Wednesday, June 23, 2010
humanae vitae
http://www.archive.org/details/HumanaeVitae audio recording of humanae vitae @ encyclicals.blogspot.com
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
The Catechism
I have been impressed by every paragraph as to how great God is.
1 God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church. To accomplish this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son as Redeemer and Savior. In his Son and through him, he invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life.
Wow Wow Wow
1 God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church. To accomplish this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son as Redeemer and Savior. In his Son and through him, he invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life.
Wow Wow Wow
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Fall Semester Returns
http://www.thecatholicthing.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2139&Itemid=2
By James V. Schall, S.J.
Americans, unlike the English, do not divide academic calendars into “Michaelmas,” “Hilary,” and “Trinity” terms. For us, it’s Fall or Spring Semester. We measure our lives by the cosmic cycles, not by the drama of salvation.
A Robert Frost poem begins: “The bearer of evil tidings, / When he was halfway there, / Remembered that evil tidings / Were a dangerous thing to bear.”
When we talk of our universities, do we bring “evil tidings?” Bernard Shaw once said: “Youth is such a wonderful thing; it’s a crime to waste it on children.”
Not long ago, Robert Royal remarked that the generation of those whose own parents did not themselves go to college is almost over. Wendell Berry thinks that the dissolution of stable families and communities begins when we send our children to college.
Is there mind without college? Is there mind with college?
What’s it all about, this college business? Of late, I have seen high school plants that simply have every physical facility imaginable. Likewise we see colleges that, for a small fee or via the taxpayer, provide all the heart could desire.
All studies show, however, that about the least “diverse” places politically and intellectually in our culture are the universities. True affirmative action does not touch this ideologically closed shop.
Catholics originally entered the university business to have a platform from which they were free to state what they held and the reasons why they held it. They professed a quaint “diversity” that could be found nowhere else. This peculiar diversity has largely disappeared.
In a brilliant, too little known essay in Modern Age, in 1987, Frederick Wilhelmsen wrote:
Aristotle insisted that philosophy is the highest instance of the life of leisure, but there is no leisure for boys and girls who are expected to gorge themselves on three thousand years of texts and then regurgitate them come examination day. To remember all the data, as suggested, leaves no time for judgment. Yet judgment, says St. Thomas, is the mark of the philosopher of being and the philosopher of being is the Philosopher (328).
Wilhelmsen was concerned with what Leo Strauss also would worry about, namely, that the “Great Books” programs, which took the place of scholasticism, produced mostly skeptics. The history of philosophy took the place of philosophy and left the mind confused.
Students graduated who knew the names of “thinkers.” They did not know themselves how to think. It did not come automatically from reading “Great Books.” One ought to read Descartes. One ought not to end up doubting his own power to know. But he can only do the latter if he knows enough philosophy to deal with the former. The fact is that philosophy as such is taught in very few places among us.
The best way to learn the truth of this proposition is to read Robert Sokolowski’s The Phenomenology of the Human Person. The title is a mouthful, but Sokolowski takes the mind step by step in the direction of, yes, judgment. The method of philosophy, he says, is to “make distinctions,” to say that this is not that, and to state why.
“Philosophy is not the reading of books; philosophy is not the contemplation of nature, philosophy is not the phenomenology of personal experience; philosophy is not its history,” Wilhelmsen wrote in a striking passage. “These are indispensable tools aiding a man to come to know the things that are. But that knowing is precisely knowing and nothing else. We once were given this, not too long ago, in the American Catholic academy. With a few honorable exceptions, we are given it no longer.”
Philosophy ultimately exists in conversation. It needs to be, as Wilhelmsen put it, “talked into existence.” But it first must be “thought” into existence.
When Monica and Patrick sent the young Augustine off to Carthage, they sent him into moral quagmire. Today’s Monicas and Patricks, as Mary Eberstadt has written in The Catholic Thing, are probably sending their offspring into a worse sink, where the phrase “sink or swim” takes on a special meaning.
Can we prepare the eager incoming classes for Fall Semester? Well, yes, they can defiantly read what they will never be assigned. I would begin with a man by the name of Ratzinger, the equal of whom can be found on no academic faculty I know of. But no one will say this. And, as David Walsh has told us, the philosophers are seeking being and its luminosity.
As one of C. S. Lewis’ devils said to the young atheist, “Be very careful what you read.” I have always liked that young devil. I know numerous books that the young atheist should never touch, lest he be tempted, as Plato said, to “turn his soul around.”
James V. Schall, S.J., a professor at Georgetown University, is one of the most prolific Catholic writers in America. His most recent book is The Mind That Is Catholic.
By James V. Schall, S.J.
Americans, unlike the English, do not divide academic calendars into “Michaelmas,” “Hilary,” and “Trinity” terms. For us, it’s Fall or Spring Semester. We measure our lives by the cosmic cycles, not by the drama of salvation.
A Robert Frost poem begins: “The bearer of evil tidings, / When he was halfway there, / Remembered that evil tidings / Were a dangerous thing to bear.”
When we talk of our universities, do we bring “evil tidings?” Bernard Shaw once said: “Youth is such a wonderful thing; it’s a crime to waste it on children.”
Not long ago, Robert Royal remarked that the generation of those whose own parents did not themselves go to college is almost over. Wendell Berry thinks that the dissolution of stable families and communities begins when we send our children to college.
Is there mind without college? Is there mind with college?
What’s it all about, this college business? Of late, I have seen high school plants that simply have every physical facility imaginable. Likewise we see colleges that, for a small fee or via the taxpayer, provide all the heart could desire.
All studies show, however, that about the least “diverse” places politically and intellectually in our culture are the universities. True affirmative action does not touch this ideologically closed shop.
Catholics originally entered the university business to have a platform from which they were free to state what they held and the reasons why they held it. They professed a quaint “diversity” that could be found nowhere else. This peculiar diversity has largely disappeared.
In a brilliant, too little known essay in Modern Age, in 1987, Frederick Wilhelmsen wrote:
Aristotle insisted that philosophy is the highest instance of the life of leisure, but there is no leisure for boys and girls who are expected to gorge themselves on three thousand years of texts and then regurgitate them come examination day. To remember all the data, as suggested, leaves no time for judgment. Yet judgment, says St. Thomas, is the mark of the philosopher of being and the philosopher of being is the Philosopher (328).
Wilhelmsen was concerned with what Leo Strauss also would worry about, namely, that the “Great Books” programs, which took the place of scholasticism, produced mostly skeptics. The history of philosophy took the place of philosophy and left the mind confused.
Students graduated who knew the names of “thinkers.” They did not know themselves how to think. It did not come automatically from reading “Great Books.” One ought to read Descartes. One ought not to end up doubting his own power to know. But he can only do the latter if he knows enough philosophy to deal with the former. The fact is that philosophy as such is taught in very few places among us.
The best way to learn the truth of this proposition is to read Robert Sokolowski’s The Phenomenology of the Human Person. The title is a mouthful, but Sokolowski takes the mind step by step in the direction of, yes, judgment. The method of philosophy, he says, is to “make distinctions,” to say that this is not that, and to state why.
“Philosophy is not the reading of books; philosophy is not the contemplation of nature, philosophy is not the phenomenology of personal experience; philosophy is not its history,” Wilhelmsen wrote in a striking passage. “These are indispensable tools aiding a man to come to know the things that are. But that knowing is precisely knowing and nothing else. We once were given this, not too long ago, in the American Catholic academy. With a few honorable exceptions, we are given it no longer.”
Philosophy ultimately exists in conversation. It needs to be, as Wilhelmsen put it, “talked into existence.” But it first must be “thought” into existence.
When Monica and Patrick sent the young Augustine off to Carthage, they sent him into moral quagmire. Today’s Monicas and Patricks, as Mary Eberstadt has written in The Catholic Thing, are probably sending their offspring into a worse sink, where the phrase “sink or swim” takes on a special meaning.
Can we prepare the eager incoming classes for Fall Semester? Well, yes, they can defiantly read what they will never be assigned. I would begin with a man by the name of Ratzinger, the equal of whom can be found on no academic faculty I know of. But no one will say this. And, as David Walsh has told us, the philosophers are seeking being and its luminosity.
As one of C. S. Lewis’ devils said to the young atheist, “Be very careful what you read.” I have always liked that young devil. I know numerous books that the young atheist should never touch, lest he be tempted, as Plato said, to “turn his soul around.”
James V. Schall, S.J., a professor at Georgetown University, is one of the most prolific Catholic writers in America. His most recent book is The Mind That Is Catholic.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Ask a Catholic a Question 2.0
http://marysaggies.blogspot.com/2009/07/ask-catholic-question-manual.html
Mary's Aggies are at it again.
Mary's Aggies are at it again.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
New blog
encyclicals.blogspot.com
Summaries of encyclicals and other Church documents in their own words. For the sparknote generation and those looking for a good refresher.
Hopefully, soon audio encyclicals. I can go through two audio books a week, and I'm sure many could listen to encyclicals who would have trouble making time to read them.
In a nut shell, new evangelization.
Summaries of encyclicals and other Church documents in their own words. For the sparknote generation and those looking for a good refresher.
Hopefully, soon audio encyclicals. I can go through two audio books a week, and I'm sure many could listen to encyclicals who would have trouble making time to read them.
In a nut shell, new evangelization.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Dirty Deca
tip of the hat to http://marysaggies.blogspot.com/
for this link
http://www.ncregister.com/daily/10_abortion-promoting_catholic_colleges/
A sad testimony to the religious orders, dioceses and alumni...
Boston College - recommends opportunities for students to work ‘pro bono’ for the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts.
College of St. Benedict & St. John’s University - the school’s Gender and Women’s Studies program promotes internship opportunities with the pro-abortion Feminist Majority Foundation and organizations supporting same-sex marriage.
DePaul University - the institution’s Women’s and Gender Studies program offers credit for internships, noting that students have interned with abortion provider Planned Parenthood and the Chicago Women’s Health Center, which offers emergency contraceptive services and alternative insemination for “lesbians, bisexual, and queer couples, single women of any sexual orientation, and trans people.”
Georgetown University - permits students to receive universityfunding for interning at abortion advocacy organizations.
Loyola University of Chicago - their website lists opportunities for internships and volunteer opportunities at Chicago’s National Organization for Women, the Feminist Majority Foundation, Planned Parenthood, and the Chicago Abortion Fund.
St. Edward’s University - has allowed students to work at NARAL Pro-Choice Texas to fulfill a “Community Service in Women’s Studies” credit requirement.
St. Norbert College - - the college’s Women’s and Gender Studies program recommends internships at several pro-abortion and same-sex marriage promoting organizations, including NOW, Legal Momentum, Planned Parenthood, the National Women’s Health Network, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and PFLAG.
University of Notre Dame - the university’s Gender Studies program offers internships for academic credit at places such as the National Organization for Women.
University of San Francisco - the school’s Media Studies program has promoted internships with the California Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League and Girlfriends Magazine.
for this link
http://www.ncregister.com/daily/10_abortion-promoting_catholic_colleges/
A sad testimony to the religious orders, dioceses and alumni...
Boston College - recommends opportunities for students to work ‘pro bono’ for the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts.
College of St. Benedict & St. John’s University - the school’s Gender and Women’s Studies program promotes internship opportunities with the pro-abortion Feminist Majority Foundation and organizations supporting same-sex marriage.
DePaul University - the institution’s Women’s and Gender Studies program offers credit for internships, noting that students have interned with abortion provider Planned Parenthood and the Chicago Women’s Health Center, which offers emergency contraceptive services and alternative insemination for “lesbians, bisexual, and queer couples, single women of any sexual orientation, and trans people.”
Georgetown University - permits students to receive universityfunding for interning at abortion advocacy organizations.
Loyola University of Chicago - their website lists opportunities for internships and volunteer opportunities at Chicago’s National Organization for Women, the Feminist Majority Foundation, Planned Parenthood, and the Chicago Abortion Fund.
St. Edward’s University - has allowed students to work at NARAL Pro-Choice Texas to fulfill a “Community Service in Women’s Studies” credit requirement.
St. Norbert College - - the college’s Women’s and Gender Studies program recommends internships at several pro-abortion and same-sex marriage promoting organizations, including NOW, Legal Momentum, Planned Parenthood, the National Women’s Health Network, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and PFLAG.
University of Notre Dame - the university’s Gender Studies program offers internships for academic credit at places such as the National Organization for Women.
University of San Francisco - the school’s Media Studies program has promoted internships with the California Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League and Girlfriends Magazine.
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