Room 201

Hi Like most, my childhood caricature of Protestantism (and in opposition to it, Catholicism) was that the former was an emotional, impulsive, and naive phenomena, while the latter was a somewhat jaded, objective, and rationalistic phenomena.  Even then, I knew this was a caricature--but it seemed to be true in broadstrokes, even to the opposition. Protestants, for the most part, decried Catholics for their subservience to human reason and works, while Catholics decried Protestants for their fideism and forgetfulness concerning the human. While this is absolutely true in the common egregore of Catholicism and Protestantism (and how can I fault anyone for paying lipservice to an egregore?) this is far from true concerning the historical Catholic/Reformed debate.  Far from true. I think, before getting into the deep, one must consider Catholic teaching on God/Revelation/Inspiration. The Church has continually maintained, sometimes to the surprise of Catholics, that all three of ...

Between two spaces. I've struggled recently with the Catholic Church's teaching on the relationship between faith and reason, especially as expressed in Vatican One. I'm not posting this to lead anyone astray--the Catholic teaching is the correct one, and any discomfort on my part is due to it being *on my part* and only on my part, due to my own human fallibility. The difficulty comes to me in three ways. 1. It would seem at first glance that nothing could be properly *beyond* human reason. I personally lean Hegelian, and from that I am coming to this discussion with the presupposition that truth always falls under the species of "concept" for the following reason:  if something is, it is true. If it is true, it exists as a concept, an abstract concept as found in a statement. Something intelligible by the intellect. Now, a Hegelian would probably say it exists first as concept and secondly as how it presents itself in individual experience. Maybe that doesn'...

I can't seem to please some people. Behind a thousand closed doors, a hundred coping mechanisms, and tens of pretense, the person is inaccessible. Kindness on their part, equal distributed, ever multiplying, seems to spread them thin even if it expands their spirit with a kind of infinitude. Or makes it glow. I don't know, I've been thinking of how to make Tomberg's "unfolding of consciousness" and Teilhard's "enfolding of consciousness" work together in tandem. So I don't know what to say about spreading kindness (an arm of the self) thin. I don't really know. So that's that.  How to reach people like that. Should I? -bjs

Pressures.  I feel horrible about it. A hyperbolic comment, mostly in jest, about how someone's 'soothing voice' makes me more receptacle to their 'bad ideas' now has me as the bane of a social group. I was in a conversation about revising the folk songbook, and now people associate my opinions on the songbook with my opinions on someone's 'soothing voice' and 'bad ideas.' I also am frustrated that apostrophes go on the outside of the period, it's so dumb. I offered the person in question the freedom to be a part of the committee of revising the book, but either at the advisement of her friend or something else, this did not seem to satisfy my crime. Never mind, apologies were made. But now of course I feel awful about it. I wish I didn't immediately feel terrible after someone apologizes. It makes me feel like I'm in the wrong, and maybe I was. I suspect that most of this blog will be about subjects like this. Bleh. I wish I wasn...

I'm back. Crummily. The most intuitive response to the interrelationship of nature, man, and Christ would seem to be that the end of nature is man, and that the end of man is Christ. This would seem to be the intuitive, obvious response. And it was in the past. "Man is a Miracle" says Pico, quoting Hermes. Man is the microcosm of the macrocosm--the universe. His dignity is universally significant. Our Lord Jesus Christ is the end of man, be it by theosis or deification or whatever name you give to the process. The Christian path renews and raises man, and by extension nature, to a kind of godliness. Very well. That is not the commonplace conception at all. The most commonplace conception is of course the secular one, which is more suited to be the subject of another conversation. The second most commonplace conception of the "nature-man-Christ" trichotomy is some disjointed and strange placement of nature as a kind of open-world "canvas" where man act...