Eucatastrophe

 I suppose I kept the reading in Lent post noncommital enough so that I don't have to reframe my resolutions.   I said I was going to revisit some of my old sources, especially St Francis de Sales, and I am doing that, though slowly.        Then I mentioned that I was going to read A Secular Age by Charles Taylor, and After Aquinas by Fergus Kerr .   And I am/will be doing that too, but currently those books are both in hiatus. Instead, I took up Twentieth Century Catholic Theologians by Fergus Kerr, which is easier to read than After Aquinas.   Its focus is the theologians whose lives spanned the 20th century, more or less.   All of the ones discussed were somewhat controversial before Vatican II Council, and afterwards, they can be divided into basically two categories:   the ones whose work was more or less recognized and affirmed in the Council documents, and those who continued on a trajectory that eventual...

“I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?” Tolkien's Philosophy of Stories A couple of weeks ago, I sprained my foot badly  -- somehow I managed to make sitting in my study chair into a dangerous athletic endeavour, and tore at least a couple of ligaments while trying to stand up.    Also, our elderly car went back to the repair shop.    This has changed my Lent in several ways.  One of them is that I am sitting down a lot more than I had planned, especially considering that spring seems to have arrived here and there is a vegetable garden to plant.   And Lenten practices have to be the kind you can do wearing an air cast, meaning mostly sedentary. While sitting around, I started reading a large book, A Secular Age by Charles Taylor .   I got sidetracked, though, after I found an article by Fergus Kerr called Christians in a Secular Age .    This led me to his page on Academia , and then to his list of books.  ...

  Ash Wednesday  , where we reflect "thou art dust, and to dust thou must return" seems like a good day to think about Cardinal Newman's analogy of corruption :   To find then what a corruption or perversion of the truth is, let us inquire what the word means, when used literally of material substances. Now it is plain, first of all, that a corruption is a word attaching to organized matters only; a stone may be crushed to powder, but it cannot be corrupted. Corruption, on the contrary, is the breaking up of life, preparatory to its termination. This resolution of a body into its component parts is the stage before its dissolution; it begins when life has reached its perfection, and it is the sequel, or rather the continuation, of that process towards perfection, being at the same time the reversal and undoing of what went before. Till this point of regression is reached, the body has a function of its own, and a direction and aim in its action, and a nature with law...

A list, by no means comprehensive, of some Catholic authors who have had a large influence on my life in the 35 years since my conversion ( besides of course the Evangelists and Biblical authors): Augustine Benedict Thomas Aquinas Ignatius of Loyola St Francis de Sales In more modern times: Therese of Lisieux John Henry Newman GK Chesterton Josef Ratzinger/ Benedict XVI Ever since  Advent, I've been revisiting the works particularly of the pre-modern saints on this list, and even more particularly, the ones that specifically have designed methods or rules of life.  That would be:   St Benedict with his Rule for Monks; St Ignatius with his Spiritual Exercises; and St Francis de Sales with his "Introduction to the Devout Life".      During Lent I'm going to continue revisiting these works particularly.   I'm not commiting to reading through them (though as an oblate I read through the Rule 3 times a year, in daily installments -- it is not long...

“Why”—Leo’s eyes widened with delight—“it’s an engineering problem after all!” He hung limply in air, entranced; ....He yielded himself up to it without reservation. All. All. There was no limit to what one man might do, if he gave all, and held back nothing.  Falling Free I am reading through Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, the ones that are available in my library in digital form, at least.   Falling Free is labelled as the 4th in the series, though it is a standalone and technically a prequel, set 2 centuries before the main happenings in the saga.    It doesn't actually mention the Vorkosigans -- though apparently, somewhere in the later books, one of the main characters does encounter the descendants of the original "quaddies", the genetically modified people who are depicted in the book.   It makes me wonder -- what was happening 2 centuries before my lifetime, that would go on to intersect with my story much, much later? That would have ...

Another old post-- it is related to the earlier one mentioning Dietrich von Hildebrand's description of "superficial knowledge".   (By the way, the Catholic Thinkers site is a very good resource for learning or reviewing topics related to Catholic philosophy and theology.   It was a project of the prodigiously energetic  Dr Ralph McInerny .)  ----------------------- This quote is from Dr Andres'  first lesson on Logic at the Catholic Thinkers site .    Dr Andres writes: It might seem strange that we would need a part of logic devoted to understanding what is so simple, the bare idea of what something is, such as what a triangle is. But St. Thomas would respond that we begin with an indistinct understanding of what a triangle is, and that the idea of a triangle is perfected and made distinct when we find a definition of a triangle.  This is from  Lesson 2 , where he goes into detail about how and why we form definitions of words...

 I wrote the following some time ago but am posting it here even though it is kind of boring.   It seems to relate a bit to the last post on continuity.    ------------------------------ This seems like a pretty fair summary  of Dietrich von Hildebrand's  What is Philosophy ?   The author writes: [Hildebrand] seeks to investigate the phenomenology of knowing: to consider “what it is like” to know something, and to bring to light the essential structures of this fundamental act. Since we are all humans, any of us can consider from personal experience " what it is like " to know something.    Hildebrand starts with the act of "taking cognizance of" something.  That formulation sounds like it would read better in German or Greek, but he uses it to describe the initial act of knowledge, before judgment or assertion.    We come to know something by a receptive but not altogether passive process;  Knowing has an acti...