The question you asked really goes back to the remark of the pope, that the major task of modern thought is to separate eschatology from science and politics as themselves claims to solve all of man's this-worldly problems and destiny. The "modern project," as Strauss critically called it, is really a form of inner-worldly eschatology that corrupts the real temporal meaning of this world.

So-called modern philosophy wants to argue that religion did not solve man's problems, so it would suggest by its own methods that transcendent issues that did originally arise from religion could be solved by modern secular means. The figure of Francis Bacon is prominent here. We should divert all our efforts to improving man's "estate." Added to this is an almost all-prevailing Rousseauism that insists that "structures" are the problem, not the souls of actually free men, as both Plato and Scripture told us. The fact is that no matter what the technology, the soul problem remains the same in every generation, in every regime. No reformation of the structure, of family, economy, or state will "cure" this inner problem, and if it could, it would simply mean that we are not free. The problem is not "medical" or psychological, but moral and metaphysical.

You mentioned "soft atheism" or "soft belief" as related to atheism. Actually, I think Nietzsche is right here. He was scandalized not because God did not exist, but because believers, who were supposed to act as if he did, did not so act. His disbelief is closer to scandal than to philosophy. But the other side of Nietzsche is a passion for the "what would it be like if it were true?" His famous aphorism, "The Last Christian died on the Cross," is nothing less than the plea of a utopian who is searching for ultimate being. He just cannot recognize it if its followers do not. Nietzsche can even be looked on as someone who wanted himself to be God, or at least to have His power to form all things anew. Nietzsche never really rejected "the last Christian."

Christianity, on the other hand, did not want to make men to be "like gods." It was content to leave them as finite and fallible men, but ones who needed hope, the possibility of repentance, and some source besides themselves on which to place their confidence. I think at bottom that Nietzsche, who is often considered to be at the bottom of modern atheism, is really at the bottom, as Walsh says, of the participation in being that violently reacted to the pseudo-metaphysics of modernity's philosophers, who, to go back to my comment on Aristotle, did think that politics was the highest science, and thus an eschatology.

-Fr. Schall

America is a mission country

The New York Times tells the story of a recent influx of priests from Africa, Asia and Latin America. They come to fill the vocational void in American dioceases.

The lead paragraphs do a great job explaining why there is a shortage of priests in America:

OAK GROVE, Ky. — The Rev. Chrispin Oneko, hanging up his vestments after leading one of his first Sunday Masses at his new American parish, was feeling content until he discovered several small notes left by his parishioners.

The notes, all anonymous, conveyed the same message: Father, please make your homilies shorter. One said that even five minutes was too long for a mother with children.

an analogy for thinking about Christmas

St. Augustine explains a little about what Christians mean when they celebrate Christmas:

"'The word was made flesh and lived among us' [John 1:14] When we speak, the word which we hold in our mind becomes a sound in order that what we have in our mind may pass through ears of flesh into the listener's mind: this is called speech. Our thought, however, is not converted into the same sound, but remains intact in its own home, suffering no diminution from its change as it takes on the form of a word in order to make its way into the ears. In the same way the Word of God became flesh in order to live in us but was unchanged."

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

wrongheaded science

This just in: scientists try to put beauty in a test tube and come up with nothing. Maybe someday, though!

Advent

What is the best way to show that you are free? Do something you do not have to do.

This is much like God, for whom all of Creation is something he did not have to do.

RIP Cardinal Dulles

From Whispers in the Loggia via National Review Online:

Word from New York brings the sad news that Avery Dulles SJ -- the celebrated convert, teacher, prolific author, first American theologian and US Jesuit elevated to the College of Cardinals, dean of American theologians and a giant of the age -- passed to his reward overnight.

Having suffered the ravages of a post-polio syndrome in recent years, the Navy vet and scion of a Washington dynasty was 90.

More as it comes in... may his brilliant soul rest in peace.

SVILUPPO: At 9.30, a statement from the Jesuits' New York province formally announced Dulles' passing; the cardinal died at 6.30 this morning in his room at the Jesuit infirmary at Fordham University.

Funeral arrangements are to be announced shortly, and later today will see the release of the customary telegram of condolence from the Pope, whose respect for Dulles was especially significant.

a reckless and unedited attempt at philosophizing about the media, Obama, and secular hope

With the prospect of the Obama administration on their minds, the media is abuzz with newfound hope. A new president has come to save the people from too many years of an oppressive and seemingly indifferent Republican president. We must understand that the media has spent these past years observing and cataloguing the all too many inadequacies, frustrations, tragedies, disappointments and pains of human life – so many of which seem to be caused by George Bush. Secular humanists all, they no longer have the stomach for such suffering. This man, this great man, surely will be able to alleviate our great burden. His Harvard education, finest in the world, will enable him to plan the plan to save all plans. If there are people losing jobs, they will find new jobs when Obama invests in infrastructure. The media already has the news story; haven’t you seen it? Criticism may come from “skeptics,” but the media is quick to point out this is not just “infrastructure”: it is the right kind of infrastructure, the infrastructure this country needs. This is infrastructure that will create jobs now, to save us from having to suffer from the consequences of George Bush very much at all. This is the politics of hope, and the media cannot get enough. They know that every interesting news story is a crisis. And for every crisis, there is a plan. There is a solution. Obama will give us deus ex machina, god out the machine. What is the machine? It is nothing but the coercive power of government. After all, this is the only way Obama can implement his plans. His power as a politician is power to control the government, not to control minds and hearts. The god here is security. Near the beginning of the Enlightenment, Thomas Hobbes gave us this new summum bonum, which could also be called freedom from the fear of violent death. It has come to mean freedom from all material suffering, freedom from having to live a life rightly ordered. We think we should have freedom to do whatever we want (as long as we’re not hurting anybody!) without any consequences. The media doesn’t see that this is what they want, but I insist that it if they were honest with themselves, they would admit it. The media wants Utopia, they want Heaven on Earth, and they want our politicians to usher it in. They should realize how dangerous a project theirs has proven to be.

RJN on Walter McDougall on American Character

An interesting thought on American character:

Walter McDougall’s recent monumental history of America—in Freedom Just Around the Corner and Throes of Democracy—proposes that, of all the ways of describing the American character, the most apt term is “hustler.” He hastens to add that the term has both complimentary and pejorative meanings. With respect to the religion business, the pejorative seems somewhat more pronounced.

McDougall is an excellent historian from the University of Pennsylvania. His other book, "Promised Land, Crusader State," is perhaps the best summary of American foreign policy there is.

in medias res

I thought I would let you all know that I am in between living spaces and still in the process of setting up a new internet account / computer situation. Regular posting will resume likely by the Christmas break. I wish you all a blessed Advent season!

In the meantime, I recommend reading The Political Teachings of Jesus. My initial impression was flawed because it was incomplete. While I think the first few chapters of the book stumble theologically, the subsequent chapters are very provocative and are an excellent New testament exegesis. Reading the book, one is struck by the profound unity and coherency of the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. By the end of the book, I found myself thinking that any merely human teaching would be somehow deficient, somehow incomplete; Jesus' teachings do not suffer this defect of standard human wisdom, and the book helps us to see that clearly, even if it is not its explicit goal.

In other news, Dracula is a highly entertaining read. I know next to nothing about the book, but I'm wondering if the novel is in part a critique of certain excesses of Catholicism?

beauty

Beauty is one of the three foods of the soul, the three most vital human needs, along with Truth and Goodness. These are the three things we all want infinitely and absolutely. They are the three attributes of God that our very nature tells us about. They are the three ideals that raise us above the animals. Christians have succeeded, and are still succeeding today, quite famously in the first of these two areas. Christian philosophy is the most intelligent of philosophies, and Christian morality is he most holy of moralities. But Christianity no longer produces the world's most beautiful and arresting art. Modern man is not rejecting Christianity because it looks stupid or wicked but because it looks boring: dull, hokey, embarassing, "square," sissified, bland, repressive, platitudinous, preachy, dreary, "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable." Its pictures are no longer moving pictures. They do not move hearts. The secular media makes the magic now.

...

Christ's beauty is a beauty that breaks our hearts. It is "no beauty we could desire" unless our hearts break first. Deep truth heals your mind, and deep goodness heals your will, but deep beauty wounds your heart.

Deep beauty hurts.

- Peter Kreeft in Envoy Magazine

money from nowhere

"This current bailout, calculated only up to $4.6 trillion, has cost more than the following government expenditures combined: The Marshall Plan. The Louisiana Purchase. The race to the moon. The S&L crisis. The Korean War. The New Deal. The invasion of Iraq. The Vietnam War. NASA. All of those combined, in inflation-adjusted dollars, equal $3.92 trillion."

- Rush L.

Change we can believe in

What is this change? Hillary Clinton! The New York Times informs us:

Hillary Rodham Clinton has decided to give up her Senate seat and accept the position of secretary of state, making her the public face around the world for the administration of the man who beat her for the Democratic presidential nomination, two confidants said Friday.

As time passes it becomes more and more obvious that the Obama administration is going to be... just like all the other Democratic administrations. Turns out the change we are supposed to believe in is really the federal government under the control of Democratic politicians. The Democratic campaign slogan should be: "believe in the power of the federal government to solve your problems".

Classical Christian Education

I recently visited the Logos School, a classical, Christian school in Idaho. It was a great school, inspired by a 1947 essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning," by the English novelist Dorothy Sayers. She argued that there was something seriously amiss in modern education; we have, she said, “lost the tools of learning--the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane—that were so adaptable to all tasks.” Instead, students learn an assortment of “complicated jigs,” specific, isolated knowledge, which have turned out to be very poor substitutes. We are failing in the “sole true end” of education, which is simply to teach men how to learn for themselves.

What set Sayers apart was her solution. Schools, she urged, ought to adopt “the mediaeval scheme of education…what the men of the Middle Ages supposed to be the object and the right order of the educative process.” At the heart of classical education is the Trivium, whose three parts are Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, in that order. Intended for the study of Latin, they actually instruct pupils in the process of learning. First, one learns the structure of language, grammar (hence, grammar school) “what it was, how it was put together, and how it worked.” Then dialectic, how to use language, make accurate statements, construct an argument and detect fallacies in argument. Finally, the pupil learns rhetoric, how to use language elegantly and persuasively. These steps—acquiring the building blocks of knowledge, analyzing how they are used, and constructing something beautiful and true from them—apply to all fields of study, not just language.

I've got more over on my education blog.

And here is the St. Crispin's Day speech from Shakespeare's Henry V.

times, people, laughs

[friend](9:12:42 PM): ya I hate working
[friend] (9:13:00 PM): maybe i'll file unemployment like the rest of america
[friend] (9:13:20 PM): that why I have a better chance of breaking a guitar hero record
Zach (9:13:28 PM): people will pay to see that
[friend] (9:14:10 PM): and i'll do it while picking up and quitting smoking cigarettes every two weeks
[friend] (9:14:21 PM): and i'll write a book about indians
[friend] (9:14:43 PM): there are so many things I would do if I didn't work

21st century dating

City Journal is a great magazine. "Love in the Time of Darwinism" is an insightful look into dating in a post-feminist age. Ms. Hymowitz explains her thesis:

The reason for all this anger, I submit, is that the dating and mating scene is in chaos. SYMs of the postfeminist era are moving around in a Babel of miscues, cross-purposes, and half-conscious, contradictory female expectations that are alternately proudly egalitarian and coyly traditional. And because middle-class men and women are putting off marriage well into their twenties and thirties as they pursue Ph.D.s, J.D.s, or their first $50,000 salaries, the opportunities for heartbreak and humiliation are legion. Under these harsh conditions, young men are looking for a new framework for understanding what (or, as they might put it, WTF) women want. So far, their answer is unlikely to satisfy anyone—either women or, in the long run, themselves.

Now, men and women have probably been a mystery to one another since the time human beings were in trees; one reason people developed so many rules around courtship was that they needed some way to bridge the Great Sexual Divide. By the early twentieth century, things had evolved so that in the United States, at any rate, a man knew the following: he was supposed to call for a date; he was supposed to pick up his date; he was supposed to take his date out, say, to a dance, a movie, or an ice-cream joint; if the date went well, he was supposed to call for another one; and at some point, if the relationship seemed charged enough—or if the woman got pregnant—he was supposed to ask her to marry him. Sure, these rules could end in a midlife crisis and an unhealthy fondness for gin, but their advantage was that anyone with an emotional IQ over 70 could follow them.

Check it out.

de-divinizing Jesus

A few months ago a man named Tod Lindberg wrote an interesting-looking book titled, "The Political Teachings of Jesus". Quite unexpectedly, I have found the book to have many similarities with liberation theology. It's expressed purpose is to analyze the Teaching of Jesus Christ as if he were merely a man. The book ignores any investigation into his divinity and looks to explicate the profundity of his teaching that is available supposedly without considering his divinity.

My brief review is this: to ignore the question of Jesus' divinity is to misunderstand some of his teachings. Not all, just some. The book, so far, is a reflection of this principle. Lindberg gets many things right, and at times his writing "makes you think deeply," as Michael Novak says. But at times his writing demonstrates a misunderstanding of Christian teaching and the very verses he is drawing from. Not to mention that the last thing Christianity needs is another de-supernatural-ification, or attempt to understand Jesus without reference to his claim to divinity.

Rather than substantiate this criticism with an example, I'd rather share something the book offers that was particularly interesting to me. The selection below demonstrates the strengths of Lindberg's style. He is talking about Jesus' notion of an "enemy"

What, then, does it really mean to "love your enemies," not just your neighbors? We might begin with what it means to have or be an enemy. Here, Jesus suggests that from the point of view of the old law, an enemy is someone you "hate," perhaps viscerally. We therefore have to begin with the notion of "enemy" as a relationship between two people, or two peoples, or two nations. What divides you from your enemy? And what do you have in common?

The easy answers are, respectively, "everything" and "nothing" To be in a relationship of enmity is to be in a relationship in which there are no ties of goodwill that bind you: no law, no "brotherhood," no neighborhood. There is accordingly no way you can agree on how to resolve the differences between the two of you. The only option each of you sees (assuming that both parties to the relationship of enmity are aware that they are enemies of each other) is to try to kill or force the submission of the other or to separate yourself by as much distance as possible if you fear the struggle that might ensue.

In truth, though, this is a misimpression, one that Jesus sets out to identify and correct. Note to begin with that, in most cases, enemies are aware of each other as such (and if not, one party will treat the other as something better than an enemy while the other pursues the relations between the two in accordance with the hidden or secret understanding of the other as enemy). But even a common understanding between two people that they are enemies is a common understanding between the two. They are not so radically apart as they might like to think.

Animals don't have enemies: The predator/prey relationship is different, even though we sometimes use terms like "natural enemies." To have an enemy is a matter of a person's understanding that someone is an enemy. We come back to that idea of "hate." The condition of enmity is precisely not "natural." If it were, how could we escape it? Generations of people would be doomed in perpetuity to a state of hostility.

Hobbes's "war of all against all" is one possible outcome, and it may be the initial state of relationships between people and a "state of nature" in the sense of the human condition before we encounter people who are willing and able to forge different principles according to which they will live. Nevertheless the Hobbesian struggle remains only one possible outcome. Others are possible as well.

So it's definitely an interesting read, but I think there is slight injustice done. I still think the best thing ever said about Christianity and politics can be found in Peter Kreeft's talk "Should the state take a stand on first things?". It solves just about every problem I've ever tried to deal with in an hour.

Check out Alan Jacobs' latest thoughts. It's good stuff.

worth amplifying

Or at least posting it here will help me recall this beautiful story:

The Dominicans report that one of their own has helped convert one of Serbia’s most notorious abortionists into an advocate for the unborn. The whole story is worth reading, but the critical part involves the appearance of a certain Angelic Doctor:

In describing his conversion, Adasevic “dreamed about a beautiful field full of children and young people who were playing and laughing, from 4 to 24 years of age, but who ran away from him in fear. A man dressed in a black and white habit stared at him in silence. The dream was repeated each night and he would wake up in a cold sweat. One night he asked the man in black and white who he was. ‘My name is Thomas Aquinas,’ the man in his dream responded. Adasevic, educated in communist schools, had never heard of the Dominican genius saint. He didn’t recognize the name.”

“Why don’t you ask me who these children are?” St. Thomas asked Adasevic in his dream.

“They are the ones you killed with your abortions,’ St. Thomas told him.

“Adasevic awoke in amazement and decided not to perform any more abortions,” the article stated.

“That same day a cousin came to the hospital with his four months-pregnant girlfriend, who wanted to get her ninth abortion—something quite frequent in the countries of the Soviet bloc. The doctor agreed. Instead of removing the fetus piece by piece, he decided to chop it up and remove it as a mass. However, the baby’s heart came out still beating. Adasevic realized then that he had killed a human being.”

Via First Things

Feministing points out the obvious

Namely, that Catholics are no different than the majority culture. In fact, they may be worse!

That's change you can believe in.