soul is the form of the body, even while every single body that exists has some form. A tree has a form. In fact, the form of a tree is also a soul. … Continue reading Spiritual Souls vs. Material Souls
Last week, I mentioned what will not be taken from us if we choose what is better: “Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42). Here is how Thomas Aquinas puts it in his mediation on the relationship between the Contemplative and Active life: Sometimes a … Continue reading Thomas’s Take on Life Interrupted
Same & Other 