Byzantium after Byzantium

Nicolae Iorga’s “Byzantium after Byzantium” has had far-reaching implications in the study of post-Byzantine history, art, and culture. Learn more about the origins of this concept from Dr. Ovidiu Olar - https://t.co/8PK83Lce1K #medievaltwitter #mappingEE @mjcbac pic.twitter.com/0zp3Cc9LHJ

— North of Byzantium (@NorthofByzance) August 25, 2021

Tom Holland on the Influence of Christianity on Politics

In the new episode of my podcast CULTURE WARS for @spikedonline, I talk to the historian @holland_tom about the enduring influence of Christianity on Western politics.

Available on all major audio streaming services. https://t.co/h8mFq1vZ8S

— Andrew Doyle (@andrewdoyle_com) January 28, 2021

The Cambrian Explosion

"Shhh. The geological event, well, not 'event,' as in something that happened about 541 million years ago…we don’t talk that way anymore. People may get the wrong idea. Changing the names of things helps people to think correctly. Right?" https://t.co/1JpWygmN6t @discoveryCSC

— David Klinghoffer (@d_klinghoffer) December 2, 2020

The Story of Khalid Ibn Al-Walid

My latest column, coauthored with @Macalester student Zain Ijaz #heymachttps://t.co/Y5pePMAcKp

— Andrew A Latham (@aalatham) October 25, 2020

Literacy in the Kingdom of Judah

Study confirms widespread literacy in biblical-period kingdom of Judah https://t.co/xfq0HmWPKN. #History

— Kathleen O'Neal Gear (@GearBooks) September 11, 2020

Two Perspectives on Vatican II

The first is from theologian and bishop Franco Giulio Brambilla, as relayed by Sandro Magister: A Bishop and Theologian Breaks the Silence Over the “Banality” of Viganò and Company

In fact, this is the contribution of the most significant statements of this last decade, before, during, and after Pope Benedict's statement in 2005.
We could outline the theme of the legacy in three moves:
a) Vatican II as style: to resume the original way in which the council fathers (which historical studies have made known to us) posed problems with the method and resources that they put to work in order to propose a response to the challenges of their time in the interaction between subjects, textual “corpus,” and new readers;
b) the principle of pastorality: to bring out the originality of Vatican II, its creative ideas and its basic intuitions in the areas of both method and content;
c) the future of the Council: to rediscover the state of invention that characterized that epochal turning point and that today needs, at the beginning of the third millennium, a creative recovery and a new ecclesial pragmatics.

And the following is from Adam DeVille: Vatican II as “chosen trauma” and “chosen glory”.

If nothing else, the decision to be faced by Catholics today is whether we will allow ourselves to manifest the maturity necessary to stop treating Vatican II as either a trauma or a glory and instead to see it as all councils from our past: an event where some of the crooked lines of human history were used by God to write straight the salvation of the world. If He is content to leave some lines askew on the page, some tares and wheat in the fields of the Church until the end of the age (cf. Matt. 13: 24-30), why can we not grant ourselves the same freedom to stop clinging to pseudo-intellectual genealogies helpful to nobody and instead get to work healing today’s myriad crises in Church and world alike?

Even though DeVille is Ukrainian Catholic, he assumes that Vatican II was an ecumenical council, or at least a council of both Roman Catholics and of Eastern Catholics. As far as I'm concerned, even if various Eastern Catholic bishops signed the documents, that does not make Vatican II an ecumenical council, and even the claim that it was a "general" council of the churches in communion with the bishop of Rome is question, given the lack of equal weight given to Eastern perspectives. I see it in content and function as being a synod of the Latin churches in communion with the bishop of Rome, and it needs to be understood carefully: not as an ecumenical council, but as a Latin council with certain pretensions, to be historically situated in the development of the Roman papacy in the second millenium and with reference to the claims of Rome, which go back to the first millenium. It also must be understood with the proximate and not-so-proximate causes that lead up to the council, which explain why Latin bishops and theologians thought some sort of reform was necessary.

Fr. Edmund Waldstein on Laudato Si'

Catholic Herald: Freedom and Connection: A reflection on Laudato si' by Fr Edmund Waldstein

I wrote something about Laudato si'. https://t.co/rcTVUz5UzM

— Pater Edmund (@sancrucensis) May 24, 2020

My comment: not every vice needs an -ism, nor is every disorder rooted first in an error of the intellect. But intellectuals love genealogy as history, and this is true of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Related:

Pieces of Biblical History

OrthoChristian/Times of Israel: Tiny First Temple find could be first proof of aide to biblical King Josiah by Amanda Borschel-Dan

Eastern Christian Books: Holy Rus'?

Eastern Christian Books: Holy Rus'?

Discerning the Historical Causes for the Fall of a Polity

I recall having read in certain Latin apologetic works on Church History that attributed the success of the Muslim invasions of the Christian world to the moral laxity and softness of Christians and their heresy (the Nestorians and Monophysites!). This may strike one as being an expression of Latin triumphalism, given the weakness of the Latin churches today

What if it is the case that the invasions were successful because the Christian polities were simply too weak? Must we find some moral blame for this? Or what if the polities failed because they were not Christianized enough -- not with respect to the "private" lives of individuals or expressions of orthodoxy, but because the polities lacked the excellence proper to it?

While those who lived with empire may have seen it as the only way to deal with external threats, what if they were wrong? Could it be said that the Byzantine theme system was close to being an expression of republicanism? Or were they effective purely for military reasons? What if despite the expression of public orthodoxy, the imperial government was not the form desired by God?

Would God save those who refuse to do what is necessary to save themselves? Lepanto, other victories have been interpreted as God intervening (especially through the intercession of the Mother of God). Still, Christians usually had to do their part in securing victory over the Muslims. While God's primary causality is not to be denied, and miracles are possible, what if God prefers Christian polities to participate in the Divine, in their own way, but attaining the excellence proper to them? Could God miraculously have intervened in preventing the Holy Land from being conquered by the Muslims? Did He withhold this help because of the private sins of the Christians living there, or as a consequence of other failures? Or did He have other reasons for allowing this to happen?

The Unasked Question

CWR Blog: Why is this non-Catholic scholar debunking "centuries of anti-Catholic history"?
An interview with Dr. Rodney Stark, sociologist and author of "Bearing False Witness"
May 07, 2016 03:21 EST
Carl E. Olson

CWR: The Jesuit, the Monk, and the Malaise of the West by Dr. Samuel Gregg
The persistence of Joachimism over so many centuries suggests that, for all its vaunted secularism, the West remains profoundly religious in character.

Eastern Christian Books: From Rome to Byzantium

Eastern Christian Books: From Rome to Byzantium

City of Man

When the Western Roman Empire was weakening and about to fall through outside pressure, could any of the bishops, or the bishop of Rome, have known about all of the causes of the decline and warned about them, other than some general admonishments against sin? Should we expect our bishops to have that sort of knowledge and circumspection?

Squaring a Circle?

Post by The Charles De Koninck Project.

Maybe not, but even if it is possible to show how some sort of evolution is possible, can one prove that it happened?

Related:
Disputed Questions in Evolutionary Creation

Daily Mail: Carthaginians Sacrificed Own Children - Antiquity

East of Byzantium

website, blog, FB

Scientific American: Sex with Other Human Species Might Have Been Secret of Homo Sapiens’s Success

The Incredible Human Journey

The BBC series can be found on YT, for now.