Ambrosian chant - Tecum principium in die virtutis tue

Tradition and the future

Francis of Assisi: A New Biography by Fr. Pius Pietrzyk, O.P

Family Life in an Orthodox Rhythm

James Chastek, Two truths in theology and history

Per impossibile, what if there were rock-solid evidence that Christ didn't rise from the dead? I just find the hypothetical question posed rather baffling. "Assume we have, say, rock solid evidence that Pilate was a no-nonsense judge, with no scruples about killing anyone for the sake of order (I’ve heard historians modify or contest this, but assume that it is firmly established)."

What what the rock solid evidence be? Some record, some testimony, plus some reasoning on the part of the historian. Can a historian ever capture the full character or personality of a historical person? It is questionable whether we can even do that with respect to the people we "know."

Mr. Chastek writes at the end:

The Christian can point to the fact that it is possible that the accounts are true, but is it necessary that he be able to transmute possibility into a historically reasonable claim? So do we have some sort of “two truths” doctrine here? In fact, if historical truth is what the theologian calls a probable opinion, and the theologian can admit that some historical facts need not be the ones that are most probable given the historical evidence we have, is there even a tension between the two truths? Why can’t something that is in fact false be what is most probable given the historical evidence that we have?

Any evidence we have is some sort of testimony and subjected to criteria pertaining to trustworthiness/credibility. If history cannot attain the level of certitude necessary for a science, then this isn't really a problem of "two truths, " is it? Can we say that the history given within Sacred Scripture is more reliable than anything constructed by human historians working without the aid of the Holy Spirit? Why not? In addition, isn't the testimony of the authors of Sacred Scripture one more historical source that must be taken into consideration by the secular historian? On what a priori basis can he exclude it as being unreliable?

The Valaam Monastery CD, The Secret Way: Jesus Prayer. Znameny melody.

Edward Feser: McInerny on TLS

Icon painting class at Thomas More College

NLM: Learn to Paint Icons in the Western Tradition at Thomas More College this Summer

Aidan Hart's book is rather expensive, but I'd still like to get a copy. Alas, I don't think I could become an iconographer.

Adam De Ville: Aidan Hart on Iconography (an interview with Aidan Hart)

Zenit: Achieving the Ideal Society
University Professor Explains Thomas More's Utopia

One example of how Utopia is relevant is found in "the need for the careful, studied place of intellectuals in the political life."


"It's really a call for intellectuals, to think about [their role]" in society, explains Dr. Boyle. Thomas More himself exemplified this well, being an intellectual who was deeply involved in the politics of his day. "More was a very smart man, a clear intellectual. Many of his humanist colleagues thought he was wasting his time in government service. But it's not just that he was really smart, he read his Plato, terrific how he would go boss princes around. Rather, his intelligence, his certain understanding of precisely how it is, in the practical realm… works."


"Given the complexity of modern life, the need for solid philosophical principles, at the same time on the firm ground in the practice of politics, in economics, in any number of aspects of culture, seems all the more relevant."


"The political order," Dr. Boyle goes on, "is not the source of our happiness. This is a theological point, but it's very dear to More's heart. The political order can serve to help order men to their happiness, but it cannot achieve it. This is a matter of Church, of the City of God. Political order can more or less help, but it can't achieve what I think, in the modern sense, is the Utopian dream."

I need to read Utopia, but "political order" seems to be rather squishy here because of the word "order." Are we talking about the constitution, the government, the laws (and customs) or something else? None of them are identical to the ultimate end, but some precision may be warranted if we're trying to understand Utopia better.

Dr. John Boyle

From 2009: Lost Aquinas

Rick Garnett, "Growing in Love": Congrats to Susan!

Mr. Garnett hypes Susan Stabile's Growing in Love and Wisdom: Tibetan Buddhist Sources for Christian Meditation. Why? The book's description:

In Growing in Love and Wisdom, Susan Stabile draws on a unique dual perspective to explore the value of interreligious dialogue, the essential spiritual dynamics that operate across faith traditions, and the many fruitful ways Buddhist meditation practices can deepen Christian prayer.


Raised as a Catholic, Stabile devoted 20 years of her life to practicing Buddhism and was ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist nun before returning to Catholicism in 2001. She begins the book by examining the values and principles shared by the two faith traditions, focusing on the importance of prayer--particularly contemplative prayer--to both Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism. Both traditions seek to effect a fundamental transformation in the lives of believers, and both stress the need for experiences that have deep emotional resonance, that go beyond the level of concepts to touch the heart. Stabile illuminates the similarities between Tibetan Buddhist meditations and Christian forms of prayer such as Ignatian Contemplation and Lectio Divina; she explores as well such guided Buddhist practices as Metta and Tonglen, which cultivate compassion and find echoes in Jesus' teachings about loving one's enemies and transcending self-cherishing. The heart of the book offers 15 Tibetan Buddhist practices adapted to a contemplative Christian perspective. Stabile provides clear instructions on how to do these meditations as well as helpful commentary on each, explaining its purpose and the relation between the original and her adaptation. Throughout, she highlights the many remarkably close parallels in the teachings of Jesus and Buddha.


Arguing that engagement between religions offers mutual enrichment and greater understanding of both traditions, Growing in Love and Wisdom shows how Buddhist meditation can be fruitfully adapted for Christian prayer.

The legacy of the 13th Apostle: origins of the East Christian conceptions of church and state relation (pdf)

James Chastek, Aristotle’s theohedonics (pt. 1)

Waiting for the next part.

Zenit: On Prayer and Ministry

Rorate Caeli: The Life and Thoughts of Cardinal Merry del Val - IV
Disregard for self

The Theology of the Hypostatic Union

(Leonine Edition of the Summa Theologiae and Contra Gentiles Now Available as Reprints)

William of Ockham’s Early Theory of Property Rights: Sources, Texts, and Contexts

A post from last month at Mary Victrix: SSPX on the Brink:

It seems, as I have said, that the Holy Father does not favor the position of Gheradini and De Mattei. The doctrinal preamble is non-negotiable. The existence of a hermeneutic of continunity, as such, is not a matter for debate.

Why? What in our understanding of the Magisterium and the status of the conciliar documents requires that we have to interpret them thusly? Giving a charitable interpretation may be required, but is it possible that some of the documents may contain some errors? Isn't that the question? If it is impossible that the documents contain error, then everything must be interpreted in the light of Tradition. But if it is possible... then such an interpretation may go far but it may still not be enough to turn falsehood into truth.

The Smithy: Leonine Edition of Thomas's Summa - In Print

القديس جاورجيوس-Saint Georgeos


Troparion of Saint George - طروبارية قديس جيورجيوس

The 50th Psalm as chanted at the Ecumenical Patriarchate (Byzantine Chant)

Aquinas on the Intentionality of the Passions

Archbishop Augustine DiNoia, The Easter Vigil with the Queen of Heaven

Vultus Christi: Little birds in the nest of our nothingness

News on Silverstream Priory. And some photos.

U. of St. Thomas (MN): Law Journal Spring Symposium: Sentence Commutations and the Executive Pardon Power (via MOJ)

Rome Reports: Society of St. Pius X is one step closer to reconciling with the Vatican

2 from 30 Days

What we need most of all is prayer
Witness of Cardinal Roger Etchegaray
by Cardinal Roger Etchegaray

It is prayer that is the keystone of the Christian life
“We need much humility, we need to recite the Rosary and the simplest prayers, like those of popular devotion; one understands there that it is very often the people who hand on the faith to the learned”.
An Interview with Prosper Grech, the Augustinian created cardinal by Benedict XVI in the recent Consistory

Distinguo

James Chastek: Don’t always distinguish

In the (corrupted?) Scholastic tradition, “distinguish” has become a fraternity password or cheerleader-slogan. All problems and paradoxes are seen as mechanically calling forth the need to “distinguish!” The irony is that what is most loveable in the great Scholastics is not their distinctions but their syntheses and unifications. Distinction itself is purely ad hoc, arbitrary and hateful unless it can reduce to some evident principle that allows for the distinction itself.

As a beginner, I'm not understanding the critique so much. Distinguishing may be a necessary step to clarity when definitions have not been stated and one does not to presume that an interlocutor or opponent is using a specific one. It seems necessary when the discussion is taking place through the written word rather than through speech; it is useful too for preserving a measure of humility and politeness in discourse.
definitions

DSPT: The 22nd Annual Aquinas Lecture - vimeo

The Evidence of the Precepts of Natural Law

Is the Natural Law Persuasive? by R.J. Snell

The theory of natural law, not the precepts of natural law.

One can try to persuade not through demonstration of the principles (i.e. human goods), but through dialectic.

The first-person aspect of natural law explains also the appeals to the self-evident. As John Finnis articulates in Fundamentals of Ethics, “ethics is not deduced or inferred from metaphysics or anthropology,” and principles are self-evident precisely in that they are not deduced from previous principles, but in no way is ethics merely intuited or asserted or mystically known. Rather, by adverting to the object(ive)s of human action—the for-the-sake-of-which rendering action intelligible—we can attend “to precisely those aspects of our experience . . . in which human good(s) became or can now become intelligible to us.” In other words, we can understand human goods rather than deduce human goods, but while understanding is not an inference it nonetheless involves insight into our experience, and without the experience and insight we would not understand. Basic goods are not deduced or derived, for they are self-evident, but there are conditions for our understanding of the goods.

The condition of coming to understand basic human goods, which serve as grounds for reasonable action, is a first-person understanding of our own reasons for acting. That is, we have to understand why we act and what we seek when we act. If an action is intelligible, that action will have some grounds which are understood as worth seeking in themselves, not requiring justification or demonstration on the basis of some other good(s). Understanding this entails self-understanding, adverting to the reasons for acting always operative in our knowing and choosing. Such self-understanding, Finnis explains, is not simply “opening one’s eyes” to take a look at oneself, nor is it an “intuition”; it is an “insight” gained by “reflecting on one’s own wanting, deciding and acting,” which occurs not by “peer[ing] inside oneself” but by noticing and understanding one’s own reasons for acting.

While these goods are assumed in ethics, they can be shown to be such in metaphysics? What about the precepts dealing with the means to these goods? Can they be demonstrated (through moral science)? Even so, would such demonstrations be persuasive to the man of vice(s)? Probably not.

[We have a natural inclination to know truth. But moral truth is not the same "truth" as speculative truth.]

Lefebvriani, la risposta positiva è arrivata (via Fr. Z) - Rorate Caeli

A different take: St. Pius X Society gives mixed response to Vatican

The Interior Life by Fr. Kenneth Baker, S.J (ia Insight Scoop)

Logos Bringing Aquinas’ Other Works into English

James Chastek, Two answers to “why do we form political associations?”

Plato says that the city arises from an individual’s inability to meet his own physical needs; Aristotle says that it arises because men are political by nature. At first glace, it seems like Aristotle’s account is facile, or even that it is no explanation at all: “men are naturally political because they are political by nature! What an insight!” But Aristotle’s explanation is the better one. In effect, he is insisting that political life is irreducible. It is not the result of a more fundamental drive or desire – political life itself is the fundamental desire, and it would remain so even if it was not as good at meeting physical needs. This is why his Politics doesn’t begin by considering the individual (and his needs) as the principle of a society, but takes communal life as irreducible.

How many modern political theories start with the good of the individual and the myth that society originates in the need of individuals to cooperate for survival?

But if political life is a basic and irreducible need, then just regimes must at least strive to make the regime a place in which the citizens can be truly politically active. Again, where political order reduces to physical need, the Leviathan-state is possible and perhaps even desirable; but where an individual’s political life is an irreducible reality, the Leviathan-state is in flagrant contradiction with the first principle of politics, since no one can lead a political life in the Leviathan state. The Leviathan might meet all the individual’s physical needs, but it does not allow his political actions to make anything beyond a negligible difference.

Political friendship, by the nature of friendship, is ordered to some measure of equality? (Or that constitution known as republic/polity?)

St. Thomas and the Keeping of Pets

Might some pets (e.g. dogs) be more suited to be companions for man than others?

OP: Initial formation: between postmodernity and new evangelisation

PASCHA "As Smoke Vanishes...let them vanish" St. Elias Church

Rome Reports: Benedict XVI: Celebrating his birthday and election as Pope




My Brother the Pope by Georg Ratzinger and Michael Hesemann

Cardinal Raymond Burke Discussing Religious Freedom (video)

Some beautiful iconostases

Paschal troparion | Russian Patriarchate Choir | Anatoly Grindenko direction


Haven't decided if I will attend Russian Pasha vigil liturgy tonight or not.

The Sperm of Sea Urchins and the Directedness of Natural Processes by William Carroll

Urgent/For the record:Le Figaro - "Rome and Écône on the verge of reaching an agreement" (Rorate Caeli)

The Remnant: The Ides of April by Stephen Dupuy
Some thoughts on the Society's Imminent Response to Rome

James Chastek, Re-evaluation of First Matter

Sandro Magister: That Strange Mass the Pope Doesn't Like
It is the Mass according to the rite of the Neocatechumenal Way. Benedict XVI has ordered the congregation for the doctrine of the faith to examine it thoroughly. Its condemnation appears to be sealed

For the Lefebvrists, It's the Last Call to the Sheepfold
Otherwise it's schism. But Rome will do everything possible to avoid the irreparable. From Australia, the theologian John Lamont shows that reconciliation is possible

Was Robert Bellarmine Ahead of His Time? (via Insight Scoop)

Reviewed: Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth. By Stefania Tutino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 416 pp. ISBN 978-0-19974-053-6.

On Temporal and Spiritual Authority. By Robert Bellarmine. Edited, translated and with an introduction by Stefania Tutino (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2012), 500 pp. PB: ISBN 978-0-86597-717-4.

Jimmy Akin: A Day of Shame in Christian History

Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False
Thomas Nagel


Thomistic Circles Symposium on Creation and Modern Science (via Edward Feser)

Eileen Sweeney has a new book out: Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word.

Recently uploaded - Living Tradition No. 150: Father Feeney and the Implicitum Votum Ecclesiae Part B. Reading Cantate Domino, Unam Sanctam, and the 1949 Letter in a Hermeneutic of Continuity

How many issues of RT were there last year? No. 150 is dated January 2011.

It's been a while since I've looked at Amy Welborn's blog. She recently wrote a post on Fr. Augustine Thompson's new biography of St. Francis of Assisi.

Nicolas Gombert: Regina Coeli - Marian Antiphon for 12 voices

Alexander Agricola: Regina Caeli

Ethiopian Iconography (Photo Report)

CUA Press: Select philosophy titles on sale

Details

More from Valaam

(alt)

A blessed and Holy Pascha to all!

Julia Annas has written a book, another in the project of recovering virtue ethics for "the modern age": Intelligent Virtue. A review here.


More:
Virtue Ethics: what kind of naturalism?
The Phenomenology of Virtue
Virtue as a Skill
Being Virtuous and Doing the Right Thing
Virtue Ethics and Social Psychology

An essay in philosophy in biology referencing her.
Aristotle on human nature and political virtue

(see this comment)

Morality and Virtue: An Assessment of Some Recent Work in Virtue Ethics by David Copp and David Sobel

Aristotelian ethical and political naturalism

Confusion About Discrimination by Richard W. Garnett

Mystagogy: The Tragedy of Russia's Abandoned Wooden Churches

Another John Behr lecture (via MB).

Sandro Magister, Vatican Diary / The focolarini's conquest of the curia
Vatican Diary / The Holy Office at the click of a mouse

The Lamentations For The Lord (Romanian Orthodox Church Music)

Byzantine, Texas: NBC to air Orthodox Paschal service

It will not be shown in the SF Bay Area. But it will be shown in SLO.

More links for Fr. Ramirez

Santiago Ramírez, O.P., su vida y su obra
Edicion de las obras completas de Santiago Ramírez, O.P.
A bio (in Spanish).

Éditeur Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas CSIC / Instituto «Luis Vives» de Filosofía
CSIC

Klubertanz and Ramirez by Tom Osborne

I used to have a bookmark at BAC? for books by Fr. Ramirez, but his books appear out of print now? The bookmark is on another hard drive, so I can't look it up now. Maybe someone over at the Thomism YG or Ite Ad Thomam would have more info.

Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, edited by Michael J. Christensen and Jeffery A. Wittung (via 8th Day Books)

The frailties of men

Could Byzantium have been saved?

The First Crusade, the true story

Why was there a sudden need to recover the city where Jesus Christ lived and was crucified? The answer, writes Peter Frankopan, lies in the imperial capital of Constantinople.
By Peter Frankopan *

Harvard University Press & Random House UK

A review in The Tablet.

Tristis est anima mea - University of Utah Singers

Catholicism Producer Speaks About the Friars

Catholicism Project: Filmmaker Mike Leonard from Province of Saint Joseph on Vimeo.

Fr. Robert Spitzer, SJ: Creation and the New Cosmology
(via this link)

The Shocking Truth about Christian Orthodoxy - John Behr

Thomistica.net: Hypothetical Disqualification of Dogma? by Christopher J. Malloy

Metaphysics, the Middle Ages and the Birth of Protestantism - a review of Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation (via The Smith)

One might think that a committed Protestant would have a stake in showing that the Protestant Reformers were not determined in their teachings by their acceptance of bad medieval metaphysics, but I think that the claim in the critique that the metaphysical views of the Reformers were widely divergent (not all were followers of Ockham or Soctus) is something we should attend.

A new book on the way from Dr. Rao

An interview with Dr. John Rao - The Remnant: Black Legends and the Light of the World (New Blockbuster History Book on the Horizon)

For Palm Sunday...

Alleluia: O Pimenon - Ensemble Organum