Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Zenit: On St. Alphonsus Liguori
"Priests Are a Visible Sign of the Infinite Mercy of God"

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Ave Maria U conference on rights

A report at First Things: Catholic Contributions to Human Rights.

The proceedings will be published in the Ave Maria Law Review.

Monday, March 28, 2011

Thaddeus Kozinski, The Good, the Right, and Theology (via Peter Hawthorne)
Jacques Maritain’s "Democratic Faith": Heretical or Orthodox?
By Thaddeus J. Kozinski
First Things: The Beauty of the Ethical
A everyday ethics that brings grace to life
Ross McCullough

A new group blog for Catholic moral theology

Catholic Moral Theology (via MOJ)

The only one I've heard of is John Berkman. This one hits close to home:

Thomas Bushlack
Thomas J. Bushlack (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame) is an assistant professor of moral theology at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN. He recently defended his dissertation titled Justice in the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas: Rediscovering Civic Virtue, and he is also an Oblate of St. Benedict
Not sure if I ran into him during one of my visits to UND.  He is still listed here. Is he publishing his dissertation, or is it available online? Not yet. Not surprisingly he is associated with ">New Wine, New Wineskins
Thomistica.net: Gilles Emery, OP, to speak at Lumen Christi Institute (UChicago)

Sunday, March 27, 2011

The ordinary magisterium's infallibility
Theological Studies, Dec, 1994 by Germain Grisez,
(pdf)
"Master of the Sacred Palace" trailer

"Master of the Sacred Palace" trailer from Province of Saint Joseph on Vimeo.

How many zeroes are there in a trillion? On economics, neoliberalism and economic justice by Nitasha Kaul (EB)

What is the author's alternative to neoliberalism? I suspect it would not be a third way.
Ite Ad Thomam: Commemorating the Last of the Fathers, the First of the Scholastics

CE
Some of his writings.

From 2009:


Something for the Sunday of Orthodoxy:

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Ecce Virgo concipiet

Philotheus Boehner, Medieval Logic: An Outline of Its Development from 1250 to c.1400
(via The Smith)

Google Books
Amazon
op-stjoseph: The Pritzl Chair - Endowed Philosophy Chair to Be Named for Friar

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Rorate Caeli: Vatican orders reforms in the philosophical formation of seminarians

Another article covering the same decree mentioned in the Zenit article linked here.

Friday, March 18, 2011

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Rome Reports: Cardinal Marc Ouellet and Claudio Magris speak about the Pope's new book in the Vatican
Rome Reports: François-Marie Lethel explains what he is saying to the pope in spiritual retreat

Is Aquinas a liberal?

In this one respect -- how he defines injustice.

Lydia McGrew: Contract killing

As Wesley J. Smith points out, when he was in law school he was taught that X's agreeing to be murdered does not make killing X legally something other than murder. And a good thing, too. Well, as usual, the UK is leading us into a new world. In Brave New Britain, that isn't true anymore, evidently.


Michael Bateman put a bag over the head of his wife Margaret and pumped in gas to kill her. She was in a lot of pain that wasn't getting properly treated because the moronic medical establishment didn't diagnose her broken pelvis. (It was discovered after her death.) She was also depressed about not being able to do normal things like taking showers. That's it. She wasn't dying, if you think that's a relevant consideration. (I don't.) So she and Michael planned her death, and he killed her, because she apparently couldn't do it herself. The prosecutor has declared that it "isn't in the public interest" to prosecute Michael, presumably because Margaret agreed to be murdered.


In the current context of recent posts, I'm almost afraid to ask whether mere libertarianism would mean that agreeing to have yourself killed with plastic bags and gas means that everything is A-okay and no prosecution should be carried out against your killer. I'm pretty sure I know the answer. And that, folks, is just one reason that, while I'll defend small government all over the place, I don't carry a libertarian card.
Aquinas asks, "Whether we can suffer injustice willingly?" Is it no longer injustice if we suffer the action willingly? In the body, Aquinas argues that no one can suffer an injustice except involuntarily. But he adds in the response to the third objection:

Suffering is the effect of external action. Now in the point of doing and suffering injustice, the material element is that which is done externally, considered in itself, as stated above (Article 2), and the formal and essential element is on the part of the will of agent and patient, as stated above (Article 2). Accordingly we must reply that injustice suffered by one man and injustice done by another man always accompany one another, in the material sense. But if we speak in the formal sense a man can do an injustice with the intention of doing an injustice, and yet the other man does not suffer an injustice, because he suffers voluntarily; and on the other hand a man can suffer an injustice if he suffer an injustice against his will, while the man who does the injury unknowingly, does an injustice, not formally but only materially.

And so the agent may nonetheless be guilty of committing an injustice, even if the victim consents to it. How is this so? Because the action in itself is unequal. That is to say, injustice is not defined by consent, but by the lack of what is due.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

More from Miller on MacIntyre

He writes in response to David Schaengold's Defending Alasdair MacIntyre’s Economics: On Aristotle’s Wide Applicability.

(The link to the First Things piece that started this discussion can be found here.)

Monday, March 14, 2011

Interview with Matthew Levering

Over at Vox Nova: The Vocation of the Theologian: An Interview with Matthew Levering
OP Vocations: Salve Regina - Ordo Praedicatorum

Evidence against heliocentrism?

Japan’s earthquake shifted balance of the planet

Unless plate tectonic theory is incorrect or incomplete for understanding earthquakes and the shift of the earth's axis.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Fr. Anthony mentioned this book in his homily today: The Cruelty of Heresy: An Affirmation of Christian Orthodoxy, by C. FitzSimons Allison

A public police force: a fitting republican institution?

ARE COPS CONSTITUTIONAL? by Roger Roots

The Object of the External Act

A source of confusion for some trying to understand Catholic moral theology. St. Thomas teaches that the object is the term of the act--what it brings about. We often have an implicit understanding of this, as is shown by our use of a name for both a thing and the action that leads to the making of that thing. For example, section and partition. What are some other examples of this analogical naming?

Swinburne on science

BQO: The True Morality.Is science capable of providing a common morality? Philosopher Richard Swinburne answers.

Richard Swinburne, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, answers the question, "Is science capable of providing a common morality?"

Saturday, March 12, 2011

"An historic book, which inaugurates a new era of theological exegesis"
The new "Jesus of Nazareth" by Benedict XVI explained by a cardinal theologian raised in his school

by Marc Ouellet

"Attende Domine"

Video: The 21st Annual Aquinas Lecture
The Dead in Christ Will Rise: Thomas Aquinas and Current Ideas on the Time of the Resurrection by Fr. Bryan Kromholtz, OP

Arete Initiative at the University of Chicago

MOJ: "A New Science of Virtues"

Arete Initiative at the University of Chicago
Stuck with Virtue Conference Series
Science of Virtues
Defining Wisdom

Friday, March 11, 2011

Michael Sandel's Liberalism

From Oz Conservative: Hank Pellissier criticises male-identified males

In the preface, Sandel defines the liberal conception of the person this way:


According to this conception, my dignity consists not in any social roles I inhabit but instead in my capacity to choose my roles and identities for myself. (xiv)

Do all academic liberals believe this, and are they this blunt? Amazing -- no obfuscation here, and Sandel deserves to be labelled an enemy of the true and good.

Justice With Michael Sandel
faculty page


Playlist
itunes



Michael Sandel on Markets and Morals

Michael Sandel’s Reith Lectures.
Chautauqua Institution

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Benedict XVI: Our World Needs a New Heart

(via DSPT FB)
Re: the discussion of (public) unions, collective bargaining, and benefits, what does CST say about renumeration for labor? Does it extend to benefits after employment? Fostering the ability to provide the highest level of health care? I don't see anything in that particular section of the Compendium. One could argue that pension and other retirement benefits are included under remuneration, but that would appear to be stretching the meaning of the word remuneration -- what is owed is payment for services rendered only while employed. If the pension is actually something owed for labor that has been provided, then to take it away would be unjust. But it is commonly understood not to be such?

Living in a welfare state, we may think of entitlements and pensions as being owed to us (out of justice) but we may be wrong on these points.

Wednesday, March 09, 2011

Father Gabriel (Bunge) “Orthodoxy is the Fruit of My Whole Life as a Christian and a Monk”
By Archpriest Pavel Velikanov

A link to a copy of the next Orthodoxy in the World post, part two of this interview, was already posted by me here.
OP Vocations: The New Wine of Dominican Spirituality: A Drink Called Happiness
CNN: How the human penis lost its spines

Tuesday, March 08, 2011

Monday, March 07, 2011

St. Alphonsus Liguori on the Order of Charity?

Found what I was looking for. From Volume 1 of Theologia Moralis.
OP Vocations: Preaching the Gospel of Life as Dominicans
I've been looking for an outline of St. Alphonsus Liguori's Theologia Moralis so I can search the contents of his multivolume work more easily, but no luck so far.

How does this work compare?
Compendium theologiae moralis Sancti Alphonsi Mariae de Liguori

Sunday, March 06, 2011

First Things: Waiting for St. Vladimir
An admirer of Alasdair MacIntyre’s moral philosophy rejects his political economy
by Robert T. Miller

Mr. Miller's treatment of MacIntyre and capitalism merits a response, but there are so many things that need to be countered and clarified that I do not think I have time. First Things has not changed its basic economic beliefs, even though it may have a new editor?
MacIntyre on money

Ancient Faith Radio: Lectures by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware

here

Archbishop Hilarion on Music and Faith

Russian Orthodox Archbishop on Music and Faith

video (flv)

Chant - Music for paradise - Music for the soul - Stift Heiligenkreuz

Emmanuel Mounier


(source of image)

A Theory of Personalism (New York: Lexington Books, 2005, by Thomas and Rosita Rourke (Google Books)
Reviewed by John Francis Burke, Professor of Political Science, University of St. Thomas, Houston

Roots of the Movement: Emmanuel Mounier and Personalism:

Personalism


Personalism requires an affirmation of value, viz., the affirmation of the absolute value of the human person. We are not asserting that the human person is an absolute, although for a Christian believer the Absolute is indeed a person, and in strict terminology the spiritual does not exist except as personal. But we do assert that the human person as defined by us is an absolute in comparison with any other material or social reality and with any other human person. It can never be considered merely as part of a whole, whether of family, class, state, nation or even humanity. God himself, in the doctrines of Christianity, respects the liberty of the person, even while vivifying it from within. The whole theological mystery of free will and original sin is based on the dignity of free choice conferred on man. The Christian accepts it because he believes that man was in his very nature made according to the image of God, that he is called to perfect that image by an ever increasing participation in the supreme liberty of the children of God.


Any discussion of personalism must thus begin at the basic roots of all human existence. If our efforts were confined merely to a defence of man's public liberties or to any rights not further grounded, then our position would be weak indeed; for there would then be danger of defending only individual privileges.

Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism, and the Catholic Worker movement
Association des Amis d'Emmanuel Mounier
The Personalism of Emmanuel Mounier (pdf)
Personalism (Hardcover, from Boughton Press)

SEP: European Personalism (from the entry on Personalism)

Links:
Personalismo

Saturday, March 05, 2011

Catholic Moral Tradition by David Bohr

Wipf and Stock
Liturgical Press

The other survey on happiness I had in mind

Gross National Happiness Index
op-srjoseph: "I Shall Go Forward, Stripped and Trembling"
Yves Simon on the Daily Struggle for Freedom
by Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau, O.P.
CRC 21st ce: TO PREPARE VATICAN III
THIRD DOGMATIC CONSTITUTION OF THE COUNCIL
WHAT LITURGY FOR TOMORROW?
Zenit: JOSEPH RATZINGER'S PRIMER ON ECCLESIOLOGY (PART 1)
Interview With Ave Maria University's Father Matthew Lamb

(Part 2)

Related:
The Benedict Blog
O VOS OMNES . TOMAS LUIS DE VICTORIA . CAMERATA ABULENSE
SANCTUS BENEDICTUS - TOMAS LUIS DE VICTORIA - CAMERATA ABULENSE

Friday, March 04, 2011

Medievalists.net: Why Medieval? with Philip McDonnell

Thursday, March 03, 2011

Russell Hittinger was recently at the University of St. Thomas to give a lecture on St. Benedict. Will he repeat this lecture elsewhere?

Tuesday, March 01, 2011

If I recall correctly, MacIntyre advances the thesis that Renaissance Aristotelians brought discredit to academic moral philosophy (and to Aristotelian moral philosophy in particular) with their claim that what they taught was sufficient by itself to make a student good. With a proper understanding of human nature (and of sin) we know that this claim is wrong.

Still, it is "natural" (even if fallacious) to judge a moral philosophy to be false if its teacher lived a rather immoral life. Or, we would think the teacher to lack any credibility and his teaching suspect.