The Theology of Dad

A Few Design Changes

2012-01-30T16:26:00.001-05:00

After having viewed one of the 'new' blogs of my list, in this case,

"The Flying Squirrel Press"

I thought it time to revamp a few things. As you can see, she inspired me.

The fruits of Catholic cyber community!

In case you are wondering, the script I am using now is called 'Molengo.'

Specific Blog Requests

2012-01-30T13:37:00.002-05:00

I am about to go through the entire CCCB listing of bishops in this country to dig up their blogs. Can anyone help by suggesting which Canadian successors of the apostles have blogs? I only have Archs. Prendergast and Smith so far...

On that theme, what about priests? I have a few so far, but probably not a fraction of those writing blogs.

And religious?

And young people?

70 Now

2012-01-29T00:04:00.002-05:00

We're still building a good thing here. We are up to 70 now. Again, see Friday's post for the updated, expanded list.

It is just a coincidence that it's gone up 10 a day the last two days.

Updated Canadian Blog List

2012-01-27T22:55:00.003-05:00

So I'm up to 60 now. Thanks to all who have helped with their suggestions. I will continue on. Keep 'em coming, please. I will pay you in prayers.

Just visit yesterday's post to see it. I will transfer it to one of those side listy things when I get a chance...

So, What does a Theology Prof Do, Then?

2012-01-27T12:57:00.003-05:00

A momentary break from it.

A momentary break from the compilation of the Canadian blog roll too.

I was sitting here anxiously, thinking about all the stuff I have to do. This being a day when I do not have any classes to teach.

Where the miralces happen: my contemplation of the Forms.
Leisure is not the basis of culture. Super Dad is!
Yes, that is what the mug says.

So I thought, even though I did a post on the 'Day in the Life of an OLSWA Prof...' about two years ago, I did not really talk about my office life - what I do behind closed door in 'St. Joseph Hall.' Perhaps this would be of interest to any young people contemplating scaling the mountain of the glory that is professional theologizing. And to my friends who think all I do all day is sit around reading and drinking coffee with my feet up on the desk. Perish the true thought.

Actually, in terms of productivity, other than the 'five hour' rule of reading per day I tell my students about, I do a great deal of 1) writing, 2) organization / bureaucratic stuff. (By the way, I spelled bureaucratic correctly without aid of spell-checker just now.)

Right now I am working on a great number of research projects,as perhaps I've mentioned. I have no doubt mentioned a book on Augustine's Christology I am working on. I also have several other papers in the wind. I have pushed to the fore one on the pedagogical implications of Book One of Confessions, since I simply need to get stuff published, and a paper is easier to produce than a book. That paper is coming along well, but it requires sooo much work.

How to Write an Academic Paper

This is the primary source of a professor's anxiety.

I suppose I could explain a little about how one would go about writing a paper for a scholarly journal. Deciding what to write is the biggest problem. A non-expert is in no position to make this decision. You need to know what has been written, what people are saying about a topic that interests you and for which you have a certain level of competence in order to actually dare offer your input. That decision made, you collect and assimilate what has been written. Then you formulate an opinion on all of this. You cannot just write a paper on how much you agree with everything that has been thus far said.

Churchill asks Montgomery, "How's the war going?"

Montgomery answers, "Oh, good."

You can't write that kind of paper.

I am not saying that everything written need be revisionistic. Indeed, making a presentation of the state of the research, or a paper that constitutes a very good presentation of the subject matter are papers worthy to be written. They do not have to be argumentative per se. To make a presentation is to take a stand, of course. For instance, in my book on Augustine's Christology I take a myriad of positions throughout, but the book is not 'about' any one of them. It is envisioned as a useful summary on an important topic that has never been done in English.

Another huge thing to worry about is how to draw parameters around the topic. Talking about one thing is talking about one thing only. The temptation is to solve all of the world's problems in the process. Papers need to be very narrowly focused. Books fill in otherwise. Thus, you have a right and a duty to ignore lots of adjacent topics.

I have written about 15 single-spaced pages so far, but I am constantly re-reading and finessing it. I'm not a guy who can say it just right the first time.

Of course, just as you are making good progress and feeling good about yourself (i.e. that I am not an idiot impostor) you come across another paper or book written on your topic and you begin to weep and remember that you actually are an idiot impostor. Do I have to abandon the whole thing in light of this new factor? Nope, there is always room for another view of the matter. This is not mathematics (actually, it probably holds for mathematics too), a variety of perspectives adds value. Almost always. Of course, there are objectively huge blunders you can make, like missing a seminal work. Reading a great deal is meant to render this impossible.

But the great thing about my field is that it does not rely only or even mostly on secondary literature; its object is the text of Augustine. So, your fresh eyes on his text can very likely yield valuable fruit.

Other Duties

Class prep both of classes I am currently offering and wold like to offer in the future is a constant source of work. But it is so enjoyable - at least when deadlines can be met! I love my job, my apostolate, as I consider it. If I were not married with kids I am sure that I would regularly spend 12 hour days in this office of mine. Really healthy.

One thing that I am doing right now that fits into the camp of 'future classes' is preparing a course description and rough draft of a syllabus for a class I want to create on "the thought of Joseph Ratzinger." So, I have to find texts to assign and figure out how to divide up the subject matter into 13, 2 class weeks of 80 minutes a piece. Lecture composition is a far distant task. How would you teach that class? Think about it. And that's the point: figuring out the best way to do things like this takes time. This is a task where deadlines are a factor. Any course presented at OLSWA needs the approval of the academic senate - the academic quality-assurance instrument of this college.

And then there is marking papers and tests. Then there are the myriad committees I have to do work for. This is not a waste of time. They are all necessary tasks.

Yet, nothing should come before the professor's research work. I mean that devoted to his class prep and his private research for publications. This makes him a better teacher, and that betterment is what students deserve.

So, now that I am done blogging, how much of this am I going to get done?

I have not yet mentioned my duties as the school's librarian. Friday means cataloguing books. Any readers of thetheologyofdad who live in Barry's Bay want to become a library volunteer? The payment: my friendship and gratitude! Priceless.

The Canadian Catholic Blog Roll

2012-01-27T01:18:00.001-05:00

I have been hard at work and, with the help of some helpful people, I have accumulated nearly fifty so far.

I would love your suggestions, but keep in mind my criteria:

1) Canadian - lives in Canada.

2) Catholic in a broad sense.

3) English language.

4) Regularly updated. At least 12 times a year, with the most recent post no further back than a few months ago.

5) Public blog - if I accidentally put a password one up, I will take it down!

6) Moral quality: no swears, no bad pictures, no excessive negativity, no defamation, slander, etc.

7) It's a blog, not a website, not a whatever...

Here is the list so far. These were the easier ones to get. The next step will consist in spiralling out from the ones I have, in other words, going on these blogs and checking out their contacts and blog rolls. I have done a bit of that already.

Here they are in alphebetic order. They will eventually be put in a blogger blog roll, but this is just to let you know what I have so far. Eventually I'd like to present them in terms of how popular they are, and / or in subgroupings: i.e., clergy blogs, mother blogs, prolife blogs, etc.

Let me know what you think and where to go from here, please.

I believe this is the longest list of its kind in existence...

* updated as of January 27th.

* updated as of January 28th.

http://acatholicdad.wordpress.com/

http://adventus.org/en/

http://archbishopsmith.blogspot.com/

http://archbishopterry.blogspot.com/

http://archdioceseoftoronto.blogspot.com/

http://bishopdowd.net/blog/

http://blog.hopeforpriests.com/

http://brotherjoachim.blogspot.com/

http://busycatholic.blogspot.com/

http://catholicfaitheducation.blogspot.com/

http://catholicicing.com/

http://caymanpei.blogspot.com/

http://cburrell.wordpress.com/

http://christianstate.wordpress.com/

http://concernedforlife.blogspot.com/

http://consecratedtomary.wordpress.com/

http://convert-man.blogspot.com/

http://crossroadscanada.blogspot.com/

http://deborahgyapong.blogspot.com/

http://dumboldhousewives.blogspot.com/

http://embracingnow.blogspot.com/

http://everydayforlifecanada.blogspot.com/

http://fatheranthonyho.blogspot.com/

http://fatherdesouza.ca/

http://feeds.feedburner.com/DrawnToCatholicism

http://flyingsquirrelpress.blogspot.com/

http://forlifeandfamily.blogspot.com/

http://fountainsofhome.blogspot.com/

http://frbobscorner.com/

http://freethroughtruth.blogspot.com/

http://friarducharme.blogspot.com/

http://friartuc.blogspot.com/

http://frtimmoyle.blogspot.com/

http://gman59.blogspot.com/

http://godsgeste.blogspot.com/

http://gregorynsmith.blogspot.com/

http://heresy-hunter.blogspot.com/

http://holymotherchurch.blogspot.com/

http://jesuscaritasest.blogspot.com/

http://journeyofayoungpriest.blogspot.com/

http://lettingthesmokeout.blogspot.com/

http://livingsimplysothatothersmaysimplylive.blogspot.com/

http://livingwater2009.wordpress.com/

http://militesveritatis.blogspot.com/

http://mumologic.wordpress.com/about/

http://odsblog.blogspot.com/

http://ourmotherofgoodcounsel.blogspot.com/

http://practicingmammal.blogspot.com/

http://prime1-marco.blogspot.com/

http://redeeminglittleway.blogspot.com/

http://riccioli.wordpress.com/

http://rosariumofbvm.wordpress.com/

http://saintboundsinner.blogspot.com/

http://saltandlighttv.org/blog/

http://solisisters.blogspot.com/

http://spikeisbest.blogspot.com/

http://thebany-livelaughandlove.blogspot.com/

http://thetheologyofdad.blogspot.com/

http://vivacatholic.wordpress.com/

http://voxcantor.blogspot.com/

http://whinersandwimps.blogspot.com/

http://www.bigbluewave.ca/

http://www.bookreviewsandmore.ca/

http://www.cccb.ca/site/eng/blog

http://www.ccocanada.ca/en/become-a-missionary/hrblog.aspx

http://www.davidmacd.com/blog/

http://www.frdenis.blogspot.com/

http://www.itinerantpreacher.org/

http://www.netcanada.ca/blog

http://wwwseekingjesus.blogspot.com/

My Illiberal Confession

2012-01-25T00:09:00.001-05:00

I was reading "The Gospel of Thomas" today in preparation for Thursday's Patristics class.

Why would you assign something like that? my wife asks, as you might ask as well.

In short, to help my students get a handle on the thought, the culture, the setting of Early Christianity, and to know against what the Fathers were reacting, particularly in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.

As for my liberalism, let me say this. I consider myself a student of humanity, especially of religious man. I have gained a deep admiration for all sorts of pagans and heretics over the years: love Nietzsche, as you know, admire Siddhartha Gautama, consider Plato the master of those who know, adore Plotinus, feel a deep affinity for Luther, Tertullian, Pascal, Tolstoy, love Philo the Jew, Moses Maimonides, etc., etc. But I have standards. One can appreciate a lot of things that specifically diverge from one's own worldview, but because something is different does not mean that it is admirable, I learned today.

Origen, the great 3rd Century theologian, encouraged his students to read everything, with one exception - the works of atheists. He just considered them so obviously unwise that he thought no benefit could come of it. Now, in those days, of course, atheism was extremely rare. Thus, it was basically considered a sign of stupidity or even madness. Now, my immediate reaction to Origen's statement was disagreement: truth, after all, this liberal (i.e. me) argues, can be found just about everywhere, if not, in fact, everywhere. After having given my standard sympathetic reading to the Gospel of Thomas, I still stand by my liberalism, but just by a thread. There is some truth in this ancient text. It's just that it's not much more than the scribblings of an idiot, an ancient idiot.

I am not altogether comfortable with this very illiberal conclusion of mine.

The author of the Gnostic Gospel of St. Thomas was not a religious genius. In fact, he was a buffoon, an 'enthusiast' in the worst sense, just someone who loved to hear the sound of his own voice. One can admire the moral puritanism of Marcion, for instance, but this guy was juvenile and, I believe, disturbed.

A few years ago a movie came out, Stigmata, whose premise was that the Church was doing whatever it could to bury this Gospel of Thomas, "newly" discovered. It was a sort of Da Vinci Code before Da Vinci Code, but without the hype and without the budget. But of course, anyone with an even passing knowledge of Early Christianity knows that this Gospel was not - nor were the many other false Gospels - 'buried.' It was known and simply considered inauthentic.

Here are just some of the hilarious quotes I have culled from that source so that you can decide whether the Church was right not to include it in the sacred canon of Scripture (the numbers that follow the excerpts are the standard paragraph designations):

Let him who seeks not cease seeking until he finds, and whenhe finds, he shall be troubled. And when he is troubled, he will marvel, and hewill rule over all (2)

If you become my disciples and you hear my words, thesestones shall serve you. (18)

He who has known the world has found the body, but he whohas found the body, the world is not worthy of him (80)

The body is wretched which depends on a body, and the soulis wretched which depends on these two (87)

Do not give what is holy to dogs because they will throw iton the dung heap. (93)

Heaven and earth came into being for James (12)

Show me the stone rejected by those who built. It is thecornerstone (66)

Blessed are you when they hate and persecute you, and theyfind no place wherever you have been persecuted (68)

If you beget what is in you, what you have will save you. Ifyou do not have it in you, what you do not have in you will kill you (70)

This writer had an uncanny ability to take a passage from Matthew or Luke and while attempting to make it even more profound and mysterious, mess it up badly, thus indicating his total failure to understand the original point. A great example of this would be his parable of the fisherman, which should be compared with Matthew13:

⁴⁴ “Thekingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, hehid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought thatfield.

⁴⁵ “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for finepearls. ⁴⁶ When he found one of great value, he went away and soldeverything he had and bought it.

Here, net gain, one giant pearl.

The Gospel of Thomas, offers this by way of comparison:

"The man is like a wise fisherman who threw his net into the sea. He drew it up from the sea; it was full of small fish. The fisherman found among them a large, good fish. He threw all the small fish back into the sea; with no trouble he chose the large fish."

So I am to believe it is wise in fishing that one prefer one fish to a huge net full of fish that also includes that one large fish?

Here, net loss, a whole bunch of fish.

This work ranks as the worst attempt to appear wise I have ever come across.

One last thing. Read the Gnostic writings. If nothing else they will teach you to appreciate how ingenious the authentic canonical writings are and also a great deal about the Ancient World.

Oh, Elaine, for a Princeton prof you certainly do not seem to have many scruples about manipulating the uneducated for a buck.

Alexandrian Content

2012-01-23T12:46:00.002-05:00

This is a prayer I adapted from the Ante-Nicene Fathers' translation of St. Clement of Alexandria's prayer at the end of his great work, The Teacher (which usually goes by the Latin title, Paedagogus). I was put onto it by Pope Benedict's Wednesday Address of April 25th, 2007.

(I significantly altered it; for instance, excising altogether the first several lines.)

In my quest for greater prayers, I present it here:

To the Teacher,

O King, great Giver of good gifts tomen,
Lord of the good, Father, Maker of all things,
Who alone made heaven and heaven's adornment,
by Your Divine Word;
Who brought forth the sunshine and the day;
Who appointed to the stars their courses,
And how the earth and sea should keep their places;
And when the seasons, in their circling course,
Winter and summer, spring and autumn,
should come, according to your well-ordered plan;
You, who out of a confused heap created
This ordered sphere, and from the shapeless mass
Of matter did adorn the universe—

Grant to me life, and let this life bewell-lived,
enjoying Your grace.

In all things let me act and speak as Your Holy Scriptures teach;
Let me praise forever You and Your co-eternal Word, All-wise,
From You proceeding.

Father, give me neither poverty nor wealth,
but what is good for me in this life,
and happiness at the hour of my death,
Amen.

And, remember to pray for Christians suffering in Egypt and the Middle East as a whole.

St. Mark's Cathedral (Coptic) in Alexandria.

Canadian Content

2012-01-23T00:02:00.000-05:00

American Catholics have everything to teach us, save how to live as Christians under a socialist regime. That we have to teach them. But in all other things, we look south, and rightly so.

American Catholics have all the blogging fun too. But there is no reason why we cannot do what they do: have fun, express ourselves, build cyber community. And, you know what, once we get going, I think we can do it even better than they do, because we have a special asset: we are less stuffy than they are. For as much as Americans would want to understand themselves as innovative and their manner loose and unconventional, they are stuffier than we are.

So, I think, perhaps one day we would have an even greater cyber community than they have, featuring our own brand of Jennifer Fulwilers, Fr. Philip Neri Powells, Mark Sheas and Thomas Peterses... After all, we already have the greatest popular Catholic writer today in the English language right here in Canada - Fr. Raymond de Souza. Since the death of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus there has not arisen greater.

For my part, I want to aid this development in two ways...

1) More reflection on Canadian ecclesiastical issues. For instance, I hear that my post about the Cardinal-elect has created a bit of a stir in the upper echelons of the Church in Canada. I find that very humorous, principally because it was on the whole laudatory of His Eminence-to-be. It was an honest reflection by a man who loves the Church, is sympathetic to human frailty, especially that of the clergy, by a man who was stung and yet forgiving and inquiring. I guess no one dares to talk about these things in a forum like this one, and in as balanced and as searching a manner as the one I attempt to provide here, so to merely mention the unmentioned comes to be seen as mentioning the unmentionable. (After all, the only ones who mention anything are the good folks at LifeSite, and they often do so in an unmentionable manner.) I think there is a place for polite and yet pointed discussion that is neither saccharine nor rude.

2) Build up some kind of database of specifically Canadian Catholic blogs. I do not think one exists. But if any of my readers know of one, even if it's outdated, please let me know. Of course, there is the general, USA-centred one.

So I will try to do my best on these two fronts because the Church in Canada is too much fun to let go by unblogged.

And, for my part, I promise to commit no evil of excess: that is, to praise evil in the name of canadianism or to blame the good out of some misplaced zeal and self-righteousness.

Will that be Cash, Credit or Guilt?

2012-01-21T08:25:00.001-05:00

I've noticed Catholics - particularly women - have a ritual, a guilt ritual. I won't name names, or cite examples with too much detail, to maintain the anonymity that just about everyone deserves on thetheologyofdad.

One should feel guilty when one sins. Sometimes sins are greatly premeditated, sometimes they are almost spontaneous. But choices about things that are not sins fall into the camp of prudent or imprudent actions, the camp of utility. In the case of these types of actions, it is generally irrelevant whether we like the choice or not. For instance, objectively speaking, I need new clothes. Perhaps I like buying new clothes. Irrelevant. I need them. Guilt has no place in this case. The weird kind of guilt associated with such actions is kind of like an atonement I bring for all the yuckiness I perceive in my life.

But the feeling of guilt does not offer atonement. Only Christ's blood atones for sin. You cannot make a situation less immoral by feeling guilty about it, or a situation that is not sinful to begin with somehow better. This is a particularly Catholic problem since we know that contrition is a necessary part of the Sacrament of Confession. It is necessary to make it fruitful, but from the feelings of guilt not one bit of sin is washed away in isolation from the blood of Christ. The feeling of remorse is at best a fruit of grace, as it is a desire not to do it again.

But, let's remember, here we are not talking about sin at all, but a sort of socially useful spiritual payment plan. It is not intrinsically sinful to eat dessert, to buy new clothes, *ahem*, to buy a new minivan, etc., etc. These things do not violate the Law of God; they can, however, violate one's self-conception. In this case, it is guilt itself that is the sin: it is an act that says I wish to perceive myself as a good person. It is an act that says I am better than this.

That there, my friends, is the sin of pride.

Your lifestyle is the lifestyle of a sinner. You expect more from yourself. Your hope and trust, though, should be in God, not in this idol you have made of yourself.

As Master Yoda says, Do or do not, guilt will not atone for the fact that you likes things you feel you shouldn't according to your inflated sense of self... (He didn't say all of that.)

There is a certain sagacity attached to Luther's well-known injunction to 'sin boldly.' Luther knew that this life is a vale of tears and that man is himself incapable of anything good independent of the grace of Christ. What one does, then, is always tainted by imperfection. Expecting anything more from this vessel of clay (me) implies that I consider myself a source of goodness.

Yes, you like shoes, chocolate, vacations. These things are either sinful or not. If you decide that, yes, in fact, you need new shoes, buy them, wear them. Your guilty feeling after the fact do not alter the morality of the initial choice, they will not feed the poor or clothe the naked. Buying shoes that you hate rather than that you like will not do this either, so why not buy the ones you like?

The Seminary, Part 2

2012-01-20T16:49:00.000-05:00

Again, the reason why I haven't remarked much upon this episode from my life is that I just thought it was a strange and unedifying thing. But maybe that was me taking life too seriously.

Homosexuality

The first thing people want to know is about the homosexual stuff, and, as I said, sure it was there, but I had no idea at the time! I was 20, naive and idealistic. Nor am I now given to hearsay. I am a scholar, at least that is my aspiration. Proof requires a bit more than someone once said something that I want in some way to be true because I like a good story.

I'll never forget the time I had two Legionaries visiting me at my parents' house the summer after my stint at St. Peter's Seminary - a LC priest with one of their seminarian. Keep in mind that my father was a non-believer and my mother Protestant. What I'll never forget is the seemingly thunderous voice of the seminarian when he asked whether there was any homosexual activity there. What did my parents make of that!?

My answer to him was just what I said in my previous post: apparently, but I have no idea.

If there is one thing priest-wanna-bes like it's a good story, and so I've heard a lot about what happened that year there after the fact. How much stock can you put in that sort of thing?

Seminaries in the 20th / 21st Century

Even being a young fellow and big into the 'idea of obedience', it yet struck me that the seminary was a dysfunctional place, a breeding ground for immaturity. The seminarians were frequently quite immature and yet the system seemed to be set up to keep that so. I'm not quite sure what the problem was - perhaps rules that were insulting because they existed. They seemed more like vestiges of a much older and outdated conception. Things like 'no dancing' and 'no jeans.' For my part, I hated dancing (still do) and didn't own a pair of jeans, so my point is not that they were cramping my style. My point is that you can't have rules like that for adults. It's insulting. This rule-bound mentality was just the thing to form a new priest into thinking he should have a bunch of rules for his parish, that he should treat his parishioners like they are a bunch of medieval serfs. If someone is not living a life in keeping with the priesthood, well, you should get them to leave. Maybe I'm being idealistic. I had no problem with the rules; I aspired to be a saint, but they do not strike me as contributing to the formation of mature, self-starters.

The problem with the seminary is, and probably has always been, that it can't make up it's mind what the monastic setting contributes to the formation of a priest who will certainly not experience his priesthood in such a setting. If it contributes something essential to holiness of life, then certainly this should be extended on into parochial life - as in the case of the Companions of the Cross, for instance. If it does not, then scrap it. A few years in an artificial environment can only serve to distort the yong man's expectations.

When I decided that God was not calling me to priestly / religious life I yet had a very strong desire to one day teach in a seminary - perhaps some day I will! I would like that very much. I like priests. I have a very warm place in my heart for them. Like I used to say to Fr. (now Archbishop) Currie, "I have a ministry to priests." Sure, it was a funny thing to say, but I feel very attached and sympathetic towards priets because I know them: I know what they have to go through. I lived with priests in the seminary for a year and then another two years in the cathedral rectory in Halifax, and, as you know, count as one of my dearest friends, nay, my father in faith, Archbishop Prendergast. I don't, however, look up to priests, as many of the faithful do. Rather, I love priests, as my brothers and as my fathers. I suppose some day I shall also look upon them as my sons.

Seminarians vs. Faculty and Staff

What I discovered only after having become a teacher myself in a traditional setting is that students can sometimes be judgmental without having the theological wherewithal to know when the teacher is actually offtrack. So they attack perfectly orthodox positions because they seem heterodox. In actuality they are nothing more than unfamiliar to the student. Been there done that. All the time!

Anyway, it has been observed that there is a real cultural divide in seminaries between the 'JPII Generation' seminarians and the 'Spirit of Vatican II' faculty. That was the case in my seminary, big time. We were then still in what I would call "the days of confusion," when people were very hard pressed to give an actually convincing account of the faith, since so much weight was being placed on the exceptions to the rules rather than the rules themselves. There wasn't a lot of papal intervention to point to in those days. John XIII and Paul VI didn't exactly write a lot of dogmatic stuff, as would JPII and B XVI in time. The theological paradigm was that of contrast between the old texts of Vatican I and Pius IX and the new texts of Vatican II. If there was such a strong contrast between these, what was stopping one from concluding that so very much more was up for debate too? This has been called the hermeneutic of discontinuity, which conflicts with what BXVI has always insisted upon - the hermeneutic of continuity.

Those were dark days, when things like Veritatis Splendor were just starting to appear. But the theological innovators were far too entrenched; they had at least a 20 year headstart. So in the seminary we had a well-educated 'proportionalist' (he is still there, as far as I know). We had at least one, but arguable two, theological buffoons, which, in looking back on now with all this additional education I have amassed since then I can confirm was the case. They didn't know theology to save their lives, and had no right to teach in a secondary educational setting. Although there were a lot more overtly heretical things said, the one I found the most hurtful was when in "Church History," the prof said that if St. Francis could not convert the Muslims he would have them killed. St. Francis was my dearest hero in those days. Alas.

The atmosphere was general tense and unhealthy because of this cultural divide. I remember asking a prof to explain his position on ectopic pregnancy (which was perfectly orthodox). He took this to be an attack. I never did get a good explanation from him. But with a little heresy all things are thrown into suspicion. Anyway, it was a terrible learning environment. Hopefully they've fixed it since then.

This seemed scattered. I'll have to tidy up my thinking with a part trois.

Optimism

2012-01-16T23:13:00.002-05:00

A beautiful passage from the Book of Revelation runs,

The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. (21:23)

That'll be awesome! I can't wait.

But in the meantime, living here in the Ottawa Valley in mid January, sunlight seems a rare commodity.

The keen observer will note that I seem to end up writing some kind of post about the weather every year about this time.

The days are getting longer, even if still colder, at least for a few more weeks.

By my calculations - and thanks to the good people at timeanddate.com - the days are getting about 2 minutes longer each day. That is about 15 minutes a week, which is an hour a month! So, today, January 16th, there was about 9 hours and 8 minutes of sunlight. One week from now, 9 hours, 22 minutes. A month from today, on February 16th, we will have 10 hours and 27 minutes. A month after that, that is to say, March 16th, we will have 11 h 58 m. The very next day, it'll flip to the other side, and there will be more sunlight than night.

But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. If you found today that you were a little pressed for time, or you were feeling a little dreary because of the oppressive darkness, tomorrow will be better: you will have 1 minute and 54 more seconds to play with. That will make all the difference in the world.

I have a friend who likes to go for walks around dusk. This added time should give her another 100 metres to play with. I hope she takes full advantage of it! Of course, that means that supper will be delayed a full 114 seconds...

Another random bit of wisdom:
Having children makes, can make, no man worse, only better. This is in the nature of things. The one made worse by his fatherhood, only seems so; the selfishness was always there, hidden, having no light to shine upon it.

Civilization of Love, and Barfing

2012-01-12T10:54:00.000-05:00

Once again am I waylaying part two of my "year in the seminary" postings. This time for a reflection on the moral value of the flu.

Tolstoy has this story, if I remember correctly it is Mayan or something, wherein the ancient truth is told that the evils in the world are meant to direct us to the good, to love, because human beings became progressively worse in their prosperity. It's as true as it sounds quixotic coming from him. I remember going to a talk by the great Jean Vanier who said as much about the great consequence for the world of that those with disabilities produce. Also, JP II's wonderful encyclical, Salvifici Dolores. Not a day goes by when I do not see infants doing the same for me: teaching me how to love.

Boy, though, the flu has a great way of forcing a reexamination of life. Does it for you? It sure does for me. Is that normal? The flu seems less to me a physical trial than an emotional one: I get depressed. Why? I guess because I cannot avail myself of my normal creature and psychological comforts. I cannot silence the voice of my own mortality; I cannot silence my existential angst. It is easy enough to read the words of the Teacher, "All their days their work is grief and pain; even at night their minds do not rest. This too is meaningless." (Eccl. 2:23) It is easy enough to read it, but at home in your recliner, or in the chapel, under the warm light, next to the cozy space heater, do you feel his words?

A reexamination fuelled by God's action, rather than that customary pattern of your own (though, of course, commendable) daily reflection, resets the mind at least temporarily, sometimes even profoundly. Recall how it was for St. Ignatius Loyola being laid-up after his injury. So, it seems, those like me will only be driven to a real reexamination when forced to it by God. For, I can resist ordinary graces; I am quite good at that.

I've said before that Catholics must maintain two things: life is tragic and that it is very good. You can see how leaning on one side to the cost of the other can have bad consequences. It is well known that Christopher West leaned too heavily on the one side; Cornelius Jansensius, perhaps too heavily on the other, or St. Jerome, or St. Augustine, or Tertullian... The tendency today, due to our pro-life efforts, is to accentuate the former. But that is likely good and necessary, since, I believe, abortion and euthanasia, and homosexualism, etc., are all terribly pessimistic doctrines, or rather, are the fruits of deep pessimism. The Catholic doctrine undergirding this doctrine is simply that this life is a gift from God, but it is not sufficient for our true happiness. I don't think I need to prove this doctrinally.

When Isaiah had epilepsy as a young child,
I took great comfort in this picture,
which combines one of my favourite things,
the Transfiguration, with the story of
the healing of the epileptic.

Some people are bothered by the books of Job and Ecclesiastes; I'd be bothered by their absence. Here are two books that are all about the reality of suffering. I often wonder, I often question the received wisdom, is life really better today than in earlier times? I can read about St. Augustine, who was neither poor nor rich, being laid up for months and months by toothaches and by, yes, hemorrhoids. If I had either, it would be unusual to be inconvenience by either for more than a week at a time. Today is better, then. But why is suicide so common, and becoming more so? One is four Canadians are being treated for depression, or some such outlandish figure. Modern invention promises more, certainly, than it can possibly deliver, and that is one thing from which we must suffer - false promises of a terrestrial utopia - from which Augustine did not. Whatever the case, were you born in 354 or 1954, life still sees an abundance of suffering. The worst kinds I have endured were in the mind, not the body. St. Thomas says that's the case for everyone: for whatever a human being suffers is in the mind - if in the body, the mind bears it too... I would say that for as much as you can try to imagine the physical torture of chemo-therapy, you will not be able to imagine the concomitant mental torture.

If we needed to go a step further. Scripture does not simply countenance the reality of suffering, it seems place it at its heart with the Paschal Mystery. The death of Christ is not something to contemplate while snacking on crumpets, or on nachos - like the person sitting behind me while I watched the Passion of the Christ in the theatre! The death of Christ, like every bit of His coming into the world and His life in it, is the coming-to-be and life of every person. His suffering is not merely solidarity, but it is to be incarnate like us now. I don't like antipassiomarionites for this very reason, but that for a distant other day, I prithee. If Our Lady did not suffer then she has no part in Christ! How can it be otherwise, than that it is in suffering that important truth is found? There are two ways to consider the miracles of healing Jesus performs, as mythological displays of power or as acts of divine compassion. If we are to think along the lines of the former, I'd prefer modern medical science, since it seems more dependable in its wider dispersion (at least in this wealthy West). But I'd never trade all the wealth and comfort imagined in atheists' dreams for the disgusting poverty of Nazareth, for there in that dank cave, wreaking of animal dung and smoke was love.

In sickness love is the only thing that matters. I beat myself up over my failure to love Anne-Marie and the kids as well as I ought, and I took comfort in hearing their voices through the walls, even in hearing the sounds of their rambunctious behaviour, and I took comfort in the thought of my friends, my many dear and good friends, people who actually care to think of you and be bothered by thge idea of your discomfort.

So if this is the truth revealed, will I live out my life in accordance with it?

I Never said I wasn't Crazy

2012-01-08T14:06:00.002-05:00

On Christmas Day, that holy day of peace and joy, I fired a shot at the U.S.S. Shea. He treats of this on his post for The National Catholic Register. It all has to do with his quote of the - apparently - old text of the Proclamation of the Nativity from the Roman Martyrology - which he failed to preface in any way whatsoever! - which states that the Incarnation occurred, "In the five thousand one hundred and ninety-ninth year of the creation of the world..."

I sort of flipped out and wrote in his commented box:

I hope that is a joke, Mr. Shea! I just added you to my blogger list; I’d hate to have to take you off so soon. Do you think the pope thinks the world is c. 7000 years old? Sorry if I missed the joke, but the problem is too many Catholics think that the Church actually teaches Biblical literalism, so I don’t think educated Catholics should joke about this…

and then when another commenter remarked about the origin of Mr. Shea's quote, I added:

Alright, I’ll eat a bit of crow here, seeing how it’s from the tradition. But if it’s meant to edify, I would certainly be more edified by “in the 13 billion, five thousand, one hundred and ninety-ninth year of the creation of the world…” or whatever. Again, too many Catholics are frightened of science for no reason… In some things we should leave the past in the past.

That brings us to his most recent post, linked above.

My only objection to this recent post of his is that he still seems not to grasp that fundamentalism is a problem in the Church. Thus, I added these comments today:

Dear Mr. Shea,

I should have known better (I am one of the commentators who had too much caffeine - how did you know! - the one who threatened to strike you off his blog roll), that you do not espouse the classic fundamentalism, since I have a copy of your ‘Making Senses of Scripture’ on my shelf (though I confess not to have read it all the way through yet, tee hee).

Sorry for being so irate but I teach theology to undergrads and am so worried about the stain of fundamentalism in our Church. I am a convert - the proud son of a research scientist - and was bowled-over by how many ‘fundamentalists’ I have met in this here Catholic Church over the years. I am definitely not a scientific positivist either, though (that would make conversion to Catholicism rather silly, wouldn’t it?). I think that Catholics generally don’t know their Faith and tend to think Christian = anti-science for some reason. I run into fundamentalist Catholics on a daily basis, and I guess teaching the Church’s position on faith and reason has become my apostolate; I am a little too zealous in this sometimes it seems.

Keep up the good work, Mr. Shea. BTW, you are still on my blog roll ;)

and,

I should also have mentioned that I am discussing the bad consequences of this kind of fundamentalism on my blog today: thetheologyofdad.blogspot.com

A little self-promotion there added on.

I am not sure if I can follow all the twists and turns of Shea's response - like, who does he mean to include by his phrase "What do all these complaints have in common?" When he writes,

What do all these complaints have in common? The conviction that the Proclamation is a) science (the only disagreement being whether it is good or bad science); b) people are morally bound to have some definite view of the age of the universe on pain of such punishments as being declared Out of Step with Science or else on pain of Being a Heretic (note how similar those two punishments are) and c) everybody knows science and the faith “contradict” each other.

I don't think he means to include me in that (or, maybe he does in #2?), because he treats of me shortly thereafter, when he writes,

What’s ironic about the people who were ready to strike me from their blogroll for the sin of possibly taking seriously the dating of the creation at 7000 years (I don’t, by the way) is that the guy who wrote the ancient version of the Proclamation was doing science as best he could.

I can only respond that it is great that the original drafter of the Proclamation was doing science as best he could, but in repeating it on Christmas Day, 2011, Mark Shea was not doing science as best he could! In fact, he was doing it as poorly as he could! (Or, as he says, just being lazy.)

My point is, just because you are being lazy, not being serious, not meaning any harm, whatever, doesn't mean you can yell out "The building is on fire!" in a packed theatre. Shea has a wide readership, and he should treat that seriously - at all times - at least to the extent of not allowing confused fundamentalists to find in him a bulwark for their fundamentalism!

Further, his dichotmomization of these 'two fundamentalism' constitutes a logical fallacy. There are Catholic fundamentalists, as I have said, but there are no Catholic positivists, as he seems to be suggesting. (A positivist is someone who thinks that the only true things are empirically demonstrable.)

My hero, St. Augustine, thought a lot of strange things to be the case about the world. He would not be my hero were he to be a bishop teaching these things today, or were he today tacitly allowing others to profess such things.

Yes, Shea is correct when he says that a Catholic "is not morally bound to have some definite view of the age of the universe." But Mr. Shea is morally bound not to propagate error. I employ the Socratic Method in class a great deal. I intentionally make false statements, but with the intention of stirring my students on to further insight. If I had said in the last minute of class, "Everyone knows - and Pope Benedict has said as much - that Christ did not physically rise from the dead," with no follow-up, I sin, and gravely indeed.

Who cares how old the world is? Not me. But in this day and age to represent that Catholicism is so uninterested in science that it thinks that is possible that the world is only c. 7000 years old constitutes heresy, in this case, a blatant rejection of the principles of Catholic Theology as laid out in John Paul II's Encyclical, Fides et Ratio. I would say that the fundamentalism that permits such scientific agnosticism is actually a form of Gnosticism (a terrible play on words there, I apologize!) and of Modernism, as defined by Pius IX (i.e. the error the true knowledge of the world is impossible).

Just because I am not morally obliged to have a view on the age of the world does not mean that I am not morally obliged to know what constitutes the basic scientific knowledge of the age in which I live: if memory serves me, I think St. Thomas Aquinas says as much - but where, I can't recall.
(My best guess: in his doctrine of the positive law, or his doctrine of prudence, or perhaps both.)

This kind of agnosticism throws disrepute on the Church, it scandalizes both the faithful and those God is calling to his Church. It constitutes an unfair and illegitimate obstacle to communion with the Church! Thinking people have a right to the truth of the Church - even non-Catholics have a rightful claim on us in this matter.

Okay, I am using a lot of exclamation points. I am adamant, but not angry. You know what I think would be a lot of fun? Actually meeting Mr. Shea and having a discussion about all things Catholic over a few beer. That is, after he apologizes for all his wrong-doing... ;)

Cardinal Collins and my Year in the Seminary

2012-01-07T21:38:00.003-05:00

Being such an admirer of Archbishop Prendergast I could not help being a little disappointed when the inevitable became an actuality, that is, of course, the official announcement that came from the Holy Father that His Grace, Archbishop Thomas Collins of Toronto, would be elevated to the Cardinalate. This was kind of the last stage in my intrigued attention to the rise of this priest in the Church in Canada. If you think I am setting the stage to say something insulting to His Grace, you would be way off.

I spent the 1995/6 academic year in St. Peter's Seminary in London, Ontario. Why have I never spoken about that year here at thetheologyofdad, you might ask? Mainly because I don't wish to say anything disparaging about the Church. Suffice it to say that amongst the faculty, etc., certainly Fr. Collins was by far and away the highlight for me. I'd even go so far as to say that in the midst of a general and profound disappointment in the academics there, he was the only bright spot. He is a gifted teacher. Not only that, I shall never forget that he did two things for me: agreed to help me with Latin (since none was offered at the seminary, to my great disappointment. I had no idea at the time how 'political' Latin was!) and, secondly, he voluntarily offered a course one evening a week to those interested on a subject that set me off in a direction of study that I still continue on to this day: 'Patristic Exegesis'. (I'd like to think that he would be proud when and if he ever found this out.)

But for a great many years since then I had nursed wounded feelings toward him. The reason is simply this: though he was a great man interiorly I thought he was a weak leader, a man who was personally definitely orthodox, but one who allowed himself to be pushed around by a faculty and staff who were not. Some have since wanted to challenge this view I had formed of him (Archbishop Prendergast most of all!). One thing that had been observed was that he was a priest from Guelph (Hamilton Diocese) running a seminary in London where the rest of the faculty were all Londoners. The significance of this fact took a long time to sink in. The Diocese of London was in desperate shape back then, to say the least, and I am not convinced it has significantly changed since, but it was certainly very bad then. I'll never forget reading the advertisement of the 'Mass for Gaia' that was being planned that May (1996), if I remember correctly.

I had thought that Fr. Collins and I had formed a sort of friendship, and so was crestfallen that Palm Sunday, just as the seminary year was wrapping up, when I found a handwritten note taped to my door. It was the Rector asking to see me that afternoon. When I went to his office he informed me that the faculty had decided that due to my relatively young age (21, definitely the youngest in the theology program and that time) I should take a year off. If this had come out of the blue I would have considered it on its own merits, or at least thought that the extremely liberal faculty members had scored a small victory. Yet a few unusual events had preceded this final one.

About a week or so earlier, at the weekly 'Rector's Talk,' Fr. Collins spoke about 'particular' or 'exclusive' friendships. I thought it was an interesting topic, but didn't think too much about it, until in a brief exchange with him later that evening, he brought it up and seemed to want to apply to me! I was mystified. I had said that Fr. Collins was the highlight of the year for me in terms of the academic life of the seminary, but the actual highlight bar none of my year there was the time I had spent with my fellow seminarians, how many wonderful friends I had made that year. Our 'group' (roughly ten men with whom you shared a wing of the building) in the seminary had a particularly fun dynamic; I found it very positive and life-giving. Yet the rector was not in this case referring to my friends in my 'group'. He was referring to someone I had befriended from another group. The irony of the whole thing - and this was something that I had not found out until about the fifth year of my marriage - this man, who was the emcee at my wedding, 'came out of the closet.' But he was not asked to take a year out of the seminary, the guy who now has five children and who has been married for 12.5 years was. In fact, this fellow was never impeded in any way. He eventually left on his own accord just before diaconal ordination!

The thing was, it seems, another friend of mine, who I subsequently found out had disordered, jealous feelings toward me (yes, I am a man-magnet, in case you didn't know) had gone to the Rector and had told him that he thought this other guy and I had an "unhealthy friendship." I think it was this confused young man's tattle-tailing to the Rector that set all of these events in motion. So, in other words, Fr. Collins had been manipulated by a seminarian he had trusted. What would you have done in that situation? Understandably this decision of the Rector hurt me greatly. How do you prove you are not gay? I had not even been sure that I even wanted to come back to the seminary for another year until a few days before that. (I was still contemplating joining an order.)

If you had asked me the summer of '96 what I thought about Fr. Collins I would have said that I liked him very much but that he was a weak man. I would have been horrified to have found out that one day he would be a Prince of the Church! In fact, even his first appointment, this as coadjutor bishop of St. Paul, Alberta, was a bit of a surprise to me - but that was as second hat in an unimportant diocese, so it was not such a big deal. How much harm could he do there, I thought. Of course, his meteoric rise in the decade after that has forced me to reevaluate my '96 impression of him, and again, so have Archbishop Prendergast's words. Archbishop Collins has had an impressive record since then, especially in Toronto. I have been continually impressed by what I have seen (not that I see all that much from Barry's Bay). He is no Prendergast, but perhaps the next best thing?

Since then our paths have only crossed twice, in any significant sense: I am obliged to him for having written a letter of recommendation for me in my application to the MA Program at St. Michael's College (the least he could do, my wounded heart reasoned!) Secondly, it is his name signed on my PhD. certificate as he was and remains Chancellor of the University of St. Michael's College.

The outcome of my year in the seminary left a bad taste in my mouth, and Fr. Collins was a part of that, of both the good and the bad.

May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with him both now and always, and may his elevation to the Cardinalate be a great grace for both Toronto and for Canada as a whole!

Now that I am on this seminary topic, so much more needs to be said. This perhaps should be considered but chapter one.

Please Weigh In: What is Theology?

2012-01-04T11:42:00.001-05:00

There are more than a few theologians who read this blog. I was just sitting here adding their number in my head. The following is an excerpt from something I have written, an essay entitled "What is Theology?" which is an assigned reading in my Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas course. I would love to hear from these theologians who read thetheologyofdad in the shadows of the internet... In fact, everyone should always feel free to comment here!

This is the final two-fifths of the essay. Yes, two-fifths. I have been doing a lot of carpentry over the Christmas break.

Why would I assign such an essay in a class on St. Thomas? Because I have found that students generally do not know what theology is. Many confuse it with catechism, some with apologetics, etc.

Please, enjoy...

The Sourcesof Theology Beyond the Bible

Theology, as we havesaid, has an historical profile, because divine revelation was given in time, a long time ago, and because naturaltheology attends almost indiscriminately to all times and places – including times passed. There are, however,as we have mentioned in passing above, certain privileged moments in history,and certain privileged texts to which we pay greater heed. These can roughly begrouped into two classes: Patristic texts and the texts of the (mostly)Medieval Doctors of the Church. Both groups are difficult to pin down, and evenwithin those broader groupings further distinctions can be made. Above all standsAugustine amongst the Fathers and Aquinas amongst the Medieval Doctors. It isalmost silly to compare their respective authorities, even though this is done allthe time. The silliness of the comparison lies in the fact that Aquinas was athorough-going Augustinian; Thomism cannot exist as more than disjointed thesesindependent of what it owes to Augustine.

These are the twogiants of Catholic theology; there is no other to compare with them. Yetneither are their teachings identical; neither are their teachings interiorlyseamless. The early Augustine is as different from the mature Augustine asAquinas is to the mature Augustine; Aquinas himself advanced greatly from workto work, but not, of course, in as great a degree as his African father. It isthe mature Augustine who teaches the Church, not the younger man who was stilldiscovering the doctrine of original sin, grace, the sacraments as opera operato, that the soul was notpre-existent, and that Christ was not adopted into Son-ship. All of thesediscoveries and more he handed on to the Church, to thinkers like Aquinas whodid not have to strain after them. Almost immediately did the Church recognizein the sheer force of Augustine’s teaching charism the authority that God bestowedupon him, although this was also periodically recognized formally by popes likeBoniface I, Siricius, and Leo I. Likewise, formal declarations leave the authorityof Thomas unquestioned, yet, of course, not his infallibility, nor theexaggeration that all theology must be Thomistic from start to finish. Justlike later popes take precedence over earlier ones, Thomas takes precedenceover Augustine, since in this latter case, in affirming Thomas the Church bothaffirms and corrects Augustine.

Yet it is never their texts that close off discussion.It is the Magisterium by formal and informal declaration that alone has carefor the Church and that, with Scripture, is the source of definitiveness indoctrine. As Bl. J. H. Newman wrote, “St. Augustine and St. Thomas are suchgreat names in the Church that he must be a bold Catholic, who, knowing whatthey are, should contradict them. But they cannot rightly be taken instead ofHer Voice.” It was once thought that a very casual glance to the Fathersprovided an unassailable wall of agreement in theology with which to oppose anyheresy. This was called the VincentianCanon, after its famous exponent, St. Vincent of Lerins. Today the sameerror is more often associated with Aquinas’ writings – that he is in allthings an infallible guide to the truth. Advances in historical study haveproven the Vincentian Canon to be aninsufficient guide for dogmatic clarity on many matters. It is much better tolook to the testimony of the Fathers as a source of probability, although in some key matters we can begin to speak ofsomething like consensus – i.e., the key doctrines of Christology, ofTrinitarian theology, and of biblical theology. Recent teachings of the popeshave preferred to speak of Thomas as an important and essential component fortheological formation, but not as providing the sole source of truth and theonly legitimate theological method. In many places Thomas offers definitenessand finality, in others probability and wisdom, and in some places error. To canonizeis not to deify, and that is a lesson students would gain from the writings ofboth St. Augustine and St. Thomas if they care to study them attentively; botheschewed any idea of their own infallibility.

StraightLines in Learning?

Thetemptation to follow the most efficient path to truth can lead to a whole hostof theological problems. To want to travel quickly, without turning to right orleft, to the font of truth is not an unwholesome desire, but it isun-theological, unfortunately. Theology, we have said, is about mysteries, andalthough it is foolish to reinvent the wheel, it is foolish as well to believethat the Mysteries of the Faith are ever fully revealed. One thing that all theDoctors have always taught is that learning is a life-long endeavour. It is aprocess of volitional and intellectual assimilation to the One-Who-Is. Aftertwo thousand years, the broad outlines of the Articles of the Faith have beenfilled in, but they can still be plunged indefinitely. It is our human need toso plunge into them. Theological formation moves from learning what has beenfilled in with certainty (called catechism) to the study of the realm of theprobable. Advanced theology is about probabilities. When a theologian fallsback to questioning what has already been received, he errs, and ceases to actfor the Church. But this is an aberration. The rule is that theologians dwellin the realm of probabilities. They study the dogma and the tradition,assessing which way the evidence leads. This is a worthwhile enterprise, onethat does not only become justified at the moment of ecclesiasticalintervention. His work might never actually become the subject of a decision bythe Magisterium. Nevertheless, it is spiritually and intellectually profitableas an exercise, both on the level of the individual researcher and on the levelof the Body of Christ, of which he is a member. His research must be careful,never hurried. It may be as removed from the pastoral realm as necessary. Thereis no superfluous question. Here we can make a distinction between thetheologian as researcher, as teacher, and as human being. Each informs theother, but they are not identical. The idea that everything the researcherreads and considers must directly inform his teaching and his everyday life isone that can lead to significant errors. Howcan he know what is useful before he has completed his research?Commonsense and the sensus fideliumare invaluable to the theological method but they are not infallible measuresof anything. How many heretics have claimed these as their own? All of them.Indeed, the single greatest obstacle to theological truth is the arrogation ofthe sensus fidelium to oneself.

The Missionof the Theologian in the Church Today

It is not possible tooverestimate the value of truth, especially of divine truth. But theology isnot about position and power. In essence, what the theologian does is testifyto the truth of God to man. It has sometimes been thought that the theologian hasan office in the Church in virtue of his expertise, but that is clearly not thecase. In the Early Church the theologian was often considered to be gifted witha charism which it only made sense to honour, practically speaking. But thetheologian’s function need not be considered an official one. His function isto proclaim the truth which is giving to him, where he is, whether as a laymanor as one deputed by the bishop to teach in an official capacity.

When we conceive of hisoffice as one that is lived only in relation to the truth essentially, not toanything else essentially, this brings into clearer focus the fact that histask is not limited to the narrow functions of clarification or condemnation,as many would have it. We must continually point to truth itself as the focusof his interest. Practical concerns should not contain him – politics andhumanitarianism, that is. Some err in thinking that theology is simplycatechism; some err in thinking that it is nothing other than apologetics; somefail to treasure the past, or theory for itself; some reduce theology to aprofessorship. Yet, while it is true that the divine truth has light to castupon all of these things, it is not any one of them in essence.

If the office of thetheologian is no office at all, it cannot be limited to the needs ofcatechetical instruction or evangelization. The theologian need not justify hispreoccupation with speculation – he is fulfilling the essentially humanvocation, which is to think about God.As we have said, all truth is not simple and ready at hand. And the bestapologists and catechists are born in contemplation. Great errors in theologyare the result of truths that have only been superficially understood. Marx’scomplaints of the impracticality of theory (in this case of ‘the Germanphilosophy’) resonates with so many today, and many Catholics haveunconsciously adopted his thinking and imposed it upon Christian doctrine. Christiandoctrine and worship are not justified only insofar as they function as leavenin the world. Christian truth is not ordered to the beauty and goodness of theworld; this beauty and goodness are simply the fruit of the higher good that isman in relationship with God.

And so it is easy tosee why it is true that, in addition to knowing God himself and telling otherpeople about God, one valuable service the theologian can perform todayconsists in challenging the narrow utilitarian conception of knowledge that isthe predominant vice infecting educational theory today. A simple illustrationsuffices to prove why the good of knowledge cannot be reduced to the materialbenefits it can produce. This consists simply in the idea of benefit itself. If knowledge is onlyworthwhile when it offers material benefits, what is the character of thethought that discovered in what true benefit consists? It is surely not soreductive. In fact, there is no other matter more theoretical. Utilitarianismis unequipped to offer an answer. So the utilitarian simply operates from hisown unchallenged, impure, naive sense of the good, which, he hopes – we allhope – actually corresponds to our true good. Theory, contemplation of thegood-in-itself, of God, of the Word of God revealed, is the only place wherereasoning can flourish, there unimpeded by narrower concerns. Without Godknowledge cannot flourish, for the divine science has no terminus.

ConcludingPoints:

Whytheology?

There are many reasonsto study theology. They all have something to do with each other. If thequestion is why study theology ratherthan something else, that limits the number of answers we need to presenthere. We study theology rather than, or in addition to, something else, becausetheology is the most direct route to themost important truths of human life. It does not have a monopoly onimportant questions, but it is the most direct route to their answer. Ourrelationship with God is the most important thing in our lives and listening toGod is the “one thing necessary” that we have to do. This does not mean we mustdo it in an academic setting. Far from it. What we do in the academic settingis valuable in part because it is for most people the one opportunity lifeaffords them for applying their minds to the truth of God formally. Theology isa more direct route to the most important truths than philosophy is becausephilosophy, although necessary, is not able on its own to attain the answers requiredfor a happy life. Philosophy (natural reason) is necessary for theology,because it alone is able to properly dispose the human mind to the Deposit ofthe Faith. Encountering God in the depths of the soul always involves intellectin some way, even in its most mystical form. Love cannot by definition existwithout knowledge of the object loved coming into play. A fully actualizedperson – a holy person – is one whose mind and heart have been dramaticallyexpanded by the operation of grace. In other words, when it comes right down toit, there is no such thing as ‘holy ignorance’ in the literal sense of theword. There may be ignorance of some sciences in the saint, but not ignorance per se. Holiness does not thrive inignorance. Holiness thrives in knowledge that is ordered with Godfront-and-centre. In fact, holiness grows in proportion to our knowledge ofGod, that perfection of knowledge where toknow is not other than to know as tolove. This is no simple notion. We might look at it like this: the best,the truest, kind of knowledge of God is clear knowledge of His goodness, is torecognize Him as good, is, as the tradition states it, to see His essence.Whether or not one knows a great number of theological propositions (facts) ora few is almost irrelevant, especially if one’s perspective is off and if thesepropositions are mixed with errors and false impressions. The process is one ofintellectual purification (warding away these errors), but it is even moreabout moral purification, since it is the will more so than it is the intellectthat sets up obstacles to the vision of God’s essence. Knowledge of God makesgood, but God only allows enough of Himself to be seen in this life to maketruth and goodness possible, not to make them inevitable. He can overwhelm thewill with Himself; He simply chooses hardly ever to do so.

With such a view inmind of the relation of knowledge and will, how do the actual theology courseswe take here at OLSWA fit in? Thematter being studied is important, but not to the extent that we can say onecourse is better than another with absolute precision. Perhaps better is the waythe material is approached: all theological topics require reverence. Reverenceis the real beginning and life-blood of theology, or, in Thomas’ terminology,the ‘specific difference’ of theology – what distinguishes it from the otherdisciplines.

Theology isNot Piety

But theology does notend when reverence arrives. Poor theology is the outcome of poor reasoningwhich cannot be made up for – on the human side, anyway – by piety. Bad peoplecannot do good theology, but neither can lazy or unintelligent people. Toreverence must be added something more for true scholarship to arise. Love of thetruth for truth’s sake and readiness to admit error must also be present.

Faith andReason Well- and Ill-Conceived

The point of theologyis neither confutation of simplicity nor equivocation in the midst of strongcriticism. The data of reason constantly challenge naive forms of belief and requirethe traditional formulations of the Faith to justify themselves. On the onehand, naiveté must give way to greater circumspection, but, on the other, the sacredformulas must be vindicated. At first glance these tasks seem opposed. At leastit is true that they draw upon different arrangements of the virtues. Predominantin rooting out naiveté is love of wisdom, a trust in the power of truth.Predominant in protecting the formulations of the Faith is loyalty to the Bodyof Christ, caution against novelty, and trust in the dispensations of divineprovidence – trust that what is needed by men was given by God in the way andat the time it was required. But we cannot find the truth simply by guessingwhich way virtue would lead. When is the time to trust that change is good andwhen is the time to remain loyal to what has been given? When working outcomplex problems it is more often than not the case that both things will beoperative simultaneously, for the essential form of the theological question isboth conservative and progressive: whatdoes the doctrine of the Faith imply for this? The question would be asuperfluous one were it merely a matter of elucidating the received tradition.At the very least, the virtue of theological loyalty staves off iconoclasm. Atthe very least, trust in the power of reason guided by revelation and gracestaves off theological diffidence. Are not both of these aspects implicit inthe classic definition of theology as faithseeking understanding? Faith is something capable of performing an action.It is a before that is notannihilated by the after; it issomething uniquely capable of producing something more. It can be drawn uponagain and again as understanding deepens. Fear is as detrimental to growth inunderstanding of God as is love of novelty. It should also be noted that the goodintention to love and honour God (piety) is not sufficient for good theology,because the stain of original sin has consequences for both will and intellect.As Augustine said in On ChristianDoctrine (Prol. 4), God does not choose to reveal everything directly, but oftenthrough the intellect and through other people. Limiting theology to theoutcome of prayer is akin to praying not to get hit by a car while walkingacross the street with one’s eyes closed. God could have made good theology theoutcome of prayer alone, but He did not choose to.

Teachingagainst Doubt or Teaching out of Faith?

Theology can convictpeople of error. Why upset people by casting a critical light on their faith,even if their faith is guilty of being simplistic? For one reason only: Godcalls, saying only this: know me.This is something that He says to every single person, and, though one mightescape asking theological questions in the formal sense, one cannot escape thedesire to know and to have purpose. It is a desire that can lead todifficulties and anxieties. These are things, it is strange to say, that Godintends. Pain urges us to seek a cure.

A great deal ofdifference persists between the work of the Scholastics and us. Today we willfind our confreres amongst the Fathers, I think, and not the Scholastics. Welive in an age of pluralism, as did they, not in an age of ideological homogeneity.Every reasoning person will spend at least some time with doubt in the ultimatesense: does God exist? But this isnot the only kind of doubt there is. In theology another kind predominates. Howmuch of my relationship with God, my idea of God, is associated with otherthings whose truth can be doubted or reconceived? Perhaps as one begins toexamine his faith critically a great deal of his idea of God will bechallenged. But a very great good is promised in this: to divest oneself offalse notions is to begin to see Him as He really is. Undergraduate theology ismeant as a beginning of this slow process. Instructors at best can act asguides within a process that is otherwise God’s alone. It is an interiorprocess that the instructor can at best ‘occasion.’ He can buy the chips andthe dip, but not make the party fun. That is for God alone, and requires a willingnessin the person to open his mind and heart to God.

Today theology shouldbe presented in the manner that I call ‘against doubt,’ or perhaps, ‘in lightof doubt.’ At other times it has been taught from the strength of faith or ‘inlight of faith.’ This shift in approach means that the reality of doubt mustalways be considered part of the learning context and, thus, taken intoconsideration in how the material is presented. In other words, theology mustbe robustly apologetic and philosophically rigorous. This fits in perfectlywith the methodology of the university. What is this methodology?University-level education is critical. This means that it is directed towardsthe analysis of propositions, to determinetheir intellectual credibility. This does not mean that all room for faith isremoved. What it does mean is that even for the credenda – things to be believed – analysis is directed towardstheir greater understanding, to coordinate them with the other truths of theFaith and, as well, the other truths of reason. There are, then, three ways inwhich the critical method can assist the Faith:

(1) The Faith can beerroneously comprehended by the individual.

(2) He may not know howcertain aspects of the Faith relate to certain other aspects. In other words,it is correct but not as sophisticated as it could be.

(3) He may not know howthe truths of Faith relate to his experience of the world. In this sense, faithmay be correct and interiorly sophisticated but esoteric, that is, out of touchwith any other facet of life.

The ‘academic method’ aids with all three of these.

We cannot for a momentthink that theology ought to extend no further than the first two tasks. Thatis not the Catholic position on faith and reason, a doctrine that distinguishesCatholicism from nearly all other religions. As John Paul II wrote in Fides et Ratio, “Deprived of whatRevelation offers, reason has taken side-tracks which expose it to the dangerof losing sight of its final goal... faith and philosophy [must] recover theprofound unity which allows them to stand in harmony with their nature withoutcompromising their mutual autonomy.” In other words, the deposit of faith mustengage, be shaped by, and in turn shape our knowledge of the physical world.The power of the Scriptures to speak to state of the world was spelled out byHugh of St. Victor, who wrote that those who do not grasp the depth of themeaning of the Scriptures, “turn their attention to the writings of thephilosophers precisely because, not knowing the power of Truth, they do notunderstand that in Scripture there is anything beyond the bare surface of theletter.”

These tasks –especially the third – are not easy to perform. The greatest insights occurprecisely in the most problematic points of intersection between faith andreason. No benefit can follow from a chauvinistic sense that Catholic is better, that it constitutesa very easy road to truth and wisdom. Catholic is better, but it does not meanthat the particular Catholic approaching the question is better. In the actualhands of people, true premises lead to false conclusions almost as easily asfalse ones occasion true conclusions.

It is not enough toknow what the Church teaches. These do not become useful and life-givingdoctrines until they begin to cast light on the whole life of man. How Christ defines humanity, how the naturaluniverse is an expression of divine love, how history has meaning that wants to be discovered, how prayer andeducation lead to peace in the heart and in the world – these are just some ofthe intersecting points between the domain of faith and the domain of reason.These are for the man of today focal points for the construction of a Christianculture.

The biggest problemin theology lies with human defects: ill-will, pride, pettiness, narrowness ofoutlook, cliquishness. What he is called to is as great as the subject itself. Thetheologian must have the heart of a philosopher and the industry of anhistorian.

Holy Family, New Year's Day - Mary, Mother of God

2012-01-01T18:08:00.000-05:00

A two year tradition now. We spent the last day of the year of with His Grace, Archbishop Prendergast, at his residence. We had a great time with him!

Here are some pictures of that. If you care to see a few more, make sure you visit His Grace's blog.

As you will be able to determine partially from these pictures, we were present at the Bishop's mass, then lunch, an afternoon, which included a walk to the Parliament Buildings, dinner, and a nice conversation. The two last pictures were taken in the Chateau Laurier, into which we retreated for respite from the cold. It is really neat in there. Its lobby constitutes something of a destination in itself. My favourite thing there was the extensive collection of soapstone carvings they have both on display and for sale in a store there.

The next day, after breakfast with the Archbishop, we made our way to our good friends', the Murphys'. The Murphys have been our friends since about 1998: I have known them almost as long as I have known Anne-Marie. Peter - one of the most intelligent and faithful people I know - is the Assistant Director of COLF in Ottawa. Melody - one of the most patient and tolerant and funny people I know - takes care of their three wonderful children: Agnes (our god daughter), Leo and Greggory. It was so mice catching up with them and with His Grace.

Pictures Are What the Holidays Are All About

2011-12-28T10:42:00.003-05:00

I just woke up. You come up with a better title under these conditions!

I love Christmas vacation. My big plans for the day: we got about 10 cms of snow last night (Americans, read: 3 to 4 inches) so I should probably shovel that. In addition to that, wash a few dishes, try and stay awake until at least 11 pm (i.e. no napping that, in turn, will make me stay awake until 3 am), continue reading Plutarch's On the Fall of the Roman Republic (very interesting, exciting read), maybe get dressed, definitely brush teeth, maybe comb hair, play a little Plants vs. Zombies, get in my infant's face, wash a few more dishes (mostly cups), eat some sugary cereal (sorry, Elena, glucose is stronger than good advice), probably work out, and perhaps work on my reno (closing in the little porch thing we have on the side of our house (pictures to follow if and when I decide to put boots on.)

So, that is the reason why I love Christmas vacation.

I forget to add blog (and read other people's blogs and surf the net looking for something interesting to read, something not about Newt, or Kim Jong Il, or Barry Obama, or Air Jordans).

Isaiah's eleventh birthday. This is wonderful picture. Such a loving, joyful family.

A minute before:

Incidentally, the kids are not in their pjs because we like to give them cake right before bed. It was 'Pj Day' at school, which they never had when I was a kid. Darn it. Not that I owned pjs. But I certainly had enough dreams of me showing up at school in just my underwear. Sorry bout that non-festive 'aside.'

Capitalism reigns here, my friends.

Thanks, Grammy, for the new skates! Why don't you come up now and teach him how to skate... it's too hard on my back!

Not sure, but I think this is Bethany Kluke, our little friend. I finally got exactly what I wanted for Christmas!

One of the highlights of the year for me, the kids' Christmas concert. Sarah-Grace is to the left of the guy in the yellow shirt (who, I am told, thinks boogers taste sweet).

I wasn't fast enough to get a picture of Isaiah's class doing some kind of dance. I was laughing too hard. Isaiah is going down the stairs in front of the girl with the
thing on her head. Is it mistletoe? Run, Isaiah, run!

And, of course, Rebecca. She is in the back middle with the red band on her star.

Finally, Christmas punching.

"Merry Christmas" - Who Knew?!

2011-12-24T10:48:00.000-05:00

Just to interrupt the augustinizing for a wee bit.

I made my yearly solitary shopping trip to the big city yesterday (Pembroke: pop. c. 23,000), to finish up those odds and ends that I could not manage to get done earlier.

Something surprised me there: the clerks said "Merry Christmas," like, all the time. I thought we lived in a more tolerant world now where we don't tolerate religious syncretism? Or, is this a matter of the corporate world finally realizing that there are Christians out there who vote with their feet, or rather, their wallets?

On a related matter,

I had the misfortune of clicking on N'Sync's Christmas song this morning on YouTube. It's title says it all: "Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays" and, no surprise, the two aspects of the title go together as naturally as homosexualism and tolerance. Can you just picture the discussion around the table when they were planning that one?

"Umm, guys, how do we tap into the Christmas buying spirit and yet not alienate our non-Christian fans?"

Nevertheless, I love N'Sync and their indefatigable boy band ways.

If you are in the mood to listen to pop Christmas tunes, how about this one from Wham! (The exclamation point is part of the group's name). It's actually a catchy tune - unlike that from N'Sync. Make sure you watch the video, for, as N'Sync was to the over-the-top fashion of the 90s, Wham! was to the 80s.

Joyeux Noel!

First Augustinian Exam Questions

2011-12-20T23:26:00.000-05:00

1. Comment on Augustine’s educational background, and how it equipped him well or ill to be a preacher of the Scriptures.

Augustine's education - at least in its primary stage - was typical of the time. It was oriented to grammatical textual analysis, especially of the works of Virgil. It was in this way based on the Greek model of Isocrates, rather than on the 'substantive' education of Plato. This bias was to have profound repercussions in Augustine's late teenage years as he came to realize that form was far less important than substance. Yet this attention to the structure of language would ultimately provide an admirable technical dimension in his exegetical work: he was always conscious of the complexity of linguistic signification (semiotics, in today's language), thus, he was always aware that deviations in tense, mood, person, number, etc., were something that the divine author employed for spiritual purpose; he was disposed to consider Scriptural texts in their finest detail. On the other hand, Augustine seemed to be unaware that his preference for 'substance' over 'form' would ultimately deprive future generations of Christians from developing the same technical prowess by the moral disdain he cast upon it.

His higher education was generally oriented to the perfection of the subjects covered in his primary education, as he was trained formally in the discipline of rhetoric. This was the master-subject of the Roman elite, which crafted the bureaucrats who ran the empire. It was the intention that Augustine should ultimately rise to the rank of provincial governor, a truly impressive goal for a provincial like himself. He was well on his way to this attainment when the full-force of his higher education made itself felt. He had been exposed to philosophy with the assigned reader of Cicero's Hortensius, a work assigned, not for sake of passing on its substantive teaching (a praise of philosophy), but in order to exhibit its formal perfection. But true appreciation for wisdom was no more a goal of the dominant education of Augustine's time than it is in ours. In Augustine's case, the matter was definitive.

The final pieces of Augustine's education were self-directed. He read as much philosophy as he could lay his hands on, a sizable task considering his limited knowledge of Greek. It was his attention to the dominant Platonistic form it took in the semi-Christian milieu of Milan that would lay the final piece in place. It was this approach which enabled him to see the 'bigger picture' of God's message in Scripture, to finally refute the Manichaean criticism of the Scriptures, and to fire his love for the Word.

(To read more on this topic, I recommend Marrou's Education in Antiquity; O'Meara's The Young Augustine; and , of course, Books 1 to 7 of Confessions, as well as his On Christian Doctrine.)

2. What does Retractations (Revisions) reveal about the evolution of Augustine’s theological understanding?

This work in a gold mine of information on the question of Augustine's intellectual development. It was written (primarily) in order to refute the Pelagians' accusations that he himself used to teach what they now teach (that man can be saved without grace, but by force of his free choice alone). A close examination of the data would indicate that, despite Augustine's change of mind on some matters respecting grace, he had always looked to the essential operation of God in the matter of enlightenment and salvation. His ideas about grace had been, yes, inconsistent and unformed, but he had never verged on Pelagianism. The most that could be said was that he held an inconsistently semi-Pelagian view that man might initiate the process of salvation by his initial act of faith, but clearly he did not picture even this initial act as unaided by grace.

In other matters, we see how Augustine's knowledge of Scripture grew over time - he admits making mistakes simply because he had defective copies of Scripture. His view about the degree of happiness (blessedness) we might enjoy in this world changed dramatically sometimes in the 390s. In general we can see how his knowledge of the Christian world at large grew as well - he becomes more aware of the writings of other great bishops - he begins to refer to their opinions more and more. He comes to treat secular thinking less and less favorably - the philosophers and the poets. This work does not in any way support the false assertions of certain scholars that Augustine became more literalistic in his approach to Scripture, or that he became more intolerant of theological debate.

(Further reading: any good preface to Retractations - New City Press or CUA Press; better yet, my some-day-to-be-released study of Retractations, entitled, "Memory and Intellectual Integrity...")

3. Comment on the literary structure of Confessions.

Although the study and debate continues, certain patterns have been generally recognized in this work.

The first distinction lies between the first autobiographical books (1-10) and the very different books 11-13. Both are studies of God's providential care of man,:the first examines Augustine's life as case in point; books 11-13 the world as a whole.

Next, we can recognize the structure of Books 1-10. They are primarily governed by something that can be referred to as a 'chiasm,' one that develops 1 John 2:16's assertion that sin develops along the lines of the lust of the flesh, the eyes and the pride of life. That these are the sins of his own life is developed respectively in books 2, 3 and 4; their amelioration in 6, 7, and 8; with 5 as the sort of watershed.

Books 11-13 are each dedicated or devoted to a Person of the Blessed Trinity.

Associations with Virgil's Aeneid have been made, as have - more lately - associations with Gregory Nazianzus' autobiographical poems.

The paradigm of the Prodigal Son and of the expulsion from the Garden are dominant (note the function of trees and fruit in the narrative), but we can also detect the general structure of Job as well. Books 1-2 especially draw on the Tower of Babel story.

Each book has its own literally structure as well.

(Further reading: Anne-Marie Kotze, Augustine's Confessions: Communicative Purpose and Audience, O'Donnell, St. Augustine's Confessions: A Commentary)

4. Comment upon Augustine’s relation to the concept ‘nature.’

I take this question in two senses - human nature specifically, and the Aristotelian category of 'nature' in general. These are related topics, of course, since the matter of man's state in this world is a case of a nature exhibiting changeability or stability.

In general, does Augustine speak about natures? The well-known passage in Confessions where he talks about Aristotle's categories is a point about God's transcendence of any category. In principle he seems to be suggesting that things other than God can be categorized, and that sounds like 'nature'-type language. However, this is not to suggest that he does anything other than acknowledge the fact. His Genesis commentaries seem to do no more than this too. The reason for this is that he does not see the concept as especially useful, since he did not see things as things on account of their possession of specific, concrete natures, but on account of their relationship to God.

Really, he is only interested in two natures - that of God and that of man. One could go one step further and talk about his interest in the nature of Christ, but that is not nature in the Aristotelian sense, because it is a special case of two natures combined into one.

The divine nature was the preoccupation of the most intensive speculations of his youth. It is the focus of his life with the Manichaeans and the whole question of evil.

Human nature is the characteristically Augustinian preoccupation. He is the Christian psychologist par excellence. His view came about as a result of his intense bewonderment at the human condition - his experience of suffering, of unhappiness. This aporia is manifest on every page of Confessions. An illustration of how his consideration of nature is non-Aristotelian lies in his discussion of the change brought about in man by Original Sin. The dramatic shift he describes seems to push to the limits any sense of nature as philosophically informative precisely insofar as it is a stable category. It might not be a coincidence that Aquinas, who thinks along the lines of Aristotelian categories, does not describe the Fall in such radical terms. What was human nature meant to be? This is one of Augustine's most interesting topics of discussion. He describes something more than Stioc apathy in the prelapsarian Adam, as well as in the perfected human nature of Christ. He delineates the perfected emotional life of these as well.

(Further reading: nature per se: Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine; human nature specifically: any endless number of writings devoted to his doctrine of grace, such as Burn's The Development of Augustine's Doctrine of Operative Grace..., or more generally (though I haven't read it yet), Peter Burnell's The Augustinian Person)

5. Comment on Augustine’s relation to other Fathers of the Church, both those contemporary with him and those that preceded him.

Although Augustine was an extremely original thinker, he did owe a profound debt to the Church, and would have insisted that this was so. Augustine's originality was due to three factors most of all. In their order of importance: 1) The introspective tenor of his thought: like Plato he knew that the truth lay within him. 2) His African setting constituted a sort of exile from the mainstreams intellectual life in Alexandria, Constantinople, Antioch, Caesarea, Rome and Milan. 3) His relative lack of competence in Greek inhibited his absorption of Greek theological writing.

His debts could be summarized as follows, roughly in their order of importance.

Ambrose of Milan. Through whom he was exposed to the Alexandrian mode of scriptural exegesis, which constituted a pivotal moment in his intellectual conversion to Christianity. This tradition was more or less derived from its greatest practitioner, Origen. Ambrose's influence, or we might say Origen's, was also passed on through Ambrose's successor to the See of Milan, his close friend, Simplicius.

Athanasius. It was his most famous work, The Life of Anthony, that profoundly influenced Augustine, convincing him that true holiness was a fruit of the Christian (not Manichaean) Church.

Tychonius (the Donatist). His rules for the interpretation of Scripture were integrated almost wholesale into his On Christian Doctrine.

Tertullian. The founder of Latin theology was of huge theological consequence in the West, and especially in Africa. Tertullian influenced Cyprian who was the saint above all saints to African Christians.

Jerome. His long-standing but intermittant exchange of letters with him exposed Augustine to the finer points of the problems associated with biblical manuscripts and the issues of translation. Augustine derived from Jerome some general impression of the broader ecclesial setting but not as much as he had hoped.

Marius Victorinus. Perhaps very influential on Augustine, although the latter is fairly tight-lipped on this when it comes to specifics. In lieu of this we should limit his influence to providing an example of the fruits of Platonic Christianity in general and in the doctrine of the Trinity specifically.

Hilary. Doctrine of the Trinity, especially contra the Arians.

John Chrysostom. He seems to have read several (many?) of his homilies, although specific influence cannot be detected.

Cappadocians. (Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus). Doctrine of the Trinity, doctrine of the Holy Spirit especially (Basil) and doctrine of Creation (Basil). These were later influences, merely augmentations to an already formed doctrine.

Epiphanius (the heresiologist), for general characterisitcs of doctrinal history.

Eusebius? May have been exposed to his Church History.

Various African theologians, especially Orosius on the history of the Donatists.

(Further reading: not sure... perhaps Chapters 2 and 3 of my some-day-to-be-finished book on Augustine's Christology)

6. How does the ‘Church’ appear in the writings we have studied?

The Church figured very prominently in his post-Italian works (c. 390+). Previous to that, however, one would not be wrong to observe its minimal appearance. What explains that? Most likely it is due to the fact that Augustine was interpreting the ascent to wisdom along the lines of the individualistic conception of the philosophers. He makes it clear that he originally thought wisdom to be the possession of the very few only. Although there was a communal dimension in the early works, eg. the Cassiciacum Dialogues, these were conceived along the lines of the operation of God through contemplation and not through sacramental graces. Sometime early on in his Catholic life he realized that the Church was itself a great source of grace, not merely because it was the deposit of truth (the possessor of the divine Scriptrues), but because it was a itself God's favoured spiritual vehicle. Did this change come about as a consequence of his experience of daily Christian life (in Africa) or was it amore the result of an interior evolution of understanding how God works in the world? Likely both. In terms of the latter, it seems that he drew the conclusion that the graces he had received which led him to the Catholic Church were the proper possession of that Church.

Augustine's mature writings which we studied (including various works contra Pelagius, Confessions, Retractations) reveal his conviction that the Church was a tradition possessing resources by which it could detect and avoid heresy, and, moreover, lead all men to the truth of God. He came to identify all the acts of God as acts directed at the Church. He began to realize that the Church was itself a part of the revelation, a part of the point of God's revelation: membership in it was necessary for peace in the world, for truth and love to reign. Just as baptism was necessary for sanctification and salvation, so was the Church ultimately. Although the power of the sacraments might extend outside of the visible bounds of the Church, it was as such unnatural and called out for integration into the full reality of Christian life in the Church. It is interesting how a humbler view of human potential corresponded to a more 'democratic' view of wisdom as the common possession of the whole Body of Christ.

(Further reading: Grabowski, The Church: An Introduction to the Theology of Saint Augustine; Alexander, Augustine's Early Theory of the Church)

7. Augustine’s greatest work is __________________. Why?

Obviously, there is no right answer to this question. The front contenders would be Confessions, On Christian Doctrine, On the Trinity and City of God. Some would offer his Literal Commentary on Genesis, his Tractates on the Gospel of John, or his Ennarations on the Psalms. I would be apt to list Confessions, On the Trinity and Tractates on John as my favourites. If I had to pick one and argue for its preeminence, I would likely chose either Trinity or Confessions... third, Tractates on John.

Arguing for one of them - any of them - one would want to indicates the grounds for its (1) literary greatness, (2) its philosophical / theological greatness, (3) its originality and / or importance for the future and / or how it perfects an established genre.

The essential problem is that Augustine's genius was present in all of the above-listed books. They are all greater than all the works of any men before and after. They cannot compete with each other. Which is greater Michaelangelo's Pieta or his Moses? They both display the full excellence of their maker, and admit of no other comparisons.

Trinity perfected a genre, and Thomas could do little more than re-copy it.

Confessions invented a genre and 1600 years has proferred no comparisons.

Tractates on John is theological excellence.

On Christian Doctrine can only be integrated by subsequent authors; it can never be ignored.

8. Describe St. Thomas’ theological relationship with St. Augustine.

For this one I think that I will simply cut and paste sections of the two lectures with which I concluded the course, entitled, "The Augustinian Legacy I and II." I have not edited these lectures yet. They are a little obscure in the absence of the lecturer's adnotations.

Ontological Break

St. Thomas’ distaste for the ontological proof says a lot about the significance of the shift between a thoroughly Platonic metaphysic in Anselm and Thomas’ own Augustinian-Aristotelian hybrid. Thomas might have seen existence as something other than as participation per se; he credits ‘nature’ with some metaphysical relevance in and of itself. But Augustine could never have seen a nature as anything other than a type of participation, wholly reducible to the divine will’s dispensation, that is, as having no ontological stability of its own to speak of. This process by which Platonic participationism was replaced by an Aristotelian-inspired metaphysic that included a formal separation between the realms of heaven and earth has been referred to as the ‘ontological split’. The Augustinian notion that things on earth can only be given adequate account as oriented to God was replaced by a desire to account for things with a purely natural profile. What Thomas’ role was in this is debated. People like Duns Scotus and Ockham are implicated, but it would be a mistake to gloss over Thomas' contribution as well. Does not Thomas ultimately attempt to operate in two parallel spheres – one represented by Augustine and one by Aristotle – with the latter becoming the dominant one in the realm of philosophy and the former relegated to the sphere of mysticism? Augustine understood reality as fundamentally mystical; to cordon it off to a special realm of discourse called spiritual theology is to fundamentally compromise its original nature in Augsutine's hands.

St. Thomas the Augustianian?

Nevertheless, we can account almost statistically for the Augustinianism of the Summa Theologica. One would be able to roughly divide up the treatises of the Summa into those primarily indebted to Aristotle and to Augustine. The important first question on sacred doctrine is essentially Augustinian, whereas Q. 2 on the existence of God is more Aristotelian. The treatises on the Trinity and on Creation and Divine Government of the world are Augustinian, but the treatise on Man (qq. 75-102) is Aristotelian. The Tertia Pars and the Supplementum are thoroughly Augustinian. Of course, these deal primarily with the sacraments, and even though it is true and important that Aquinas is now treating of the sacraments according to the Aristotelian categories of form and matter, the substance of his thinking is Augustinian and owes basically nothing here to anyone else, least of all Aristotle. It is the Pars Secunda in which the importance of the relationship comes to a fore. This is the largest section of the Summa, which is divided into two parts. The first treats of the internal and external causes of human acts, the second the kinds of human acts, i.e., virtues and vices. The first part is framed by two essentially Augustine considerations – that on the end of man and that on grace; the remainder is for the most part dominated by Aristotle, with the exception of questions 68-70 on the gifts (68), beatitudes (69) and fruits of the Holy Ghost (70), and the discussion of the Old and New Testament Laws. In other words of the1a IIae’s 114 questions, questions, qq. 6-97 are dominated by Aristotle. Yet quantity is not quality, that is to say, importance, and, thus, there has been much debate over the true character of Thomas’ thinking. It is not so easy to parcel out between these two sources the Second Part of the Second Part. Although the treatise on the virtues is devoted to the theological virtues first and only afterwards to the cardinal, it would be crude and clumsy to say that the former was Augustinian and the later Aristotelian. Here I think the question comes down to this: do we see in the 2a 2ae a system of worldly prudence or an unworldly system ever conscious of the eschaton?

Truly, Augustine is at heart otherworldly: is Aquinas? I define ‘otherworldly’ as following an ethical system that is oriented not to a successful outcome in the world, but to salvation in the next. Aristotle’s is defined by the later. Thomas seems to want to hold on to both. Is this essentially Christian or essentially paradoxical? In 1a 2ae, 1.5 Aquinas tells us that man has only one last end and it is God. Yet this does not solve the question necessarily. We must consider how strongly Aquinas associates happiness in this world with the attainment of it in the next. Or, we must see how consistent a philosopher he is in regard to this assertion. In other words, it is hard being unworldly when you spend all your time thinking about maximizing happiness in it. Does Aquinas do this? It should be noted that the 1a 2ae is the more important of the two parts of the Second Part. The 2a 2ae is a mere working out the principles specified in the 1a 2ae. In this sense, I think we can take the Second as a mere academic exercise and not a reflection of his primary concern. He is not a worldly philosopher, he just looks like one. He believes in the benefit that this exercise can bring others.

In sum, the more important parts of the Summa are indebted to Augustine, not Aristotle.

Yet, in a way, although he wrote in the 13th Century, in accounting for Aquinas’ Augustinianism we are jumping almost to a phase outside of the attention of today’s lecture. For, Aquinas did not begin to personify Catholic theology until the Counter Reformation. Our attention would be better spent examining Peter Lombard’s writings. We can easily say that here he is even more thoroughly Augustinian than Aquinas. For instance, Lombard based his famous Sentences – the textbook of theology from the 12th to the 16th century – on the division Augustine makes in On Christian Doctrine, between things and signs, and quotes him far more than any other author.

**********

Contrary to the force of certain ideologies, mankind did not begin to think in the Renaissance. The thought of the Middle Ages, especially of those various earlier so-called Renaissances of the 9th and the 12th centuries, produced so many variations of Christian theology as to make any univocal commitment to Augustine merely a partial fact. We have seen how greatly Thomas began to differ from the thought of the ancient master. Thomas attempted to hold doctrines together that, even if they were not intrinsically opposed, were forced apart by the movement of philosophical progress. Yet right beside Thomas’ elaborate, intricate commitment to Aristotle’s moralism sat his almost slavish adhesion to Augustine grace doctrine. In the hands of a lesser man – such as the great poet but weak theologian, Petrarch, these two looks absurdly oriented. There are times when the doctrines of such great masters seem to drift out of the range of what can be comprehended by mere mortals. Thomas believed he could examine natures in themselves and yet preserve Augustine’s theocentric universe. Was this an instance of genius or of an exotericSumma Theologica is, and, indeed, perhaps just as faithfully, so is the Divine Comedy. It seemed so natural to translate Augustine’s “our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee” into Dante’s “In His will is our peace,” and to find in these equivalent expressions, not only spiritual comfort, but metaphysical direction. These lovely expressions cannot but seem to modern man just that, lovely expressions, bereft of any possibility of real or scientific meaning. But to Augustine, to Aquinas, these expressions evoked better than any other the very essence of the world itself.

But as for original sin, what was it that had made the doctrine plausible that had then from the world’s stage? To Augustine the doctrine of original sin was as straight-forward and more patently obvious than anything else he had ever taught. Nature cried out that man was defective; Plato and Plotinus had agreed; most of all, the Scriptures and a significant element of the Christian tradition agreed that it was so. It was a doctrine so obvious, so certain to Augustine. He believed it before he had canonical reason to. His commitment to the promises of philosophy was based upon a prior recognition that life lacked something seriously and fundamentally. Did the thousand years that followed him recognize that it was true only because Augustine had said so? Was the material reality of daily life in the Middle Ages so bleak as to make any argument to the contrary seem silly, and yet by the 14th Century on so markedly better, easier, and lighter, as to tip the scales of judgment firmly to the other side, endowing man universally with a hope for happiness in the here-and-now by the strength of his own intellect and will alone? Perhaps the forces behind the shift from a worldview which took the Fall to be commonsense to one that no longer did were not cultural forces at all, but ideological ones? Was this the long-term consequence of the introduction of Aristotle into the West, and with him that whole range of Ancient Roman and Greek thinkers with him who did not think as Augustine had? Truly, the thinkers of the Renaissance humanistic movement were directed by such un-Augustinian sources. Initially these Renaissance thinkers would maintain that there was no disparity between the wisdom of the Ancient philosophers and that of the Christian theologians. Yet in time these intellectuals became used to sophisticated forms of thinking that were not Augustinian in sympathy, departing quite significantly from even the Thomistic Augustinianism that they had initially accepted. But we cannot – no one can – exhaustively chart all of the vertices of Western thought; it is fairer to simply describe what has arisen in turn, from one moment to the next.

******

Can we say that today we have arrived at a new synthesis, away from the Augustinian simply to the Augustinian-Thomism that Newman referred to? By no means. This moment finds us in transition, and the sources numbered as authorities are far too numerous to be so easily summed-up. Currently the Church is very excitedly studying the knowledge of all the Fathers of the Church, and in this way places them, it seems, on an equal footing with Augustine. I am sure that this will be a short-lived parity.

(Further reading: Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine & The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy & “The Idea of Philosophy in St.Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas”; De Lubac, Augustinianism and The Mystery of the Supernatural; Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vv. 3 & 4; Harnack, History of Dogma, vv. 6 & 7)

What a Dr. Kerr Exam Might Look Like.

2011-12-17T16:58:00.002-05:00

Just for interest sake - and I can do this because I never reuse exams - here is what the final looked like for my "Augustinian Thought" course.

Overall, the class did fairly well. How do you think you would do?

Augustinian Thought (PHI/THE 270) 2011-12 Final Exam

Name: _________________________________

Answer 7 of the following questions. Write no morethan one page per question.

1. Comment onAugustine’s educational background, and how it equipped him well or ill to be apreacher of the Scriptures.

2. What does Retractations (Revisions) reveal about the evolution of Augustine’s theologicalunderstanding?

3. Comment on theliterary structure of Confessions.

4. Comment uponAugustine’s relation to the concept ‘nature.’

5. Comment onAugustine’s relation to other Fathers of the Church, both those contemporary withhim and those that preceded him.

6. How does the‘Church’ appear in the writings we have studied?

7. Augustine’sgreatest work is __________________. Why?

8. Describe St.Thomas’ theological relationship with St. Augustine.

9. What is ChristianPlatonism?

10. Comment on thepolitical and social history of the North Africa of Augustine’s time and how itinfluenced his thought.

11. Why does hecriticize the Pelagians? Include as many reasons as you can think of. Are theygood criticisms?

12. Describe hisepistemology.

13. Describe histeaching on sexuality.

Hate Speech?

2011-12-10T23:14:00.001-05:00

I have thought long and hard about this one. I grew up having been subjected to two mutually exclusive tenets of secular culture:

1) Freedom of speech is an absolute good.

2) The Holocaust could have been prevented had Nazi propoganda been prevented.

It is amazing how the second has become far more dominant in politics lately. I have little doubt that had it been other than the Christians who have felt the curbing of speech more than any other group I probably would never have come to question the politics of (2). But Providence works in these ways to teach, I guess.

Last year in my apologetics class I had the class read a couple articles on this topic, since the freedom of expression and of religion are certainly important topics today. The articles were generally from a legal perspective, a discipline of which I know nothing more than what I can glean from Law and Order. They were, apparently, learned writings, but I found in them very little to check my growing libertarian tendencies.

It seems to me that a legal system should be consistent in its application of philosophical principles. Either the legal system is set up to protect a specific value system or it is set up to repress criminals. I understand the second to be defined as that 'swinging of the fist that impacts upon my neighbour's nose,' and no further. The law should clearly state which it is about. In the West today we have a conflation of the two kinds, and this allows groups to act in contravention both of the concrete good (the first kind) and the neutral good (the second kind).

I am used to thinking of the good state as that which seeks to impose no one's concept of the good upon others, but protects people from anything but the most crucial application of force. The democratic system is good, not because people will naturally choose the good on their own, but because it is set up to impede others from imposing their idea of the good upon me. They must operate in the realm of persuasion in the open forum of discourse, not by force.

Now, of course, it is philosophically absurd to say that a system is better which impedes the good. But with people we are not talking about the good per se, we are talking about conceptions of the good. How tempting it is to move from one to the other, though. How easy to say, since Christianity is better it is a better system which favours Christianity. How easy to say, since a culture without prejudice against homosexuals is better, such a culture should be forcibly created. But the unphilosophically enlightened who sought to impose Christianity in times passed are reborn as homosexualists who seek now to impose their new philosophy. Anyone but the imbecile realizes that a certain agnosticism is required in the wiseman. This is the strongest argument for limited government, limited government involvement in education, in media, etc.

Which means that my fist must tolerate pornography, atheism, blasphemy, racial hatred, etc.; it does not, however, mean that my tongue must. I think this is the better way. I'm still thinking about it, though, because, that is what a human being ought to do.

Mor(e)-on Hugging, and Conversion

2011-11-30T21:55:00.001-05:00

A little play on words there.

Sometimes posts take a long time to create. This one will say I wrote it a week ago. It was started a week ago: I wrote the title.

Classes have finally finished for me. I'm not a fin de siecle kind of guy - I don't usually note that "the weekend's coming" or "three more sleeps 'til Christmas," etc. - but I am glad that I don't have to prepare lectures for a while.

If you are an avid reader of thetheologyofdad you'll know that I am a convert myself and yet that I don't talk about the details of my conversion much. But when I brought up the subject of being received into a Church with human beings in it I didn't want to treat of the subject too whimsically. It might be an important topic for some people.

When we say "I believe in the Holy Catholic Church" in the Creed we are saying something extremely important. The thing that distinguishes Catholics (and Orthodox) from every other kind of Christian is this belief. We believe that the Church is an eternal reality that has a certain nature and that never changes. When Protestants talk about the 'church' they generally conceive of it as a spiritual reality that exists on an ex opere operantis basis, that it is only as holy as the people in it are endowed with the Spirit. They limit their idea of church to the quality of the faith of the people in it, whereas we look to the permanent donation of the Spirit through the sacraments, the Tradition, the priesthood and the communion (with/of) the saints. On the one hand, they can say that the church is where holiness is, on the other, we can say that holiness is where the Church is.

That's a preamble.

Despite the eternity of the Church, on its visible side are included within it both people who will not be numbered among the saints of heaven and people who will be but who are now ranged between the somewhat and the extremely irritating categories. It is these that I wish to speak a little more about now.

Joining the Church should be an experience unlike any other. Should be. But it's an internal phenomenon, not as external one. No amount of bells and whistles - fine-tuning from parish pastoral committees or RCIA teams - can create a grace.

If you are thinking of joining the Catholic Church, here's what you can expect.

Generally, parishes have RCIA programs (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults), which are either run by one person (perhaps the priest) or several people, depending upon the numbers of candidates involved. The program runs from roughly September to Easter. It's a good idea for those who are 'not in any rush,' to take two years and not feel obliged to receive the sacraments (confirmation, if you already baptized and Holy Communion). I found the RCIA a rather interesting and pleasant experience. You learn about Catholic faith and practice. It's generally a good start. As a student of Early Church history I can admire the set up of the program, since it consciously models the Ancient Church's initiation process.

But acceptance into the Church through its sacraments of initiation is just the start. Sometimes the next phase can be a rather clumsy one, however. Most people who attend your parish won't know you, despite the fact that the parish went out of its way to make you known at masses. Most of those people are not really 'members' of the church community - so don't allow that to throw you off. On the other hand, most of the people are extremely kind. The key thing to do, of course, is to discover what groups your parish has - prayer groups, service groups, etc., because you need on-going formation in Christian life! These groups are where the really special people can be found.

Let me end by commenting on the sociological profile of today's Catholic parish. These are rock-solid, scientifically-determined data. (Reginald Bibby and Fr. Greeley are in awe.)

1. 90% of Sunday mass-attenders are 90% indistinguishable from your average non-mass-attending Canadian. In other words, they see the Church as providing good moral example for their children. When asked they would indicate their support for contraception, gay life (but generally not 'gay marriage'), women priests, married priests, but generally not abortion (except in cases of rape and blah, blah, blah...)

2. Of the remaining 10% -

      a. 25% are of the liberal persuasion. They are into equal rights, blah, blah, blah. They have good hearts, etc., but have no idea that Catholicism is the one thing true left-wingers despise the most. We call them hilarious Catholics, since they mean so well, but have no idea...

     b. 5% are hard-core conservative nut-jobs, angry but huge financial donors to the Church. What makes them tick? Mostly hatred of the world around them, i.e., categories (1) and (2.a) above.

              b.i. 30 % of these are simply mentally ill. Generally you can spot them by their obsession with the 'end-times,' to which topic they will manage to steer every conversation.

      c. 10% are the conservative, non-nut-jobs. You will find me here! Hooray! Extremely leery of both groups (a) and (b), but interested in reaching out to group (1). This group generally thinks that good catechism can solve all of life's problems. Ha! They know, and are willing to share, both in and out of season, what they have just read from G. K. Chesterton, Peter Kreeft or Mark Shea. They can be spotted by their use of the phrase, "hermeneutic of continuity." (See earlier post, entitled 'Cool Words for Catholic Intellectuals.')

      d. 20% are old people who are not driven by any strong political views, they are just extremely 'used' to the Church. Very fine people overall. These are the ones who will vigorously shake your hand - new convert, I am speaking to you - at all the after-mass receptions in the parish hall.

     e. 2% are "music Catholics." Although one would be tempted to split them up into groups (a) or(c), since their first allegiance is to good music and liturgy, they should be considered a class of their own. Really, they are Anglicans. You know who you are!

     f. 10% are 'youth' who do not yet fit into any of the above, properly speaking - they will in time! These are wonderful people! NET people, youth group people, music-ministry people.

     g. This group is my escape-hatch, since groups (a)-(g) only add up to 72% of 10%. I could say one of two things here. First, the above numbers are deeply flawed. Second, there are eclectic Catholics who paradoxically fit into more than one group: i.e., are conservative in somethings and liberal in others. Clearly it is the second that is the actual case.

Conclusion:

The Catholic Church is a wonderful, if imperfect place to end up. You will find it a warm and encouraging place, and if you do not - CHANGE PARISHES IMMEDIATELY! You can do that, although it is not 'offically' recommended. But given your fledgling state, it is imperative that you find an encouraging and healthy place, one that will help to guide you well in terms of Catholic morals and practice. Some parishes, alas, are not that. You are not yet in a state to do anything about that. So, spend a few years simply concentrating on becoming a saint by going to mass as frequently as you can, reading books on the Faith and the lives of the saints, and joining a service group - especially the Society of St. Vincent de Paul and a prayer group.

If you have any questions, immediately consult thetheologyofdad.blogspot.com.

The Greatest Fear of the Outsider: Religious Guys

2011-11-28T16:03:00.001-05:00

Conversion implies a 'to-what' to which there are those who already belong.

I was seventeen-years-old when I did something which had profound implications for my life from then to now: I called a church.

Now, in some sense my adhesion to the Body of Christ was a conversion from one thing to another, one system of belief to another, but that's only in some sense. It was just as much a switch from nothing to something. Whatever the case, I had had enough Protestantism in my family background to have been aware that religious people are not always average Joes. On my mother's side are ministers of various stamp - Pentecostals and Baptists, of the most fundamental bent, some of whom I have met, most of whom I have only heard tell. But it was enough.

When my phone call translated into a visit to the local parish the thought of meeting 'religious people' was on my mind. And when I met that first nun, a sixty-something-year-old, with only the most nondescript habit, the eventuality was still not eventuated. It would need to come later, I supposed - once they had me on the hook?

It wouldn't have changed my mind, meeting the silliest of religious fanatic. I had not come to make that call for 'human' reasons, such as finding a 'nice place with nice people in it'. Truth was truth, and I determined that the Catholic Church was Jesus' Church. Donatism was never my default position. Besides, I had read the Gospels - Judases were part of the playing field.

But theological conviction does not annul social awkwardness. And nothing makes for awkward like a religious fanatic.

This is a post for 'outsiders.' I'd like you to eventually arrive at my theological conviction that the Church is the Church even with Judases in our midst, but if your 'human' reasons are keeping you from looking into Catholicism any closer, I am writing this to encourage you not to let the thought of religious weirdos keep you from doing so.

What is a religious weirdo? It is not necessarily someone whose every thought is God, God, God. You can be insane and do that; you can be a saint and do that. No, rather, it is someone who believes he speaks for God. God has many kinds of spokesmen. There are those who a just plainly egomaniacal: those who cannot distinguish between their own mind and God's, much like a three-year-old cannot. Those are the worst ones; sometimes they are plainly dangerous; certainly they are always boorish. Then, there are those who have bought so fully into something like the 'Medjugorje Encyclopaedia' - or perhaps even the Summa, or Chesterton, papal encyclicals, or St. Faustina's diary, or charismatic-type prayer, etc., that they insist that you too find in them, in exactly the same way they have, all the answers to all of life's questions. These ones are often boorish, but hardly ever dangerous.

Then there are lower-level annoying religious people. These are the huggers and the perpetually 'up.'

And now, a momentary digression on Catholic hugging. It's new, it's young, it's happening, it's something I avoid like the plague. The last thing from which I could draw benefit is another women's breast pressed up against me. I mean, I am not everyman, yet the logic strikes me as sound. People have assured me that there is a proper way to hug - and breasts are not involved in it. I remain unconvinced.

Chances are, if you join the Church, you are going to get hugged.

But, it is a small price to pay for eternal salvation, all things considered.

Becoming Catholic is joining a body. The people are not incidental to it. Of course, no one person is essential to it, that is, other than Christ. So, do not become Catholic if you cannot stand people. We have enough of that type here already.

As I have said many times - I have met the best people and the worst people as a consequence of that phone call I made to St. Thomas More Church in 1991. I am a pretty straight-talking guy: serious Catholics are on average way better than others. Such is the Grace of Christ mediated through the sacraments.

Families in Advent

2011-11-27T23:16:00.001-05:00

Fathers who were not loved as boys, stand helpless before love.
A son who sees that emptiness in his father sees is too late for his father.
That son, will he ever realize the tragedies that have come before his own days?

There is no son, no father, for father or son too ashamed.

Daughters sin against the silence. Their trespasses save.
Infants lead the family; in need, they lead, in want they lead, in tears.

Mothers who were not loved as girls, are broken before love.
A daughter who sees that emptiness in her mother sees it too soon for her mother, for her daughter.
That daughter, will she ever forget the tragedies that have come before her own days?

There is no daughter, no mother, for mother or daughter not ashamed.

Sons praise the silence. Their fidelity saves.
In Bethlehem, the Infant comes to lead; in need, in sorrow, His tears will cleanse us all.

Quote of the Day

2011-11-16T12:30:00.001-05:00

"I only wish that the ability he has displayed were sound and less like that which insane persons are accostumed to exhibit."

- St. Augustine, On Nature and Grace, referring to the heresiarch, Pelagius, as quoted by one of my students in her paper.

I'm sure we can all think of someone in our lives to whom that sentiment fittingly applies. ;)

Two Posts in One, Plus a Random Thought

2011-11-09T17:12:00.000-05:00

Post One, Entitled, "Can Anyone Write Anymore?"

Every writer can inform; very few can delight.

The authors that always delight me include, but probably not exhaustively, St. Augustine, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Maximus Confessor, Bl. John Henry Newman, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Friedrich Nietzsche and Adolf Harnack.

Yes, what a peculiar, mixed bag, you are likely saying.

What brings all this up, you ask? I am reading the one person from that list that is least known to you: Adolf Harnack. He is one of Pope Benedict's archnemeses (with Bultmann), whom he mentions all the time in his writings, only to condemn. He mentions them, of course, because they are important. Harnack was the 19th Century's greatest dogmatic historian. I am reading volume 5 of his History of Dogma (vol. 3 of the original German), which is devoted to Augustine. That is what brings this whole thing up.

For as much as Harnack can dismay by the positions he adopts he says is in such a way that fills you with admiration and delight. He is so black and white, which is refreshing in the context of today's soft-peddling style. Here is the opening sentence of this volume:

The history of piety and of dogmas in the West was so thoroughly dominated by Augustine from the beginning of the fifth century to the era of the Reformation, that we must take this whole time as forming one period.

Ka-boom! Tell me how you really feel, Adolf!

He's clear and decisive. If there is one thing he lacks that modern scholars think the preeminent intellectual virtue it is nuance. But it is tedious to read a writer who is constantly qualifying everything he is saying. Readers want more than this. Sure, the great 19th Century writers often suffered from lack of precision, and the earlier writers too - like Rousseau, Gibbon, etc., but they were powerful nevertheless. It is impossible to combine scholarly precision with great writing?

Sometimes Harnack gets a little silly, and so does the earlier historian, Gibbon, but they are masterly prose-artists nevertheless. Why do we not value this today? Sure the weight of words is much lighter in a culture that finds them multiplied exponentially, but is there no value to be placed on the sonorous quality of words - why would they since no one reads aloud?

Post Two, Entitled, "The Most Important Books to Account for in Accounting for Catholicism in the Modern Era"

I am doing some thinking about my 'Modern Church History' course that I am presenting next semester. I came across a book entitled, Ten Books that Screwed Up the World, by Wiker. See it on Amazon here. Now, I don't exactly like the totally dismissive tone of the title. I like to think that some of the books on that list have contributed something - like Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, which is the subject of Wiker's Chapter 8. Nevertheless, many of them are just plainly destructive, and he is right to 'expose' them. I imagine Wiker's work would constitute a good introduction to the modern context in which we Catholics have to live.

The question is, if you had to pick a few works to represent Modernity, what would you choose? Certainly, I would say that the most influential 'makers' of the modern mind would include Marx, Freud, Kant, Nietzsche, perhaps Voltaire and Rousseau. But is this a complete list? If it is, which work of theirs would you choose to represent them? If I had to sum up Ancient Christianity, it would make sense to choose Athanasius' Life of St. Anthony, Origen's Peri Archon, Augustine's Confessions, or one of a few others. For Medieval Christianity, St. Benedict's Rule, Gregory the Great's Morals on Job, the Summa, etc.

But what about Modernity? Is there a Catholic work that can epitomize Modernity? The closest would be something by Newman, but I am not as convinced that any single Catholic work can evoke Modernity as, for instance, Athanasius' Anthony can evoke Ancient Christianity.

I know that Pope Benedict could write this, but he has not yet, at least so I say from a perspective that cannot avail to itself hindsight.

What would such a work look like? Perhaps the magnum opus of his career will prove to be - surprisingly - his Jesus of Nazareth. But it does not have the character of a universal classic so as to evoke that character of an entire epoch and inspire that epoch to a truly remarkable degree. I say this while being that work's biggest fan. I love it. Pope Benedict is a religious genius, even more so than JP II ever was. I think that the most epochal writing of B XVI's was the 'Regensberg Address.' Strange that I don't say that about so many other works of his akin to it thematically, yet even more elaborate than it.

A Random Thought

St. Augustine loved Cicero's remark that his son was the only man he wanted to surpass him in every way. Augustine in turn applied it to his own son. I can relate. The thought arose in me, is this the true sign of friendship - that one would want to extend this privilege to his friend too? One of my dear friends doubtlessly greatly exceeds me in one certain way that I value in myself, and yet I cannot help but notice that I am happy that he does.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOT MUCH?

2011-10-31T19:13:00.000-04:00

This was how I felt when I first heard about the USCCB Doctrinal Committee going after Sr. Elizabeth Johnson for her book, Quest for the Living God.

It kind of seemed like the Church coming out with a fresh condemnation of adultery.

Johnson's theological position was standard fair in graduate school when I was there. St. Mike's - I am talking to you! Who would believe such malarkey was consistent with the teaching of the Church, anyway? Lot's of people would, is the answer, of course. Because:

For the majority of Catholics one or both of the following statements is / are true:

1) They do not know the Faith.

2) They do not like the Faith.

There was nothing in the list of things the bishops singled-out for condemnation that was all that surprising. Yet, that is me. Perhaps to a non-initiate these things might prove contentious. The point is, though, that if a glorified amateur like me is non-plussed by this list, an expert like Sr. Johnson knows well and truly that her ideas are old, heterodox, and, worst still, boring.

The text of the USCCB statement on her book can be found here.

The document highlights her failure to make the proper distinctions between analogical and metaphorical language about God, states she has not sufficiently clarified the datum that man is not merely the result of evolution, that she speaks panentheistically, seems to espouse the heresy of Patripassionism, and seems to espouse Modalism (i.e. Sabellianism).

These are all old heresies. In fact, the newest ones are over a hundred years old - the one about analogy and the one about evolution.

First of all, Catholic theology is based on analogical thinking, that we can know true things about God reasoning from creation. Analogy accents the fact that truth actually lies on the divine side, so being, goodness and paternity, for example, lie on the divine side and are applied relatively to other things. Metaphor implies unknowing, in-clarity, vagueness, which moreover implies reality lies on the side of the creature and not on God's side. Sister seems to be implying that we don't really know anything about God, that revelation does not privelege us to knowledge of God.

Panentheism, the sophisticate's pantheism, means, not that everything is God, but that God is in everything. This error, like that of patripassionism (that God Himself suffers) are rightly said by the bishops to diminish the greatness of the separation between God and man. Modalism means there is no real significance to the Divine Persons of the Trinity.

So, after that quick resume, I'll draw a few conclusions:

1) these are significant errors, common to liberal Catholicism.

2) these are, as I have said, old errors.

3) based on these I am forced to conclude that, because of her relative fame, Sr. Johnson is being made an example of.

4) the question I am forced to ask is, is this time well spent? I wonder when the last time was that the bishops so interceded? Ideally, matters like this should be dealt with at the level of the diocesan censor, the granting or withholding of the imprimatur (permission for ecclesiastical printing), but these are not ideal times. There is nothing in Johnson's book - at least according to the bishops' presentation of it - that has not already been condemned elsewhere. I would direct you to the Vatican's condemnation of Fr. Roger Haight's, Jesus Symbol of God, especially. See here. So it's a matter of the pastoral appropriateness of this act. I don't know. She was mentioned a lot when I was in school (I made it a personal project to avoid any courses where she supplied the text book), so maybe she's the right target for disciplining today?

I defer to the American bishops. I am sure they would be much better able to judge the pastoral usefulness of this act than I. Yet it kind of reminds me of the whole Harry Potter thing. As a friend of mine likes to ask, "With all the filth that's out there, why are they focusing on Harry Potter?" It does seem a little like straining the gnat. (See Mt. 23:24)

Don't worry, Sister,
I think the next pope will be much less Catholic!

The point about the Harry Potter thing is that it's hugely culturally influential. Is Johnson? In churchy circles, she ranks about a 2 out of 10, but I guess the teachers have to teach something. So, even though she does not constitute a three-alarm fire, I suppose that because she is representative of certain insidious tendencies in liberal theology, her fire should be put out.

The timing seems off too. She has been doing her thing for years! This ain't the 80s any longer (I seem to say that a lot). It would have been useful for the bishops to have acted against her way back then, when the heat was on, these ideas were more openly maintained, etc. Now it looks a little like condemning slavery in the 20th century. Given the timing of this condemnation it all seems a little disingenuine, dare I even say cowardly? I mean they acted rightly and everything... Perhaps I have been away from theological politics too long and that is why I can't see what the big fuss is about? Or, maybe this was on some seminarian's "If I am ever made a bishop, I would do X, Y, and Z" checklist who has finally become bishop and can now let loose. Nothing sweeter than fine, aged wrath.

I guess the bishops can never satisfy me, can they?!

I am beginning to wonder whether what I really need is a good, rousing homily on the virtues of homosexual monogamy. It's been too long since I've heard one of those. Perhaps that will rekindle my fire.

Family Vignettes

2011-10-30T15:11:00.001-04:00

Lots of big family events recently.

The Toronto Kerrs made their yearly Thanksgiving pilgrimage to the Holy Land of Barry's Bay:

The Ego te baptizo, Lauren Mary Anne Kerr

Lauren's godparents, Paul and Mary Anne Kluke:

We were blessed to have our dear friend, Fr. Joseph Hattie, who is now living in Barry's Bay as an OLSWA chaplain, baptize Lauren.

This week Rebecca celebrated her 7th the same day I celebrated my 37th birthday:

In case you were wondering what my shirt says:

The people have spoken. I think my mother agrees.

Development and Peace Hilarity!

2011-10-27T15:07:00.000-04:00

Almost unprecedentedly in contemporary Canadian Catholicism, assembled armies have come out of hiding and begun to take pot-shots at each other. This is a refreshing change of tactic within a milieu that is ingeniously adept at circumambulation. We owe it all to LifeSiteNews, for better or ill, mostly for better. They have played a Catholic W-5 on D & P, and, to - I imagine - the chagrin of the CCCB damage-controllers, the most significant recent development is that - apparently - some of the lay staff of D & P have played right into LifeSite's hands by setting their position out so clearly.

I have several friends on the inside in all of this, but be assured, I neither asked for insider info in any of what follows, nor would these people of deep integrity have told me had I asked. What follows is all and only the brain child of thetheologyofdad.

I have to say that my old seminary rector, Archbishop Collins, is distinguishing himself as the great patriarch the papacy had obviously always hoped he would be here. In the midst of all the wrangling, from his episcopal colleagues on the one side - the Bishops of Calgary and Edmonton, especially, to the D & P staff and that weird Quebec priest, to LifeSiteNews, he simply says in so many words, 'I will do what I will do.' Who wouldn't admire that?

You have to remember that the Archdiocese of Toronto makes up in itself a large percentage of the total Canadian Catholic population. It is by far the most populous and wealthiest diocese in the country. What it decides matters. So, when that prelate says that he will continue to exercise oversight over the distribution of moneys collected in his churches, which, he has said repeatedly, will include distribution only to organizations approved of by the bishop in whose diocese these organizations reside, this amounts to a blatant contradiction of those D & P bishops who have said, "Hey, just trust us, man." In effect, the Archbishop of Toronto has said, "No, dude, I will trust my own due diligence."

Not to put words into his mouth, but does not this amount to: "I agree fully with the findings of LifeSite regarding those organizations they have identified as supporting abortion"? And, "Anyone who would act like the D & P staff who are launching an all-out attack against LifeSite are wrong to do so and working against the Church"?

The only questions that remain are:

1) Are these staff members who have come out against LifeSite stupid in their imprudence?

2) When are they going to get fired? - which they clearly deserve because,

(a) they are implying that they would continue to act as they have been despite being condemned by the great bishops (Collins, Prendergast, Currie, to name a few),

(b) stupid imprudence is a grounds for termination in any job at any time.

Yet, if my reading of the stances adopted by the CCCB's new prez and the new Overseer of D & P, Smith and Henry respectively, is correct, the answer to my question #2 is: not any time soon, because, 'Hey, you can trust us, man!'

No body trusts D & P anymore, nor would anyone trust bishops who made no changes in personnel in that organization. An organization that is trying to raise money to support a priest who is suing the organization that exposed that original organization's departure from its mandate is not trustworthy.

If I am incorrect, and significant personnel changes have been made to D & P, then I stand corrected, but still, the bishops - Henry and Smith - should come and say a great deal more than, 'Hey, man, just trust us.' If these things have not, in fact, occurred we shall have to simply echo Archbishop Collin's,

No, I don't trust you.

For the record, Bishop Henry's position is expressed here.

As for Archbishop Smith, it is unfortunate that a scion of the Archdiocese of Halifax should have pulled a Rosica* and taken a page out of the "Enemies of the Church" book, the 1990 printed version. There is a more contemporary edition out in stores now. Pick up a copy. Their Graces, Collins and Prendergast have read it. If there was such a book, it would look an awful lot like this and this. D & P is in a state of crisis. You've got to recognize that they've been exposed. Yes, conservatives are often very annoying. Those at LifeSite just happen to be 100% correct on this issue. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, Your Grace.

* "Pulling a Rosica" is a registered trademark of thetheologyofdad.blogspot.com. Any unauthorized use of this term will result in legal action.

Why Conservatives are Conservative

2011-10-22T12:03:00.001-04:00

If you have not despised me on account of my generalizations thus far, here are some more.

By conservative I do not mean it in the good sense of "not liberal," or "orthodox." I mean it in the negative sense, of "heterodox to the right." Both 'isms' are heretical, whether to right or to left, because both of them sin against the providence of God as worked through the Church. Both sin in believing the Church an overly human institution. Liberals think it is human by nature, conservatives human by accident - if that makes any sense at all. Both think the Church is capable of significant manifestations of doctrinal error.

Further, conservatives and liberals can be fanatical in so many similar ways. The closest thing to a rabid pro-lifer, is a rabid pro-choicer. Both have despised life and love so greatly as to have descended to a complete loss of actually beneficial human sensibility.

Just as there is no way to say which is better, the evil of fornication or the evil of arson (if you really thought about it), there is no way to say which is better, to sin to the left or to sin to the right.

Many of the people I know commonly equate conservative with orthodox. There is a way in which that is legitimate, if we observe that the reality is that 90% of so-called Catholics would fit into the liberal side, when we consider issues like contraception. But that's not how I want to use the word, because to do so would ignore the fact that there is a group of Catholics who sin against the Church's forward dynamic action of doctrinal development. All living entities grow, and to say the Church does not or should not is to will her death.

But for as much as they have in common, the pathology of the conservative is not that of the liberal.

So, then, why are conservative Catholics conservative?

As the liberal is obsessed with the notion of authority intruding upon the individual's conscience, the Church as enemy of the individual's heart, the conservative is obsessed with law and authority. As the liberal considers the Church to teach nothing concretely, the conservative thinks everything is taught concretely. But regardless, neither listens but wants to instruct the 'wayward' Magisterium.

Conservatives are obsessed with the Latin Mass like liberals are obsessed with sex. Why?

They are obsessed with the idea of violations of the sacred. I do not even know how they would exist in a perfect world: they would have nothing to direct their energy against. It is like the Psalms without the notion of the enemy.

They think solely in terms of black and white. As liberals are hedonists, they are pharisees. To them God is only just; to liberals only compassionate. Conservatives are hard, full of resentment. I could go on and on...

Of course, just as aptly, a personification of the conservative.:
Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor.

Why? Are they not plainly angry? Where does anger come from? In this case I think it comes from dad first. Dad has imposed an impossible or overly exacting and inhumane standard against one and all, which the child has adopted as the basis of his self-esteem. He condemns for that is the basis of his feeling good about himself; he is good if he hates evil immediately, thoroughly and comprehensively (even intelligently). As the liberal is more often the younger sibling and female, the conservative is more often the older and male. To the liberal, love is indulgence, to the conservative, it is discipline, instruction, and correction.

If it is good to hate evil - which it is - we must ask why he, why this one, hates so easily. It is not the product of pure reason, but of anger, hostility. This requires explanation.

Outside of the dad explanation (perhaps dad was a lamb?), it could be that it is the result of a shattered or challenged self-image. His principal vice is pride. Threats to this self-image are interpreted by him globally, as threats to the perfection of the world and of God. In this way it is terrible self-love. In his insecurity, he gets to define the rules of perfection, he sets the standard by which he judges all things. He carefully sets this out as not only a standard that makes sense to him, but one in which he has stacked the deck to provide himself with a certain advantage. His specific personality and skill-set are carefully reflected here so that his greatness may be perceived once the standard itself is endorsed: it is good, because he is good at it.

The liberal is self-pitying in his insecurity; the conservative wrathful in his.

As the liberal looks at the Church as a cruel father, the conservative looks upon it as his mirror.

Why Liberals are Liberal

2011-10-20T16:49:00.001-04:00

Patrick Madrid had a great post re. a so-called pro-choice Catholic the other day, and provided a link to the original article he was criticizing. This in turn led me to something called 'Young Adult Catholics Blog' hosted by something called the 'CTA.' I couldn't determine what that stood for; I guess they presume I know.* (see below post) It is not my intention to give that organization publicity, but I doubt many of my readers would care for it anyway. Have a read of it if only so you can provide yourself with some of the context of my following remarks.

Why are liberal Catholics liberal, anyway?

That site presents, obviously, a slice of young Catholic liberalism. Yes, I am sure that they are a dwindling minority, but I have a feeling that YCLs (young Catholic liberals) will always exist. Let me explain why without sounding defeatist, without sounding anything.

You can quickly figure a few things out if you scan the posting on that site, which have been written by different authors. They see the Church as an enemy of freedom, an enemy of the good. They see it, or rather, the Magisterium, as generally a source of backward thinking and repressive legislation. They especially have in mind issues related to sexuality: homosexuality and contraception especially. They even balk against the Church's teaching on abortion. If they make any attempt to understand the rationale for this merely human institution, they cannot sympathize with it, but condescending can't believe that grown men would be so stupid in their thinking when the goodness of homosexuality, etc., is so transparent!

In other words, these 'young Catholics' are motivated by an enlarged sense of sympathy, which they feel trumps any other factor. Give people what they want and call it good because that is nice. Not that it isn't nice, it's just that in matters pertaining to intrinsic moral evils, nice is a word that signifies nothing more than "I don't understand it's real moral implications, it's real implications for human happiness. I don't see how these things interfere with human happiness, therefore they can't be evil."

Their ignorance is filled in by secular truisms, which they find convincing because they are very simplistic notions: anything that I think makes me or others happy is good. They very often rely upon unsophisticated thinking. It is a kind of thinking that is materialistic and reductionistic, that is, it orients its notion of the good to the here-and-now only, understands the good in terms of the pleasant, and also in terms of what is materially beneficial. It derides any other conception of the good as superstitious or hate-based.

Is it not commendable to put people first? Sure it is. These are people of heart. If they would err (and they do in spades) they err on the side of a notion of the good that makes people feel good about themselves.

We've said what they think, now we have to say why are they this way?

They have an unusual sense of the function and character of authority. While being on the surface individualists - you do what you like, I do what I like - they are passively-aggressive, or authoritarian in an unexpected way. While ostensibly despising authority, they are very willing to employ it to mercilessly restrain those who would suggest things contrary to their paternalistic care of the feelings of others. They have an idea of mental freedom that only works in one direction: the freedom to agree that homosexuality is right, that contraception and abortion are right. One hardly needs to point out how immature this is, not to be able to extend to those who disagree with you the right of expression you are adamant in defending for those who agree with you.

The interesting thing is not that they believe that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality, contraception etc., but why they end up on this side, displaying the psychological profile they do. Why do they refuse to believe that sexuality is governed by some pretty definitive moral parameters?

What would I be like if I were to believe that sexuality is not so governed?

I don't know if I can even answer that question.

My reflex answer is: I would be less intelligent than I am. haha.

You know this is the perfect picture for this post, dont you!

But it's more likely that they feel this way about sexuality because they have been really hurt by authoritarian impositions into their personal life at quite a young age. I'm no psychologist, but it makes sense to me that they want to give a wide berth to the private exercise of sexuality because of a deep-seated need for sexual comfort. Who doesn't! But, you cannot let this need overtake rational reflection: contraception hurts people, homosexuality is unnatural, extra-marital intercourse hurts people, does not dignify people, abortion kills people. They draw the line at 'pedophilia,' of course, because that conjures up to them the sense of victimization that is at the heart of all their theorizing. The idea that homosexuality has a very close relationship with pedophilia is something they would never consider for a second, despite any amount of evidence to the contrary.

Liberals focus on the notion of victimization. Why? They feel victimized. They consider the Church a heartless father.

I don't simply accept the notion that liberals are less intelligent than conservatives. I think conservatives are often pretty dumb too. I think an IQ comparison would be embarrassing to both sides. I might, nevertheless, accept that liberals do less thinking, or that their positions are more simplistic than conservatives'.

Don't worry, conservatives are getting it next post.

* A holy saint and reader of thetheologyofdad (are they not one and the same!) has pointed out that CTA stands for Call to Action. Of course!

The Gift of Students

2011-10-17T12:58:00.001-04:00

I have a feeling that I am hard on my students - just like, I imagine, my father was before me. I was very humbled to have a student say to me the other day, that I push her harder that any other teacher does. Of course, this particular student, because of her exceptional abilities and commitment, deserves to be pushed. Teachers are blessed to have such students... But she is not your average student.

Yet, for as as often as I get frustrated with my 'average' students, I am greatly blessed to have them. It is frustrating to ask a question only to get static. It is frustrating to have a quiz and have the results turn out so poorly, on account of nothing more than their failure to do the assigned readings. It is frustrating sometimes to have to push them to think about things more than you feel you ought. Nevertheless, once you get the ball rolling, and they finally have caught on to the issue you are attempting to present, and good things begin to happen - it is then that the magic happens, the magic that makes the whole thing well worth the while. For, in the midst of the midwifery, when it seems you are doing more of the pushing and feeling more of the pain than the woman who is delivering (Plato's image), something eventually, almost always happens - the baby begins to show... what a rewarding moment it is. And, you know what, I never know what the baby is going to like like until it arrives. So often I am surprised. I always come away the richer for it.

One cannot control the outcome. I learn so much from these young people. God inevitably uses them to show you something you would have never seen on your own. I think all teachers are aware of this.

Teaching is - should be - an experience that yields invaluable fruit.

This is what Socrates realized long ago, that the very process itself is all-important. It is not that it can be manipulated into a method that will always get you where you want to go. It depends in part upon the realization that there is something greater in truth than can be pinned down. Have I, as the teacher, nailed down the process in such a way that excludes any other outcomes than the one I want? That's a big mistake. God will lead us, if we let Him, where He wants us to be.

So, thank you to my students who occasion my greatest insights.

Cool Words for Catholic Intellectuals*

2011-10-13T10:30:00.003-04:00

* Insert 'pseudo' somewhere in the above title.

There is a clique within the Church - basically all my friends are in it, as am I, I confess - a clique of conservative, Catholic intellectuals, or, intellectual-wanna-bees. This is my Church 90% of the time. We connect internationally via New Advent and the National Catholic Register; we read Ignatius Press books; our feast days include Our Lady of the Rosary (we can't get through an Oct. 7th without saying, "Lepanto"), April 2nd, Corpus Christi, and the March for Life.

This clique would distinguish itself from that lower caste that only knows phrases like 'dictatorship of reletivism' and 'culture of death.' To the higher is First Things, as to the lower is EWTN. Cretins.

When I think of 'cool Catholic intellectuals'
I think of Jacques and Raissa Maritain.
Act and potency, baby!

Some things change, some things do not. The substance remains, only the dressing changes. In the 70s people like us said stuff like 'aggiornamento.' In an earlier time we talked about 'worker priests' and 'Catholic Action.' We were lame then and we didn't know it; we remain both lame and ignorant to this day.

A few years ago this clique was all a-buzz with the omni-useful term, 'zeitgeist' (meaning spirit of the age). I know you remember it. I know you remember how you felt when you first got the chance to use it in conversation. And I know you hesitate to use it now.

Now, it is the even more annoying term 'luddite' that has grabbed a-hold of this people. This term is used (always inappropriately) by people who spend most of their time on their laptops, reading blogs and sipping coffee (horror!), yet while imagining that there is some external force - certainly not their Christian will - that is responsible for this, for they are, mark - or so they tell anyone who will listen -opposed to distracting and unnatural things like technology - especially computers and television. At heart aren't we all Franciscans living in this world quite against our will?

'Luddite' is especially vexatious. But it is not, as in the case of the now outmoded zeitgeist, as if there is no appropriate use for this word. It is just that that appropriate time will not return again until the next ice age, or sometime thereabouts.

Catholic intellectuals, for as circumspect as they'd like to consider themselves, follow fads, just like everyone else.

But he is king who starts the fad. It was JP II who had this right for 25 years, and now it is B XVI. Others can join in too, to greater or lesser extent.

I want my turn. So I shall introduce a word or a phrase that shall catch on like wild, burn hot for two years, and then decline into the shame of silence soon enough thereafter. But what shall it be? It'll have to be a treasure dug out from Catholic Antiquity that we can all hasten to throw our allegiance behind, since we remember having been introduced to the term during our undergrads... Pedigree is everything, and what pedigree is not, exclusivity makes up for. Or, perhaps something from the East would be a good contender. Yet I can't see how one would mainstream a word like 'hesychasm.'

Rome was not built in a day, and fancy, fleeting phrases for Catholic intellectuals likewise take time to ripen.

Best Prayer Ever to Jesus?

2011-10-11T14:41:00.000-04:00

There is no better theme for Thanksgiving than that of prayer. What is it if not the movement of the grateful heart to the Father of all Mercies?

At OLSWA, we start all of our classes with prayer. If I'm uninspired I do an Our Father or a Hail Mary. Distant down the line are Glories Be`s and Hail Holy Queen`s.

Of course, the greatest prayer is the Our Father - who would dispute that? It is the perfect prayer. And it's not that one needs originality in prayer, yet I find myself wanting something more sometimes, or sometimes else is probably a better way to put it. We can rhyme off the familiar too easily. Some prayers are too sappy, some are too instructional, some do not glorify.

I am a Jesus-nut. I am passionate about Jesus. Just love the guy. Can't get enough of Him. Thus, my 'best prayer', would be to Jesus. I love poetry and respect a well-turned phrase. I love profound things. One would think my 'best prayer' lies out there undiscovered by me in the corpus of St. Thomas or St. Anselm. I have read a few of each of theirs, but cannot recall having come across quite what I want. (Besides, Thomas' Eucharistic prayers commit the sin of familiarity.)

I have just come across this beautiful one by St. Anselm:

Lord Jesus Christ; Let me seek you by desiring you,
and let me desire you by seeking you;
let me find you by loving you,
and love you in finding you.

I confess, Lord, with thanksgiving,
that you have made me in your image,
so that I can remember you, think of you, and love you.

But that image is so worn and blotted out by faults,
and darkened by the smoke of sin,
that it cannot do that for which it was made,
unless you renew and refashion it.

Lord, I am not trying to make my way to your height,
for my understanding is in no way equal to that,
but I do desire to understand a little of your truth
which my heart already believes and loves.

I do not seek to understand so that I can believe,
but I believe so that I may understand;
and what is more,
I believe that unless I do believe, I shall not understand.

I have always loved the prayer from St. Alphonsus' Way of the Cross,

V. We adore Thee, O Christ, and we bless Thee.
R. Because by Thy holy Cross, Thou hast redeemed the world.

Simple, but powerful.

So, I look on and on. I have seen so many wonderful prayers. But I am not struck by prayers overly repetitive. I know many people like them, prayers like St. Patrick's, the most well known part which runs in part,

Christ shield me today
Against wounding
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me...

One of my all-time favourites is, understandably, from the New Testament. It's not a prayer so much as a hymn, from Philippians:

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

And that from Colossians:

The Son is the image of the invisible God,
the firstborn over all creation.
For in him all things were created:
things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible,
whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities;
all things have been created through him and for him.
He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
And he is the head of the body, the church;
he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead,
so that in everything he might have the supremacy.
For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him,
and through him to reconcile to himself all things,
whether things on earth or things in heaven,
by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

As prayers, these are hymns of praise, not of petition, although they could easily to converted into such.

Hopefully, someone will read this post and present me with the prayer I've been looking for. BTW, Anima Christi, is wonderful in its christocentricity, but is repetitive...

My first draft of a prayer to Christ:

O Jesus, good Son of so loving a Father,
True face of God who left the boundless realm of joy
to comfort lost men.
Wisdom of God, You are the light in my times of darkness.
Loving heart, You are with all who are without You,
Be with me now. I recognize Your goodness.
I see that You are good in Your dying and rising.
Let Your word come forth to guide me when I refuse to be guided.
Cheer my soul that I may lighten others.
Most of all, make we want to praise You:
If all else is lost, grant this one prayer,
That if I become less, or nothing,
You will be loved in everything, O Jesus. Amen.

I hope you like it; better, yet that it directs you to Him.

I want to get to know the great English poets like Keats, and Yeats, Tennyson and Byron, much better than I do. If you know of any wonderful prayers by any of these, please let me know. I have seen some online. It is a big task.

Family Tidbits

2011-09-30T10:41:00.000-04:00

A. As often happens, I fell asleep while putting my three-year-old to bed. Going to bed at 7 or 7:30 means a full night's sleep is attained by 3 or 4 am. So, I wake up sharing the cramped quarters of a single bed with a boy who seems always to be in that bed's exact geographic centre, and decide to go to my bed. Expecting to find a few people there, I am greatly delighted to see that it's empty. Now I can go to its exact geographic centre. You think I can sleep?

B. Kids say the darnedest things. Three-year-olds are the best. You say white, suddenly, undeniably, it's black, or red, or poop. Probably poop.

C. "Are you done watching your show, Stephen?"

"It's not my show. It's everybody's show."

D. Archbishop of Ottawa, shaking his hand, asks, "What's your name?"

"What's your name?"

E. Sometimes I walk into my house at the end of the day and my initial impression is we have company. Nope, they're all mine.

F. Irony. Anne-Marie and I are both desperately trying to get the other to go to Rebecca's 'friendship party' at school so we don't have to.

G. Wife comes home from a shopping excursion with a sore wrist. I need a raise.

Evolution or Homosexualism. Not Both.

2011-09-22T20:50:00.000-04:00

This seems so obvious that I can't believe it would actually be necessary for someone like me to blog about it. Evolution is a scientific theory that requires that creatures are preeminently designed to carry on their species, genes, etc. Biologists recognize that deviations from this basic pattern require special explanation if the theory is to be maintained. Thus, they explain mothers protecting their offspring from the standpoint of genetic survival: the mother is likely to have fewer additional offspring than the progeny from that point. Also, the stripes on a zebra can only be explained on the level of the herd, not on the individual. These are special cases. Ordinarily, evolution is explained on a one-to-one basis. This monkey is good at climbing trees because that keeps it safe from lions and enables it to access more bananas.

It translates into the human order, say the scientists. Here they distinguish between biological and cultural evolution. I won't go into that too much. On the human level, we can see that our huge brains have evolved to enable us to outsmart lions, tigers and various microbes. Our hands can hold weapons and tools. Our legs can help us to chase down rabbits and deer. Our genitals are specially designed to aid in copulation. Women like men's broad shoulders; men like women's supple breasts, not for purely aethetical reasons, but because broad shoulders tend to mean protection, supple breasts tend to mean adequately-nourished offspring.

Men being attracted to men makes no sense on the biological level. Psychologists never attempt to explain it that way. They treat it as the result of a psychological trauma, a malformation, because it does not make sense according to the biology of evolution.

I have heard homosexualists explain it on the side of population control, that it is sometimes advantageous to a species to limit its growth. But they offer no explanation for how this works. Actually, this is absurd, biologically speaking. It argues for a super-conscience in the species as a whole. Absurd.

Rather, humans can deviate from the strict one-to-one account of evolutionary biology because they can make decision irrespective of the survival of their genes. We do it all the time: we smoke, we eat junk food, knowing that these things are bad for us; we neuter ourselves by means of surgical intervention. This is not an adaptation; it is a choice.

Homosexuality is not an adaptation that increases our biological fitness; it is a choice that decreases it.

Either speciation is explained by evolution or it is not. Either human sexuality is explained by the basic law of propagation and survival or it is not. If homosexuality is 'natural' evolution is false, because in it we find the appearance of a trait that cannot be explained by evolutionary theory.

Obviously, it fits into the category of social adaptation,or of sociological not of biological phenomena.

________________________

That is the easier side of the argument.

But there are two sides to this disjunctive syllogism. If both cannot be true, can both be false?

Logically, if it follows that

(If A then not B) and (If B then not A) are sound

it cannot follow that (not A and not B)

because evolution suggests that all natural characteristics are the results of some (historical) fitness. Homosexualism can never be a form of fitness.

So (not A and not B) amounts to (not (everything is a result of fitness) and (there is a thing that is not the result of fitness).

So, as the first part of my argument was an attack on homosexualism (i.e. that homosexuality is natural), this second part is an attack on those who deny evolution. Since, to deny evolution is to bolster the hand of homosexualists.

I have said that it is not possible for both A and B to be true at the same time. I have also said that it is not possible for both of them to be false at the same time.

Alas, I have overstreatched things. I should have understood B in the broader sense as some (any) violation of the rule that all traits of creatures is a result of historical fitness! Homosexualism is an example of a -A.

So, to deny A is to require some B. Homosexualism, then, becomes logically possible, although not necessary, because even if H is a B, not all Bs are Hs.

So, to those who would deny evolution, be careful, you are undermining the strongest argument against the 'naturalness' of homosexuality.

Fall, Sometimes Referred to as Autumn

2011-09-17T10:41:00.001-04:00

There is no doubt in my mind that Fall is the best time of the year, at least in Canada, at least in those parts of Canada that I have inhabited. Second best is Spring, third Winter. Sorry Summer fans.

What more can you ask for - it is crisp, it is bright, it is beautiful with all its colours, it is no longer hot, there are no bugs.

On the other hand, it's the start of cold season, and I have contended with a cold this week. It is the price you pay for perfection. The first two weeks of school constitute a perfect storm for pathogens, it seems to me. All the kids of the world get together after their summer free from hand washing and teeth brushing, get packed into classrooms, gloaming their cruddiness on desks and pencils, dodge balls and door knobs, and then take it home to dad. Or, it's my students - those grimy, awful 20-year-olds.

Yet, despite that, this is the season of pie - apple, pumpkin, and berry; it is the season to leave behind hot dogs and hamburgers, which, for as intrinsically perfect as they are as foods, are getting a little old by mid August, you'd have to admit. So, turn on that oven, cook up those stews, roasts, chillies and chowders (I am blessed to have had Anne-Marie do both a chilly and a clam chowder this week - and they turned out great!)

I didn't report on the state of my garden much this summer. It was a summer of distraction and mere survival. Yet, here I am, after having planted a mere three pumpkin seeds, with part of my basement and my kitchen table covered with pumpkins. (For the record, several plants grew from last year's rotten, discarded pumpkins I threw into the garden - note for next year.) We can use half of them, but half of them have to go. It will be easy enough to get rid of them. I wish I could drive them down to Toronto and sell them on the street for $10-20 a piece.

This year the harvest included a baby!

So, living in Barry's Bay I am in Autumn heaven.

The leaves are beginning to change, it is dipping below zero at night now, and I am starting to wonder where my running shoes are.

Today, apparently, is the first day of duck season. Happy hunters are in the marshes blasting away a little bit of cherished Canadiana - the Canada Goose. I am not the least bit remorseful over that. They poop all over the beach where my kids take their swimming lessons. I saw them there at night when I went for my evening bike rides!

Get 'em, Pa!

If you have never shot a shot gun before, you ain't livin'. I always imagined that my first experience with a shot gun would involve a zombie. Not so, it turns out.

But alas, I heard the furnace come on last night, and watched little cartoony dollar bills flying out of my windows. For as good as Fall gets in Barry's Bay, nothing is perfect in the sublunary.

A Conversation that Struck a Chord

2011-09-13T22:31:00.001-04:00

Someone said to me the other day - and I am paraphrasing greatly - that they are bothered by the way Catholicism is being lived today, that is, in a way much more impoverished than they had hoped it would be. The person is a convert.

I wanted to understand precisely what the person meant. I think I got the gist.

Let's apply an analogy with Theology. The Catholic theological tradition is rich and beautiful. But do you ever get the impression it is being reduced to Thomism? For some that would not constitute a problem.

Or, take religious orders - must they all be Benedictine or Jesuit, etc.?

Or, the saints we talk about - always Therese, Bernadette, Faustina?

I can identify with this feeling. I like learning about new things, trying new foods, exploring new parts of the countryside, fishing in rivers and lakes I've never been. It's not novelty for sake of novelty, it's a different beautiful thing, because it's beautiful and it exists.

We had a great talk here at OLSWA about a year ago by Dr. Peter Erb on Newman. The thing that struck me most was when he said something about converts being more appreciative of the richness of the Faith... I might add to this observation that perhaps Catholics do not love their Faith for the right reason(s).

I think that cradle Catholics often do not experience their Faith as possessing a sense of saving freshness. They have perhaps never known the complete emptiness of a life bereft of meaning, and so cannot really appreciate that the Faith offers us so much. Can they feel the sense of sheer grace and mercy that having faith in God brings?

Yes, certainly, even though I am a convert, there is a conservative, inherited aspect in my own faith. I am, in some ways, a 'Bible Christian,' at least relative to most of the Catholics I know. I prefer reading Scripture to praying the rosary, if that means anything. I do not prefer it to going to mass, and that is probably determinative. No probablies about it.

Our whole tradition is still completely available for us. Every aspect of it should be explored and experienced. If we seem to be focusing on just a few small parts of it today, it's up to YOU to remind us about what we have forgotten. Catholicism outside of Chesterton, Divine Mercy, TOB, etc.

The thing is, the Tradition is alive and meant to continually nourish us. Hence the Communion of Saints: no time passes in heaven, their governorship over our spiritual welfare does not expire. Read widely the lives of saints from completely disparate times and places, their spiritual master-works, imitate their sometimes exotic practices.

My friend who made the remark, as I said, is a convert, and I am, as you know, a convert. As our Catholicism ages, things change. Excitement can diminish and focuses and concerns alter. They don't disappear. At 18 or 19 I wanted nothing more than to be a mendicant friar, going from place to place, begging and preaching, and wearing cool sandals. Then I wanted nothing more than to study and teach. Francis would not have approved. Now I want to be a good husband and father. Yet in this vocation I am attempting to live out in the light I take with me what was good and at the heart of my desire for mendicancy, and what was at the heart of my desire to teach and study the Word of God above all. It doesn't disappear, but it does 'age.' We do need to keep alive the fascination with Christ in these changing circumstances. There is something magical about our Catholic tradition, which includes everything from strange liturgical and ascetic practices to wonderful works on prayer and theology. We cannot box ourselves into a corner, and say Catholicism consists in this and only this. We do that. We tend to like the word 'best' too much. It keeps us from looking around at other aspects of the tradition.

The Gum-Chewing Lady Saga

2011-09-11T22:39:00.004-04:00

People are often amused to discover my disdain for sunglasses. Not on me - though I don't really wear them myself - only the polarized ones when fishing - but on people to whom I am attempting to communicate. Talking to a person wearing sunglasses is akin to talking to a person with their back to you. They can hear you, you can hear them, but, still, something's off.

Neither do I like gum.

Chewing gum at mass (who is not a child) takes the cake, though.

I noticed the "gum-chewing lady" a while ago, but told no one about her, that is, until that day when I discovered she lived kitty-corner behind my friends' house! "Aha, it's the gum-chewing lady!" I exclaimed.

I saw her again at church today smacking away. First of all, aesthetically speaking, it's not good. There is something decidedly off-putting about someone perpetually eating, which is what chewing gum amounts to.

Secondly, and more importantly, it's mass! There is an argument to be made that old gum does not violate the Eucharistic Fast because nothing is being taken into the stomach. Fine, but the letter of the law went out with tassels and phylacteries. The spirit of the law is that the whole person should be engaged upon the Food of Eternal Life being prepared at the Table of the Lord.

Yes, I kept an eye on her (why spend all your time praying at mass?), and, to her credit, somewhere between the consecration and her reception the gum disappeared.

I know we all have habits - and some of them rather annoying to our fellow men - but, seeing that she can go the ten minutes from communion to the end of mass without gum, could she not extend it just a little while longer, to include all of mass? Think of how sweet that first Wrigley's will taste as you walk down the steps of the church!

I don't know what it matters, but the lady in question is at least in her 60s. Perhaps it strikes me so keenly because I always hope for 'higher' things from that generation. Mine is the generation that has no idea of etiquette - hats indoors, that kind of thing. Theirs is the one that we count on to know better, and to scold us for it
I am disappointed in you, gum-chewing lady! You have let my generation down.

Updates

2011-09-08T16:14:00.000-04:00

I've been swamped with new babydom, end of summer, kids starting school, me starting teaching again.

TBTB - Too busy to blog.

Anne-Marie had her 35th birthday! Lauren had her third-week birthday!

Both mother and baby are doing very well.

I am actually getting good vibes from my students so far. Did I say that last year at this time? I am quite optimistic about the classes I am offering. I think I have organized them well, and that they should be a positive experience for both instructor and students.

I am living in a world of humanity, I have concluded. Everywhere I turn human life is happening. That's what you get with a wife and five children, I guess. It's not always pleasant, but it is real. Since it is a gift from God it's overall purpose must be salutary.

puer natus est nobis

2011-08-29T00:07:00.000-04:00

I want to meditate on this in the most general sense. Having witnessed the miracle of the birth of new life, my thoughts are understandably led to the subject of what human life, new life, family life, means. We move beyond and utterly disregard those who say that it has no meaning, for if new life has no meaning, no life can have meaning.

But what does it mean?

Let us consider the following:

God created the world.
He created it in His way (an image of Himself in some sense).
This pertains to every aspect of the world, more so to the higher things, less so to the lower.
Human life is a high thing, its social dimension included (image of the Trinitarian relations).
Human becoming is an image of the divine processions (the begetting of the Son, the procession of the Holy Spirit).
To be in the image of God is the basis of the goodness in things; to fail in this, the evil in things.

Truly, contemporary man lives on the verge of total despair in regards to his own being. He can no longer provide a rationale for his existence. Abortion, euthanasia, population-control thinking are based on the pure cynicism that comes from this metaphysical crisis. Man as phenomenon, man as existence, man as material, offers no justification to endure the hardships of continued existence. A being that can question or wonder about his own existence and yet not come up with a convincing account is the greatest of tragedies.

The hope that persists despite a failure to understand is not inauthentic. We shouldn't make any judgements on the vitality of this hope. So much of it is supplied by the natural graces of the Creator - the desire to continue to exist, the fear of death, the ability to hope itself.

In the face of man's choice to do without God, he yet looks to other things to give his life meaning, but in vain, to things like global warming, the eradication of disease, universal educational and political schemes, the liberation of so-and-so, he seeks after perfect health, or even the secrets of the material universe. These things cannot give meaning, for the question 'why' can still be asked in regard to any of them.

Why would you like to eradicate cancer?

- Because it kills people.

Won't people just then die of other things?

- Yes.

So, then, what is the importance of curing cancer?

- So that people will live longer, healthier lives.

Why is a long life better than a short one?

- I don't know.

Perhaps my favourite television show's - House M.D.'s - lead character, Gregory House, takes an honest approach to the problem. He does not believe in God. Hence, he approaches his healing vocation as a matter of intellectual interest. He likes solving puzzles. That is medicine to him. Yet in regard to suicide his view is that a poor life is better than no life at all, since there is nothing after this one. Interesting.

Someone who persists in their activities despite existential rationale is living in a state of radical confusion, you must agree. Sooner or later the thinness of one's philosopher will show through.

Ivan Karamazov is right. Without God anything goes.

But what I find odd is persisting in certain convictions when one has no ultimate grounds for so doing. Here, again, Nietzsche fought wholeheartedly to break us of this. He thought it would take courage to break ourselves of our (predominantly Christian) mores so that we might live in an authentic (me-centred) manner. At least he is being consistent.

Why is education good?

Freedom?

Christians have answers for these things; atheists do not, and, thus, they constitute a significant threat to freedom. Take the late Jack Layton and every one else of his ilk: socialists are ready to destroy personal autonomy for sake of equality. It seems good to them. But they cannot have an ultimate justification for this; they cannot, I know, because it is wrong. Philosophy is not dangerous; shallow philosophy is dangerous. Sooner or later its paucity shines through.

So we see it shining through and affecting the political discourse with euthanasia, etc.

I was deeply touched when welcoming the life of my newborn, Lauren, into the world just two weeks ago. It is natural to feel this way. It was not altogether the result of a conscious philosophical response. But my philosophy backs up this initial intuition: 1) I feel life is good. 2) Life is good, I know, because it is of God, from God, and in God; it has meaning.

It is no wonder that our culture has sunk inevitably towards utilitarianism - how crude, how crass, how cynical a worldview! - no wonder that life can be easily dismissed in abortion and euthanasia. In their view it has no ultimate meaning, no ultimate beauty. Kill it, then.

To see new life in the context of a carbon footprint is pure misanthropy, the saddest of all conditions.
So, with the Prophet Isaiah's declaration, "puer natus est nobis" - a son is born for us - we do not have an isolated theological datum. Rather, in God's choice to become man we find unassailable grounds to believe that human life is good.
I don't know what life has in store for Lauren, you, me anyone else. I don't know why any of us are here. What I do know for a fact, though, is that it is beautiful and meaningful.

Tattoos

2011-08-15T10:51:00.000-04:00

I set off a storm in a tea cup the other day when on Simcha Fisher's blog I commented on the "ugliness of tattoos - all tattoos." (Let me just take this opportunity to say that she seems like a really neat woman. I just started reading her blog.)

I had been meaning to write on this topic for a while, so this seems as good a time as any.

Let me reaffirm my key assertion: They are all ugly. That is because they do not belong on the skin.

I know that speaking objectively about a chacun son gout ('to each his own,' i.e., beauty is in the eye of the beholder) is problematic, but let me make my case as best I can.

Pizza is good; ice cream is good; together they are not.

Gothic wording is neat; skin is beautiful; together they are not.

Even the Most Holy Name of Jesus does not perfect the skin.

I can honestly say that I have never seen a tattoo that I thought improved the appearance of the person to whom it was attached. Being now on the tail end of a summer spent on the beach, I can say that I was given no pause to reconsider my essential thesis.

Yet when I make the ad hominen that it is a sign of insecurity, I mean that. I do not mean that people with tattoos are more insecure than I am! I seriously hope they are not. You don't want to spend time in my shoes, my friends! So, please take this personal attack with a grain of salt, knowing the baseness of the one saying it.

Even I, in my zeal for Christ, have given a passing thought to sealing myself with an 'indelible mark' of a cross or the Sacred Name, or some such thing. And, I recognize that this motivation is likely different from a 'look at me motivation,' or a 'I am ugly so I want to hide that with a tattoo' motivation. It might be a sign of love - an 'I love Betty' tattoo can be the result of a sincere act of love. I don't want to single out such romantics, but you've got to admit that there is often (maybe always) an element of insecurity in it. Love in man is insecure. It is not divine love; it is human love. There are worse things, yes, I am not disputing that. As a recovering romantic I know perfectly well what I am talking about here...

Tattoos are not augmentations to human beauty. They can be a part of beauty, but that is only because the original person is beautiful. The best they might do is perhaps provide the opportunity to recognize a person's beauty, a person whose beauty we might not otherwise pause to consider. But it is not an additional of beauty. Let me present some of my thinking with a consideration of a few pictures I think are beautiful:

This is one of Rembrandt's self-portraits. It is stunning. Click on it to enlarge it to reveal the life-like texturing of the paint.

This picture has some of the same appeal as Rembrandt's above. It is very interesting.

I like old people, what can I say? Beauty is not something predictable or prosaic, for sure. It comes in all shapes and sizes, to include Bl. Teresa of Calcutta and to exclude Pamela Anderson. There can be beauty even in something hostile to life itself, such as Mars:

I do not know in what beauty consists.

_______________________________________________________

Now here is the tattoo putting its best foot forward:

Let's even-off the presentation with some men:

You've got to admit that David Beckham is a handsome man, but...

And who doesn't like 'The Rock'?

Finally, the 'Christian tattoo' argument:

And, finally, my boy, J.T.
___________________________________________________

After all of this - and I have tried to make the best pictorial case for tattoos - I cannot say they add anything. Handsome was more handsome before, lovely lovelier before.

After all my searching around the web for tattoo pictures for sake of this post I have confirmed my thoughts about the paganism and sexualism of tattoos. I have seen a great deal more body than I would ordinary like. A good ol' Christian like St. Augustine would probably just sum up the issue as one of sin, the sin of valuing the external rather than the internal. Tattoos are probably not worse than many of the things we obsess about, that distract us from God, but that is no argument for their virtue.

It cannot be denied that tattoos are a part of a secularized culture. They have never been a part of the Christian tradition. I do not know enough about tattoos in other non-Christian traditions to say what response missionaries should have to them, so I ignore that dimension here. Tattoos have been shunned by our tradition because of its association with Roman paganism, and in the Old Testament, Near Eastern paganism. The positive value that Christians understood this proscription against tattoos was that of being in the image and likeness of God. This was primarily understood to pertain to the rational soul, but was also attached in some sense to the body as well. It is not that Christians generally anthropomorphized God. They held that all parts of man were directly the gift of God. Christians saw in the Incarnation a very strong message about the body's importance, which they defended against the Gnostics and the Greek philosophers. The reality of Jesus' body was a part of the deposit of faith, a teaching that we were meant to apply to our self-understanding. Whether tattoos utterly compromise this truth or not is another question. The fact is, the Christian tradition has understood it to do so.

Lauren is Born!

2011-08-13T20:36:00.001-04:00

I'd just like to pass on to you our great news, in succinct form, as I am tired and disorganized at the moment.

At 3:50 this morning, God blessed us with a healthy, beautiful daughter, Lauren Mary Anne Kerr. Mother and baby are doing very well. Keep us in your prayers!

Can you Prove that Christianity is True, Part 2

2011-08-12T14:31:00.001-04:00

I changed the subject in the title slightly, from Christian Faith to Christianity, since the former violates one of my thoughts: Christianity is called "a faith" for Protestant reasons, not Catholic ones. Religion is much better, much more traditional, much more Catholic. Religion is about following a rule (religio), and that is how many of the Fathers of the Church described it. Our rule is the Grace of Christ, of course, in contradistinction from the Law of Moses. Our rule is not faith, as perhaps I've said before, although it is for Protestants. The problem with equating faith and Christianity is that it overplays the former and tends towards fideism. Catholicism insists on the role of reason. You must judge for yourself which is better. BTW, the Fathers also referred to Christianity as 'the way', 'the philosophy', 'the discipline', and many other things, which are instructive for us.

I ended up in the first post on this having established that Christians are morally better than non-Christians. But this is a far cry from proving the truth of Christianity. At best we prove only that it is the best fit for man, the most natural, etc. If you take the 'most natural' and run with it, then your argument is something like,

1. There is nothing arbitrary in the world (i.e. it is given by God).

2. Man has a nature.

3. That which (best) suits his nature is a part of nature.

4. Christianity suits his nature (best).

______________

5. Therefore, Christianity is given by God.

Even if all of this is true, it does not mean that I have sufficient grounds for it to be 'justified belief.'

Certainly the most problematic from an epistemological standpoint is (1). (I came across a wonderful quote from St. Clement of Alexandria (or perhaps Justin Martyr?) about this in my reading last night.)

The best object for apologetics is (4), and that was what I was working on in the previous post. Nevertheless, you see how much else is required for the proof.

I would asset that (2) and (3) basically sum up the whole Summa of St. Thomas.

Now, even if you grant (1), (2), and (3), you still have some work to prove (4). Think in this context about Humane Vitae, for sake of example. Pope Paul argued that contraception tends to objectify women. That is a (4)-type argument. The incredible unhealthiness of homosexuality is another example. Proponents of homosexuality, then, tend to argue that it is not something intrinsic to homosexuality that is unhealthy, but the extrinsic social reception of it. Total lies, but you see the logic. Of course, some homosexualists then turn against (2) whenever they are beaten back on (4).

It is a healthy sign when a religion attempts to promote health and happiness. But it is not easy to determine the best root to this. It used to be thought that diet cola was better for you than regular. You hear you cannot and then you can take too much Vitamin A, B, C, etc. You hear that the pill causes cancer and that masturbation is a good prostate cancer deterrent. You hear that the traditional family promotes health and well-being, and that vacations are good for you too - try doing both together! Mormons appear to be right about coffee, but wrong about red wine (at least a glass of it). Exercise is good for you - but I have a strong feeling that the lifespans of Olympic athletes is briefer than the average. Observing the Sabbath is good for psychological health, family relationships, etc., but so too is not loosing your job because you refuse to work on Sundays...

All of that pertains to love of self, you'll observe. Christianity is only about that in a secondary sense. Primarily it is about love of God and then love of neighbour. You can see how these primary commands are related to (4) in some sense. You cannot prove that God blesses you and fulfills your nature when you honour Him - even though it is true. Saying that prayer is good for one's blood pressure is not quite the same thing, although even it is a part of (4). How can Christians argue both that it is the most natural religion and yet it orients us to the world to come, and thus involves some sort of hate of the world? It can, and it does in two ways: a) a good moral life makes for happiness in this life and in the world to come, b) hate of the world means not forming unhealthy attachments. Of course, (b) must mean be interpreted in such a way as to allow for some deviations from the reductive interpretation of (4) - i.e., to include things like asceticism and martyrdom. It must, in other words, comprehend a hierarchy of values - whereby it is better to die than to deny Christ, suffer ill-health than sin.

Next we'll have to discuss the Christian way of life in its specifics.

Like Father, Like Son

2011-08-11T08:59:00.005-04:00

Lest we forget.

Pride and joy.
Give a three-year-old gum, what do you expect?

Can you Prove that the Christian Faith is True?

2011-08-10T08:59:00.001-04:00

I was thinking about this on yet another one of our trips to the hospital a few towns over. (No baby yet.)

Is the world becoming increasingly crazy? Now we have the riots in London, which seem to be for no other reason than the simple desire to create chaos, destruction and to commit robbery and violence. We have all hell breaking loose in many of the Muslim states, we have euthanasia becoming more and more main stream, Christianity is becoming more and more marginalized - Christians can no longer run hospitals, adoption agencies, bed and breakfasts, etc.

I have a history degree, so I know I should not really asks questions like this one. Doesn't it seem to suggest that I am ignorant of how bad the world has always been? Yet, on the other hand, look at the London riots again. Sure, riots have been occurring for millennia, but what's the fundamental difference between this one and the Bastille event, the October, 1917, uprising in Russia? The previous two were prompted by poverty and desperation, this one by nothing of the sort. People are rampaging for nothing more than the chance to get a free pair of jeans at a looted store.

But then, more than 1600 years ago Augustine and his friends stole some pears for no other reason than to do something bad. As he tells us, he had access to better pears than these, which, in the end, they merely threw away anyway. Things never change.

Or do they?

Let's remember, that Augustine committed that crime in his pre-Christian days. These Londoners are post-Christian.

It sounds like I'm making a very ambitious argument here.

In his silly book (and it is silly, I've across much more persuasive arguments), The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins argues that belief in God doesn't make people better behaved. It's easy for him to do this because whenever he sees Christian behaving better he just redefines the terms and pulls out the old, morality is relative card. So, he says belief in God doesn't make you behave better and then he says there is no such thing as better when it is inconvenient for him.

But there is such a thing as better. He wouldn't like it if I punched him in the nose, and were I to do so he would have just grounds for complaint. If I suddenly reached into his pocket and helped myself to the millions of dollars he's earned from tricking the uneducated with his book, he would, no doubt, try and stop me, even if it meant taking me to court to prove my injustice.

So we can talk about a better world and a worse world, although I admit it's not easy to do so.

He wants to take away Christian parents' children from them on the grounds that belief in God is misanthropic. To me, that is a worse world. I'll leave it to you to decide who's correct. One of us has to be correct though, that much is certain.

The question is, Has Christianity made the world better or not? The answer to this question would seem to imply an answer for the related, Would the removal of Christianity make the world worse?

I clearly believe that it has made the world better and that the de-Christianization of the world is making it worse. But how to prove it?

Many people who oppose Christianity believe in something called 'progress.' As far as I can tell the anti-Christian form of progress owes its genesis, more or less, to August Comte. Now, it's not necessary for an anti-Christian to believe in progress, it just happens that most do, including Mr. Dawkins. Some are so grand as to thank Christianity for bestowing a few benefits upon man, but those, they say, are necessarily limited to an historical epoch that has now passed. Christianity played a role, says Comte, in getting man away from polytheism and fatalism and edging him toward reason, but it has fulfilled its function and can benefit us no more.

How would a Christian respond to this?

The issue is clearly: Are non-Christians more reasonable than Christians? If so, Does this mean they are morally better?

The answer in both cases is quite simply, no.

As to the first, the enemies of Christians - especially those in the media - are very good at depicting the followers of Christ as an altogether irrational and bigoted lot. This has been a favourite tactic since the 18th Century. Indeed, so effective have they been that only recently has literature begun to appear that is revealing how essential Christianity (Catholic Christianity) was in the birth of modern science. Unlike other systems, Catholicism understands the world as governed by God's reason, a reason that altogether rules out randomness. It understands the world as a product of God's laws, laws that can be studied and understood. Protestantism generally fails in this as it emphasizes God's will over His reason; Islam too; polytheism does not reduce the world to a single cause; Buddhism is fatalistic and uninterested in reason.

In regard to the second, even though Catholics cherish reason, they do not make the mistake of saying that it is sufficient for man. Indeed, the better things transcend reason: love, family, etc. Kant said that that there is such a thing as good and evil cannot be proven by reason alone, but it is necessary if other things are to follow. So, we cannot prove that the human soul is introduced at the moment of conception, but a better world is one that operates out of the belief that it is so; it is impossible to uphold man's moral dignity without this postulate. In general, human life is deperately diminished when we try to eliminate the soul. Morality rises and falls with the soul. We see just how this maxim - there are things greater than reason - operates when the Church confronts various bio-medical issues. Cloning, human-animal hybrids, fetal cell harvesting, these are not cases of the Church being opposed to reason; these are cases of the Church saying that there are things in life more important than it. We can identify science gone wild in the case of Nazi scientists, why do many assume that science can only go wrong in that case only? Knowledge is good, human dignity is better. Experimentation is great when it serves the dignity of man, bad when it violates it.

I seriously doubt that anyone really disagrees with this. Any posturing to the contrary is meant to do something political, not advance discourse. Of course, it's where you draw the line that is crucial. I love space exploration, but I would rather have money diverted to help Somalians suffering from famine than fund the latest Jupiter probe. Some people fear the unknown, and subconsciously dread NASA discovering extraterrestrial life as they feel it would undermine their faith. But is NASA in violation of human dignity in this part of their pursuit of knowledge? Of course not. According to some geniuses, like Michael J. Fox, foetal stem cells will cure absolutely everything. Curing things is good, but the cost to human dignity in this case makes the violation of embryonic life inconceivable. The Church does not say medical science is bad; it says simply, find another way.

The Church insists on reasonable pauses to the mad advance of science and technology. In the long run, when human dignity is respected, the advance will be greater.

In my experience, and talking to many other educators has tended to confirm this, as society is becoming less Christian it is becoming less rational. The ability of this young generation to reason, to think consistently, is appallingly weak. The Catholic tradition has always been at home with logic because it believes in an ordered universe. Yet, replacing this kind of pedagogical superstructure with an Existentialist or Marxist one, where opinion or force, respectively, are the governing values, reason quickly dissipates. On this score, and it is a big one, Christianity is essential to the well-being of society.

But this is just one aspect of the argument, albeit a huge aspect.

One thing that Christians have insisted on since the get-go, is that they make for better citizens. Their argument was two-fold: 1) they pray to God for the ruler, 2) they behave well.

I think that the powers-that-be will slowly realize this. Maybe they already do, but don't know what to do about it. I think they look around and see that society - even democracy - will not work without Christian selflessness thrown in. They think that they can appeal to natural values to make the difference, but everywhere we see that force and security are what they are increasingly falling back on to ensure order. Public parks, public celebrations, these things are increasingly becoming unworkable because people do not know how to behave, do not have the will to behave, to respect others and to value the common good. For that we need Christianity. A philosophically comprehensive sense of self-interest is not going to cut it.

Twelfth Anniversary, A Few Days Early

2011-08-04T11:44:00.002-04:00

No baby yet.

But in expectation of the coming newcomer, we decided to celebrate our anniversary a few days early. Inevitably we get a picture to mark the occasion.

Anne-Marie is as lovely as ever! And in really good spirits as the delivery date dawns ever closer.

My thoughts on marriage at the moment.

A wife is the person whose dignity, happiness and beauty you preserve and care for unrelentingly. I'm just glad that I want to do this. It's a vocation; it's a privilege.
_______________

Stevo wanted to get in on the pictures, so here's a few of him:

________________

P.S. We finally decided on a boy's name. Determining what it should be was the most emotionally exhausting experience of my life. You'll find out what it is if it's a boy... Hint: it's not Irenaeus :(

________________

One last bit of advice: in your garden next summer, grow lettuce. When I think of how much money we spend buying those bags of salad over the winter...

Family Photo Update

2011-07-30T10:19:00.001-04:00

Two important events this week, but no baby yet...

It was Stephen's third birthday!

And, it was our friend's, Paul's, fiftieth birthday!

Freind's Friends not my Friends

2011-07-29T11:12:00.003-04:00

Email Protocol

You've heard that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, no doubt. For some reason the opposite doesn't work, if we take the opposite to be: the friend of my friend is my friend. Why is that?

Well, it's easier to have an enemy than it is to have a friend. An enemy is simply someone you are against. A true enemy is someone you want to hurt or destroy. There are a million ways to hurt someone. To benefit someone requires a more delicate balance. We all know of times when you meant well, but it didn't end up well. A friend of mine calls that "going from a hero to a zero." Such has been my week.

As the subheading indicates, this is about an email. I sent an email out to about a dozen friends about something. Many of them sent it out to others. One of these others (at least) was offended by it and did something so as to upend the whole enterprise. Not the whole enterprise but an important portion of it. The email was meant to cause a benefit for a friend of mine, someone I deeply admire. The do-gooder, who was offended by my email, sent it on to my friend, for whom I was trying to effect a surprise benefit. My friend was deeply embarrassed by the whole thing, as anyone would be in that circumstance. Sorry for being so vague here. I know some of you know exactly to what I am referring. The details aren't important, though. It's about a life-lesson.

Here at thetheologyofdad I do a great deal of reflecting just before I press the 'publish' button and throw my thoughts out onto the www for potentially the whole world to read and, as happens, misread. I've written many things to which others have taken exception. I regret very few of them, btw, some of them, but very few of them. I am not 'everyman,' or even 'every Catholic.' I don't want to live my life that way, as someone equally digestible by all. I don't want to live avoiding problems. So, sometimes I am blunt and give offense. It has served me well, and it has caused me problems. I am not a saint and will never allow someone to assume that I have it all together, that thetheologyofdad is about me saying, 'Hey, everyone, look at me, what a great guy I am!' You have to write a certain amount of grit into your stuff so as to keep it morally authentic. My horror is to set myself up as some guru. I know that what lies inside this heart is very flawed and should not serve as a model for others. I don't want to guide others, just to be good enough to guide my children. That's my goal, nothing else. I consider myself a teacher of important facts not of virtue. Sorry if this disappoints anyone (most of all Socrates, who thought these were the same thing). The whole Fr. Corapi thing, the Maciel thing before it, shows that people need role models. I am not one. I am just a guy who wants to educate and encourage other Catholics. I'm a nice guy, but not a saint.

But enough autobiography.

Lesson: always say this email is for your eyes only.

Or, there are inflammatory things in this email that would potentially offend, hurt, others. Be careful with it. Contents hot. Caution. Soyez prudence.

The reason my email went south was that many people do not understand that just because we are all Catholics does not mean that we are all friends. We do not all see things the same way, even daily communicants who agree on issues X, Y, and Z. That people do not get this always surprises me.

Anyway, I am a wiser person today than yesterday. And am very sorry to my friend!

Now, do I press 'publish'?

How Would You Rank Your Priorities?

2011-07-29T11:06:00.000-04:00

I grant that there's no easy way to gnothi seauton - to know thyself, as the Oracle at Delphi was famously said to have said to Socrates. This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to some extent. I say to some extent because I'm not so sure that I am meant to be the object of my knowledge, surely a component therein, but not the object. Why do I make this distinction? Because I am an imperfect being, and thus it is impossible to imagine that knowledge of an imperfect being can constitute the goal of man's spiritual-intellectual journey. God is, of course, the object of my journey, and He is an object Who supplies the means to know Him.

Okay, good to know, but not the point of this post.

As you know, we are __________-ly (throw in any number of appropriate adverbs here) awaiting the imminent birth of our fifth child. It is a time of, yes, as I've said, joy and all that, but, whether you'd like to admit it or not, also a time of stress. Anne-Marie won't mow the lawn, move the furniture around the living room - as I've repeatedly asked her - or change the cat's litter...

This is hard on me. No one ever thinks about me...

I hope you are with me so far.

Pregnancy and the post-partum period are certainly times that call for an evaluation of one's priorities. Why am I doing what I am doing with my time? How can I do better? What does God want? - these are the types of questions I ask myself, and I am sure you do too. Choices have to be made: you can either do X or Y, you certainly cannot do both. Having a healthy sense of your limits is very important, as anyone knows who has ever tried to exceed them (as I try to do about every three months). So, we have to prioritize. We get from the Gospel that our priorities are to look something like this:

1) God,
2) self / neighbour,
3) all those things that do not fit into category (1) and (2).

But it's often extraordinarily difficult to figure out where items X, Y, and Z fit in to those three categories.

The more you think about it, and the further you go down the path of the spiritual life, the less workable these become as hard and fast categories. Everything I do for my family I do for God... or at least that should be the case. Everything I do for God redounds upon my family... and so on. I love reading the Sayings and Lives of the Desert Fathers. It is easy to see that sorting this out was one of the essential problems they had to contend with. They had an awfully difficult time determining what was about loving God and what was about loving neighbour. That they too had this problem is comforting to know. In one sense confusion can be considered a hallmark of Christianity. Do you know who had no problem with this issue? Plotinus. He eloquently described the spiritual life as the journey of the alone to the Alone. An intriguing expression, but equally horrific to Christian ears. Do you ever feel that way, like you are on a solitary journey to the solitary God? I know I do.

So, it's time to fess up. What do you value most? What concerns you most? Reading so many Catholic sources as I do, you might get the impression that what's most important to us looks something like this:

1) stopping abortion,
2) promoting good, condemning bad liturgy,
3) stopping homosexual 'marriage',
4) limiting government,
5) stopping environmentalists,
6) having lots of children,
7) decreasing sexual content in popular media,
8) exposing liberals: priests, school boards and politicians,
9) God (at least insofar as He relates to prayer in public venues).

This is not a scientifically precisely ordered nor exhaustive list, obviously. I think my point stands, though, that what we talk about does not often reflect our real priorities - or does it? Does our tongue give faithful witness to what is in our heart, and does our heart conform to our mind? There is nothing wrong with anything in the above list - they are obviously all good things. Yet are they in the right order right and does it exclude anything?

Being as honest and as reflective as I can be at this precise moment, my list of concerns - though it's impossible to say for sure (I don't have a 'caremometer') - probably looks something like this:

1) myself (my happiness)
2) my family's happiness / welfare
3) acknowledging God in my heart and mind
4) God being glorified in the world
5) increasing my own knowledge
6) making my friends happy
7) mass
8) sharing my knowledge with others
9) my possessions (might be more important to me than # 7)
10) people I don't know (the pre-born, the suffering, Joe Anybody)

There's probably something to be said about a list like this that you spontaneously spew out. Who knows whether I'd make the same week in a week from now. I think that it is fairly representative of my general values. Of course, it is evil to prefer self to God in any sense, but what one means by saying I prefer myself to everything else is a sort of state of depravity that might nevertheless differ greatly from person to person, and from moment to moment. After all, what comes to mind when I imagine my own happiness? - the sexual exploitation of others, the emotional thrill of singing, the pride I feel from helping street people? These seem to have radically different moral value.

What does it say about me that I have not included in my top-ten defending marriage, defending political issue X, promoting good liturgy, or what not? I think it implies several things. First, that I like learning more than I care about these things. Second, I don't care all that much about "the way the world is going." That's just the way I am. Not that it's necessarily a good thing. However, neither is it necessarily a good thing to be obsessed about any issue: 'true nature of marriage,' the machinations of governments, the shape of popular media, whatever.

I had no idea where to fit in the value I place on what others think of me. I suppose not knowing where it fits in is probably a sign that it's rather high-ranking for me, since my ignorance denotes a lack of self-awareness. Dare I say it sits at #5? Of course, every sin is a sin against God, and for that reason ranks that thing - at least temporarily - above God. But then, you wouldn't really be ranking it higher if you went to confession, would you? It all depends, I guess, on the degree of your contrition.

Thetheologyofdad: Home of the Ugly Saints

2011-07-18T20:59:00.007-04:00

Long, long ago, when I was wise and you were not, when I was saying stuff like the Legionaries are too into upholding worldly standards (for Christ), you know, way back in the 90s when no one would listen to me...

Okay, I exaggerate. Some of you actually did agree with me.

But I still see some of the fruit of that bad tree elsewhere.

First of all, what do I mean?

I always disliked how in their literature (which showed up at my door, year after year, without having requested it) they would always 'brag' about the priestly vocations they had who 'used to be lawyers, or doctors, etc.' They would boast about their connections with important politicians, business leaders, etc. I even recall one of their friends was the President of Mexico, or some such place.

I don't mind any of that as long as they also tell me about their vocations who used to be garbage men, long-haul truckers and waiters, you know, men who know how to work for a living.

Too often we talk about how lovely Saint X was, that men (often Roman Senators) desired them so severely or some such foolishness. Frankly, whether St. Bernadette was attractive or not doesn't mean anything to me. A blogger recently referred to how beautiful a certain modern saint was. To what end, I ask? Another tells me recently how ugly Blessed Kateri was. Okay, fine. But I have no intention of making a calendar of beautiful women saints to hang on my office door to inspire my male students, or my female students. What a messed-up way of thinking this ends up to be, the sort of ends-justify-the-means thinking on saints. Everyone within ear-shot must have heard me by now, raging about poor Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati who is only ever depicted skiing. To my mind someone who spent his whole life skiing is not a saint but a very selfish person. That's equivalent to my kids saying at my funeral, "He spent his whole life surfing the web."

And, by the way, St. Thomas Aquinas, did not have the whole Bible memorized. Anyone who has read him to any extent is aware of that. The smartest person who ever lived did not have to be Catholic for me to believe it is the true faith - nor the greatest playwright, as another Catholic blogger has recently written, echoing perhaps the most common instance of 'all the greatest were Catholic' mythology.

Yes, Augustine was sure that if Plato were alive in his time he would become a Christian. I never said that Augustine was right about everything...

Humility is the way of Christ. The moment we buy into a little bit of worldliness, we end up with a whole lot of it.

Catholic schools - you know who I am talking to - stop putting your most attractive students on your promotional material! I want to see the buck-toothed, four-eyed, goofballs, the ones with their trousers pulled up past their navels - that's the school I want to go to, the one truly committed to the Gospel of my Lord. There's a place I can truly feel comfortable.

As the great, modern Doctor of the Church, Friedrich Nietzsche, wrote, "Christianity is a religion for losers," or something to that effect. Keenly observed.

In the end, whenever you venture down the 'let's show them that it's cool to be Christian' path, you alienate someone for all the wrong reasons. Show a pretty Christian girl, you alienate someone with low self-esteem; show a muscley one, you alienate one who is not; show a successful one, you alienate a poor one. If we are certain that Christ did not choose His Apostles for such reasons, why do we chose ours this way?
___________________________________________

Some things just leave me speechless.

Happiness, Peace, Tension, Waiting

2011-07-18T08:41:00.002-04:00

It's a funny thing, being a prof., in a small town, in a small, summer tourism-based town, with four children, while waiting for number five to join us sometime in the next few weeks.

Barry's Bay is the most beautiful town in the world. In the summer it's hard to deny. Some people get to live in vacation spots, like people who live in Hawaii, Fiji or whatnot. People in Barry's Bay get to share that experience for about two or three months a year without going anywhere. And they deserve it. We endure a very harsh winter and an overall depressed economy. I don't know what the average family income is here, but I'm sure it's well below my native Dartmouth, Nova Scotia's $70,000, or Oakville, Ontario's (where I lived for a year and a half) of >$100,000.

As a prof. my summers are a little bit more relaxed than some people's. Not that I don't work. I work all the time, but it's generally according to my own schedule, which, if you are a 9-to-5er you know is kind of a luxury. That's one of the reasons why I got into this industry. I liked my dad's pace of life as a researcher/prof. I absolutely detested life in grade school: waking up every morning at 7:30 to get to school by 8:30, etc. I dreaded the thought of doing something like that as an adult. At OLSWA we still have meetings, I still do work as the school's librarian, I still do class prep., but even better, I get to focus on my research interests. Reading and writing is the best and the hardest part of my job.

My family, of course, finds itself in one of those times of waiting. We've done it four times already, but it changes every time. This time with Anne-Marie and I are four others waiting as well. This time we have a ten-year-old, a nine-year-old, and a six-year-old consciously waiting with us. The almost-three-year-old is in his own world, naturally. Anne-Marie and I have our mixed feelings, naturally, as we contemplate disturbed sleeps, crying baby, etc. The children just have excitement. That's the blessedness of childhood. A time free from anxiety. But regardless of the differences, we are all in it together. And togetherness is the best thing of all.

About three-and-a-half years ago we got the "Walmart family Christmas picture" done. Getting it done was a frustrating experience - surprise, surprise - but there it sits now as a treasured artifact on the wall of our living room. But minus two people. (Stephen was in utero.) We hope to get another one done this year. Won't it be wonderful to add these two guys?! But they aren't added as numbers. They are added as beautiful human beings, fully incorporated into the happiness, peace, tension and waiting of the Kerr family.

While Barbecuing, To Whom to Pray

2011-07-13T18:33:00.003-04:00

Last night we enjoyed a dinner at friends'. Through the too wide slots in his grill was the host offering involuntarily burnt offerings, and we had to decide to whom they were being offered. Of course, if you know your Old Testament, you know that YHWH alone gets the first fruits. We began to wonder who the pagans would think of in this case. (I learned about these individual deities from Augustine's City of God, which, believe it or not, is a font of information on such things.) Who was the Roman god of meat? Ceres was the god of grain, Neptune, I am guessing, of fish, Bacchus of wine, and Vulcan of fire.

But to whom did those pagan offer their way-ward hot dogs? Apparently, Hermes (aka Mercury) was the god of animal husbandry (as well as a million other things). Faunus (aka Lepurcus) was the protector of cattle and Faustitas of herds of livestock. Fornax was the god of ovens, and so I assume of b-b-qs too. If you were having lamb, then it was Pales who would be the object of concern. So there you have it.

Now we that we recognize that everything is God's and all the gods of the nations are demons, yet while recognizing that He deigns to dignify the heavenly host as agents of His mercy, we must ask, while barbecuing, to whom ought we direct our prayers for success? Ever into irony, the Holy Catholic Church, of course, looks to St. Lawrence as the patron saint of barbecuing. More generally for cooks, we have with Lawrence, Sts. Macarius the Younger and Martha. If you are doing much meat preparation, you'll want to seek the blessing of St. Adrian of Nicomedia, the patron of butchers.

Of course, if things do not go well at the barbecue - which was not the case last night - you might want to beseech St. Agapitus' intercession, the patron saint of abdominal pain.

One Thing We can Learn from St. Augustine Today

2011-07-13T08:51:00.005-04:00

This point is at the heart of my -first- vocation to know and love the Lord. It's easy to identify a selfish tendency within this, but the abuse should not obfuscate the fact: we are made first to know and to love the Lord.

The knowing part is strongly emphasized in Augustine's life and writing. It would be misleading to simply call him a mystic and then move on. He was a mystic, in a certain sense, but not in the sense that he only dealt with the nearly-unutterable, that which pertained to the interior alone. He was concerned with these things most of all, but strongly believed that, as the goal of intellection, mystical things could only be attained - and could only be meaningful - after rigorous mental endeavour. Today many of us get into religion deeply and avoid mental work, perhaps in order to avoid mental work. This was not Augustine's way. He assumed that one could encounter God in the deepest recesses of the mind, on those rarest occasions of profound insight. Christianity was to him philosophy, not the end of it.

This is extremely undemocratic. Is God the God of the philosophers most of all? No, but He is the God of the philosopher-saint most of all, Augustine would maintain. Monica is not a model of holy ignorance; the point she serves in Confessions (and other of his writings) is more to show that God can give the gift of wisdom to anyone. Monica yearned for wisdom too, and she was blessed with receiving it, despite her lack of formal education, not despite the effort to know. The lack of formal education is no excuse for failing to obey the universal commandment to know.

It is unfortunate that too often today, when confronted with the hugely complex issues relating to such things as evolution and the interpretation of the Bible, for instance, Catholics simply avoid learning, and instead retreat into a cozier home of condemnation, private revelation and outdated teaching.

That was not Augustine's way. Augustine exemplified the best part of the Catholic intellectual tradition: he wanted to learn about all the important questions. He had no time for the unimportant ones, of course - and we may find fault with that, perhaps. But we commend his indefatigable study of everything that in anyway pertained to the truth of God and human life. Throughout his whole life he studied the great theologians and the great pagan philosophers. Nor did he study the latter simply to dismiss them arrogantly. He learned from them some pretty important things: most of all, perhaps, from Plotinus, how to begin to think about the Trinity, believe it or not.

By contrast, we are Gnostics. We retreat into our secret world of privileged knowledge, a place that cannot be challenged by critics. We congratulate ourselves on our possession of the True Faith and in our reading seek only to encounter again and again what we have already assented to. That's at our worst.

A little better, but not by much, is the tendency of many to reduce philosophy (truth, knowledge, wisdom, our vocation to know) to catechism, that is, to believe that one learns truth like St. Thomas did by memorizing Thomas' conclusions and not by going through his philosophical process. The difference between these two things is equivalent, for example, to knowing that abortion is wrong because it undermines human dignity, without being moved by the reality that is represented by those words, human dignity. In this case, you are at least reading St. Thomas, which is better than reading most Catholic pulp literature. Indeed, knowledge of the Faith is not a possession, it is a resource. Neither is it a weapon for apologetics, at heart. Knowledge is a spiritual blessing, both knowledge of the Articles of the Faith and scientific knowledge of the universe. Both are used poorly all the time, the former no less frequently than the latter. It is simply incorrect to assume - as so many Catholics do - that only the second kind of knowledge can be abused. Both are intrinsically good because God is the author of both the natural and the supernatural sphere. Both are knowledge of God.

Yes, Thomas is over many people's heads. But Augustine would, I am quite certain, urge that more and more people read him, urge us to get out of him whatever we can, to use him as a means of deepening our rational awareness of God. Augustine simply assumed that God was to be encountered in the mind most of all. Like many of the Fathers of the Church, he believed that our imaging of God lay in our intellectual capacity most of all. So my complaint, that we Catholics do not do enough thinking, philosophical thinking, is one that I am quite certain Augustine would support. It's not about becoming well-read, or an intellectual of stature; it's simply about expanding our minds in the way God wants us to. Whatever capacity we have is what we should fill by the grace of God. That this was what God intended was obvious to Augustine. Otherwise, He would not have given us minds.

So, let us all think about the big things - the nature of the Blessed Trinity, the nature of the universe - why is it like this, why is it this big, this old, etc., the nature of man, the nature of love, etc. Spend a lot less time thinking about: politics, homosexuality, private revelation, liturgical minutiae, and - it even redounds upon me - zombie movies... In all of this Augustine would be quite happy.

Note, I didn't say read about the Blessed Trinity, the universe, love, etc. I said think about them.

Who Can Suggest a Good, Recent, Scholarly Biography of Martin Luther?

2011-07-12T11:28:00.003-04:00

This request is worth a try - now that I have expanded commenting options. Do I actually have Protestant readers?

This Martin Luther:

Not this one:

BTW, I shaved off my moustache. But I mourn for it now... :(

Corapi.

2011-07-06T16:24:00.003-04:00

I have wanted to write on this topic but new I hadn't much insightful to add. I never enjoyed listening to him; I didn't like the sound of his voice, and the fact that he dealt with catechetical commonplaces (in my opinion). But I did admire him. I have a very sober view of human nature - we are all just a little too fat and a little too lazy to be murderers, rapists and thieves, and that is all. Take away the food, and we'll be just like the Sudan. In other words, sin does not surprise me; it's what we do. Nevertheless, when the accusations first emerged vs. Corapi I did not believe them. He was too hardcore, but not in that spit-and-polish way that made me weary of the Legionaries. He was hardcore but also rough-around-the-edges, and that was a combination that set me at ease - only because I have a similar aspect in my personality. Rough-around-the-edges means to me that someone is in touch with their humanity. He spoke about his human past too: his drug and sex life. Those were all healthy signs, in my opinion.

I have known pedophiles and their victims. I have known countless schizophrenics, people with manic-depression, depression, alcoholism and a million other infirmities. I don't care what kind of thing you are dealing with. Dealing with. Dealing with. The capital sins to me are self-righteousness, self-confidence, vanity, you know, those kind of perfect-people sins. In this light, what has really bothered me about the Corapi stuff - first, knowing that my wife loved him - is facing the lies and the indignation he threw at us over the past few weeks once he realized that the jig was up and that he had to restack the deck. I am not one of those guys who thinks you owe strangers explanations. I never met Brittany Spears, Congressman Weiner, Mel Gibson, nor Corapi. They don't owe me an explanation or an apology for anything they have ever done. In fact, I don't want one. I don't want Corapi to apologize; I want him to take his addictions and sins seriously, fade into the background and ask God to 'fix him.' That is all; nothing more.

Anyway, let me close this by pointing out what is in my opinion the best account so far of the 'how' of all of this, by Fr. Longenecker.

Now Anyone Can Comment...

2011-06-29T14:30:00.000-04:00

A thetheologyofdad reader recently told me that he would comment but doesn't have a Google account. I thought, "Hmmm, I wonder if I can change that setting?" A lo and behold I can. It's an experiment. If I start getting Viagra ads in the comment box I'll have to rethink this, but for now I can't think of anything I'd enjoy more than to hear from more of my readers - especially the guy who thinks I made a mistake about Kant! Absurd.

Pray for a Boy to be Born Tomorrow!

2011-06-27T14:38:00.001-04:00

The feast day of my number two choice for a boy's name is tomorrow: St. Irenaeus. Anne-Marie said that if a boy is born tomorrow we will call him Irenaeus. Otherwise not.

Since she is due August 7th, and never goes early, I would have to force her into a c-section.

What's my number one choice for a boy's name? Augustine, silly. His feast day is August 28th. But, then, again, doesn't he have a whole month named after him?

If you are saying to yourself, "You would name your son Irenaeus?! Come on, Mister!" You should keep three things in mind:

1) Irenaeus is from the Greek root for 'peace'.

2) St. Irenaeus was the first great theologian of the Church.

3) There is no one else going by that name in Barry's Bay.

What's my number 3 boy name? Hint: there are two saints named this, and they are depicted below:

Well, I've got Anne-Marie

2011-06-17T14:22:00.001-04:00

This has not been the easiest week of my life (nor nearly the hardest), but just now while telling her over the phone about another set back, my wife said a bunch of encouraging things, but the best one, the most powerful one, was, "I love you."

That's good enough for me, though it wasn't always. Amidst all the setbacks and disappointments that life can bring - and inevitably does - if you have someone's love, that makes a real difference. Fortune cannot off-set lovelessness, but love can off-set misfortune. Anne-Marie loves me because I'm poor. Read that the correct way, and think about it, if you need to.

In a month we will be marking our twelfth anniversary, and, God willing, the birth of our fifth child. Our marriage is on a stronger footing now than its ever been. Every marriage is unique, of course, has its own history. In our case, two very dysfunctional kids got married, and had to bear with the decision for a dozen years. We grew up eventually. Slowly. She is much wiser than I, but I too am no longer a kid, I think. In the previous post I mentioned Maja's "I am third." I'm not sure exactly how that should work out in every situation, but I know that her happiness is at least as important as mine. I don't want to insist on an unhealthy sense of self-annihilation by this. Some people go into marriage with this idea in mind. But your spouse is not Christ. Save that mentality for religious life, if that is your calling. It doesn't fit well into marriage. I've seen that kind of thinking only lead to resentment in the self-sacrificer and an unreal concept of life, an unhealthy moral life, in the one being sacrificed to. We have to live with each other. Let's develop and honest idea of what we are capable of giving and of what we are not. That is the sort of self-disclosure that healthy communication and development begin upon.

A Totally Unrelated Post-Script

Newman was the most important Catholic theologian since Duns Scotus, or Ockham perhaps, but that latter choice seems weird since he was so unCatholic in some ways.

Imagine, the most important Catholic theologian in the last 600 + years was Newman!

Duns Scotus, a photograph.

Worst / Best Job Ever

2011-06-15T16:34:00.036-04:00

Farewell to she who was Dean of Students at OLSWA for the last three years, Maja Polic (pron. Maya Politch).

She did an outstanding job in this extremely difficult position. What type of person can oversee disciplinary, formative and material-resource issues with grace and Christian love? Apparently Maja can.

She is a woman of deep faith, practical sense, a survivor's sense of humour, and follow-through. She continues to care about people even when given a million reasons to give up on someone. My most enjoyable work with Maja has been helping with the RA and proctor interviews these last two years. We have sometimes laughed so hard we cried. How else to do a job like this? As a member of the spiritual life committee of OLSWA I have worked with her to organize the 'Day of Recollection,' featured in a previous post. She didn't know the meaning of abandoning a responsibility. I gather that she gained a great deal of her virtue from her connection to Madonna House. She lived by their motto: I am Third.

The thing I admire Maja most for is her good judgement about people and situations. More often than not - and much more often that me - she knows the right person for the job and the right way to deal with discipline.

Even if you don't know anything about OLSWA, and you've never been in situations remotely like this, imagine for a minute being in charge of the care of 100 young people. Some of you who are unwise are like, "I'd rule them with an iron fist!", or "I'd let them all have fun!" You should, hence, never be put in charge of 100 young people. Some of you who are wise are thinking, "No thanks."

Occasionally wonderful people come to Our Lady's school, occasionally again they depart. These wonderful people are always missed, and you never change your mind about that.

Last night we had a very lovely going away party for Maja. I forgot my camera, but I had my cell phone. I took pictures, but alas cannot seem to upload them to this computer...

Best Laid Plans

2011-06-10T03:38:00.030-04:00

I went to bed early last night (Thursday) because I had a big day planned today and I had not been getting enough sleep recently. I went down with Stephen around 8. I woke up. It was still dark, so I knew it wasn't 7:00 yet, the time I planned to be up by. When I checked the clock on the stove it was 1:00, the time when I normally go to bed. Now it is after 3:00, and am just as awake as ever.

I read some news online then redesigned the blog. Not happy with it yet. Maybe I'll keep trying. Listening to music. It's quiet, it's peaceful. I'm not too worried about the hell-day I might end up having if I can't get back to sleep at all. That's the way to beat sleeplessness - not to care.

The garden will need to be watered, but I'll be too busy. Do you think I should water it now, at 3 am?

__________

But who am I to say that my way is the best way?

Was talking to a young woman today. I got the typical amazement when I told her I had four children and a fifth on the way. After her outburst, she said that big families are fun or nice or something. I thought, you have no idea. It cannot be described. Would I trade it for anything? Never! My family is everything to me. It is my full source of joy.

Strange Mail from the Police

2011-06-08T00:15:00.075-04:00

No one really wants to open their mail box and find a letter from the police. "What have I done?" I think to myself - a motor vehicle infringement? Some camera set up in some occult location? I got a parking ticket in Ottawa almost a year ago, but I payed it. What could it be?

"You have a guilty conscience," says my wife.

"I have many reasons for that." I think to myself.

I opened it. It was just a letter in regard to the background check I did so that I can participate in my children's school event, class trips, etc. I had filled out a form last Fall about this. What was this, an update?

No, it seems that because my gender (of which there are only two, I assume) and date of birth match a pardoned sex offender I must submit my finger prints to their database.

Okay, sure, no problem. I have nothing to hide...

WHAT!? BECAUSE MY GENDER - OF WHICH THERE ARE ONLY TWO - AND MY DATE OF BIRTH MATCH THAT OF A PARDONED SEX OFFENDER I MUST SUBMIT MY FINGER PRINTS SO AS TO CONTINUE TO BE CLEARED FOR GOING ON MY CHILDREN'S CLASS TRIPS.

So, in a nutshell, I won the 1 in 730 fingerprint lottery. How so? Well, you have 2 genders to choose from, and 365 days on which to have a birthday. 2 x 365 = 730.

Let me just see what the logic is here:

1) I am a man.

2) I was born on the particular day of the year some 'pardoned' sex offender was born.

3) Therefore, I must submit to fingerprinting.

I have studied logic. I have watched hundreds of episodes of the Law and Order franchises. I don't get it.

Is it that they have lost track of this 'pardoned' sex offender. They don't remember his name, what he looks like, but they do remember his birthday, and so, it makes perfect sense to track down everyone who fits into that category? That's how they tracked down bin Laden, right? By checking out every birthday party in the Middle East until they got his?

I got to tell you, that is the weakest pretext I have ever seen for Joe Law to add me to his database. If they had just come out and said it is now the law that all men who volunteer to work with school children must be fingerprinted, I'd be, like, "Cool. Fingerprinting. Let's do it." But, on principle, this has to be dealt with in a more public and stinky way.

Am I offended? Just my intelligence. I think I will call the local OPP detachment to ask them about this, and then call my MP, Cheryl Gallant, to let her know about this 'funny' little incident. I will keep you posted.

When you think about it, there is not just one sex offender out there. There must be hundreds, perhaps thousands in their database. So, with 2 genders and only 365 days from which to choose, I am guessing everyone must get a letter like this who signs up for class trips, except, of course, for perma-lucky guy who was born on February 29th.

Further irony. I filled out the form last Fall, went on a class trip with my kids in April and this letter dated June 3rd says my check could not be completed. Too late, I have already gone. That makes me feel really secure about who is being let around my kids.

The letter says that because of this match of gender and date of birth a more thorough background check must be done to confirm my identity. Because, as you all know, no criminal bent on concealing his real identity would be so clever as to change his date of birth.

Or, is it that my date of birth is a particularly bad one? It is, after all, particularly close to Halloween. But I can't help but think that it's more a matter of this: criminal X likes french fries, I like french fries, so chances are greater that I might be a criminal...

Some Summer Shots

2011-06-06T12:58:00.003-04:00

Yes, I like alliteration.

Life is beautiful and always a pleasure when you have children. Well, that's half true.

But we should cherish the good.

Dessert with Archbishop Prendergast

Finally, regarding the importance of prepositions.

I said, "Stephen, write with the chalk out-doors."

A moment later. "Stephen, what are you doing?!"

"You said to write on-doors!"

Thankful for Barry's Bay

2011-06-02T20:13:00.003-04:00

We had the annual 'Family Fun Night' at the kids' school tonight. It's a lot of fun - for the kids; a drain on my energy and wallet. Yet tonight was okay. It was okay because we have some good friends here. Good Catholic friends are not easy to come by in this world. In Barry's Bay they are more common than you might think, and that makes all the difference. A 'good Catholic friend' loves the Faith, is healthy in mind and soul, is kind and generous and lives a good life. That's actually a very tall order objectively speaking.

The people in Barry's Bay are pretty good folk in general. Friendlier, more down-to-earth than just about anywhere else, and fairly innately Catholic - if that is a real thing. This little town doesn't have malls, movie theatres, Tim Hortons or Lee Valley. But it has Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy, St. Hedwig's Parish, and Madonna House just down the road... and it has fine people.

It is also breath-takingly beautiful:

How to Teach Theology

2011-06-02T19:58:00.004-04:00

Or,

Um, how are you supposed to teach theology?

I had an illuminating conversation today with a friend who graduated from Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy (my college) and who is now a school teacher. I had taught two of her siblings, who were first-rate students. She knows the ins-and-outs of the OLSWA world and of education in general, so I take her opinion seriously.

The essential problem I have lies in making material which is characteristically offered only at the graduate level (that is where I received it) intelligible to undergrads. Sounds simple, enough? The problem is more internal to me that 'out there.' I refuse to - or at least am hesitant to - dumb things down. It belittles me and them - or so I think. But how could it? That's just foolish. The thing is, I value the material and want it grasped in its fuller form.

Theology is usually taught with the assumption that the basics of history and philosophy are already in place. What theology is left able to be taught when these are removed, if its not going to be mere catechism? In other words, you have to teach them all together. That is not all that unusual. You cannot really separate theology from these two ever anyway. Theology is the rational reflection on Revelation which is given in and over time, hence it cannot be divorced from philosophy and history.

Let's give an example. I'll avoid Christology, since all of my examples come from that field. Let's take my course on St. Augustine. In presenting Augustine you are presenting a citizen of the Roman Empire, a person who has received theological and philosophical traditions and then has handed one on. Knowing a person requires historical context, but knowing their significance requires knowing what impact they made on what came after them. It's obvious that someone of Augustine's calibre had an impact on both the future course of theology and of philosophy. The latter cannot be said of the majority of theologians, but of some it can - St. Anselm, St. Thomas, Duns Scotus, etc. But of all it can be said that to know them philosophical knowledge is required, since they were influenced by certain philosophical schools. Even of contemporary theologians is this true, or perhaps of them it is especially true.

So, to teach Augustine thoroughly or well you must mention those who came before from whom he drew inspiration: especially Plato/Plotinus, Ambrose, Origen, Cyprian, Tertullian, Athanasius & Mani. You must indicate something of his political, geographical and social context. You must mention contemporary theological developments along the lines of Arianism, Donatism, Pelagianism, Origenism, etc., and the influence on him of contemporary figures: the Cappadocians, St. Jerome, St. John Chrysostom, etc. Was Augustine an original thinker, or just part of a school of thought? This is one of the primary questions a course like this needs attend to. Secondly, what is his significance for the development of Catholic theology? That is a massive topic in and of itself.

One of the basic dimensions in education is teaching 'appreciation.' What is that exactly?

I want to hand my students a letter of Augustine's, read it over with them carefully, pointing out its significant features, and have them appreciate it. Why? Because it is good in itself. It is a piece of history, a piece of fine thinking and writing. The good of the letter needs to be appreciated specifically and the good of human life (history, culture) needs to be appreciated in general. Is that the goal of education - love of the good? I suppose so, but I'll have to think about it. Very Platonic.

If so, how do you teach love of the good in complex things (like Augustine's writings) to those who haven't the necessary background? You teach the background along with the subject itself, regardless of whether the student finds it boring and pedantic. But of course, then you risk their quick and superficial appreciation.

What's my Assessment of the Catholic All-Stars?

2011-05-27T14:36:00.004-04:00

There were a lot of good suggestions about people I should have added to the list. And I learned a lot about Google in the mean time, that it is not a simple computer generated type of search. It is regional-specific, a great deal depends upon what exactly you include and exclude in the search, etc. Nevertheless, we can still conclude a few things. What I was after was an answer to the question: how do we Catholics 'idolize'?

I don't want to sound mean here, but, for instance, for as gifted as he is, there are greater Catholic biblical exegetes at work in the field today, so why is Scott Hahn so well known? There are certainly more ingenious interpreters of the Theology of the Body than Christopher West around today, so why is he synonymous with the field in the popular imagination? (Incidentally, Christopher West Theology of the Body generates 199,000 results.) Off the top of my head, it's not about genius, it's about presentation.

But I knew all of this before I did this little experiment. So what did I learn?

1. The top-ranked are those well known in the secular world.

2. The internet is not clericalist. Clerics rank high, but not disproportionately so. There is a strong showing from the laity.

3. There is a strong showing of intellectuals, especially when we stretch out to the fifty year mark.

4. To the question, what does this revel about the values of Catholics?, I say it's a pretty good indication that vanity and superficiality are not as strong as one might suspect in the 'every day' Catholic. When you examine the people that run the most popular Catholic blogs and web pages, for instance, you see a great deal to be admired - people like Stephen Graydanus, Mark Shea, and Jennifer Fulwiler, etc. Generally the problem with 'Catholic blogs' is that they are venues for armchair critics. The worst part of this is not that evils are called evils, it's just that they are often done with complete disregard for the pastoral complexities involved in running the Church, the parish, the university, the school, etc. These people jump to conclusions, take things out of context, impose motives on people without sufficient knowledge. But according to my lists here I'd say that that's not what we want in our 'Catholic celebrities' - good for us! Let's keep it up.

Finally, a special thanks to Mr. Kevin Knight for putting my previous post on NewAdvent. It massively increased traffic to my blog and allowed me to meet all of you! Stop by again! I'll try to keep things interesting for you.

Catholic All-Stars

2011-05-25T19:12:00.002-04:00

* While I object in principle to such things... I am going to violate my conscience for sake of science, and offer a (mildly) scientific study of a vain question:

Who are the Catholic All-Stars of the last 25 years?

By this I mean, according to Google, which names generate the greatest number of results among Catholic apologists / evangelists / prelates?

This would exclude such tedious bandying to genetic Catholics like the Kennedys, etc. Also, I have excluded certain personae non gratis like Curran, Kung, and even Mel Gibson, for these people cannot be considered crusaders for Catholicism by any stretch of the imagination.

25 Year All Star Ranking:

John Paul II - 8,350,000
Mother Teresa - 7,090,000
Benedict XVI - 7,040,000
Raymond Arroyo - 4,730,000
(Henry) Graham Green - 3,640,000
Father Aidan Nichols - 3,080,000
Cardinal Raymond Burke - 2,920,000
Cardinal Pell 1,610,000
Fr. Raymond d'Souza - 1,320,000
George Weigel - 1,140,000
Mother Angelica - 850,000
Scott Hahn - 829,000
von Balthasar - 812,000
Cardinal Dulles - 592,000
Richard John Neuhaus - 459,000
Cardinal Levada - 431,000
Rocco Palmo - 383,000
Fr. Benedict Groechel - 332,000
Archbishop Vincent Nichols - 300,000
Peter Kreeft - 290,000
Cardinal Ouellet - 263,000
Fr. Corapi - 242,000
John-Henry Westen - 241,000
Damian Thompson - 227,000
Henri De Lubac - 192,000
Cardinal Arinze - 178,000
Cardinal Christoph Schonborn - 138,000
Ralph McInerny - 118,000
Father Zuhlsdorf - 58,700

There are some surprises in this list - such as Arroyo's very high rank. Most of these surprises are due, no doubt, to the peculiarity of a Google-type search. For instance, googling theologyofdad yields an astonishing 2,850,000 results, while searching with quotes, "theologyofdad" a mere 9. Again, keep in mind that these are English language searches.

To these we could add some so as to make the 'fifty-year hit list,' adding such as

J. R. R. Tolkein - 6,300,000
Flannery O'Connor - 1,670,000
John XXIII - 1,420,000
Etienne Gilson - 948,000
Fulton Sheen - 616,000
Jacques Maritain - 465,000

It's all very selective, of course, as I have little else to go by than my own recollection to decide who to search for. And, my searches are no doubt influenced by the fact that my Google setting is for 'Ottawa.' As such, I get more results for Archbishops Thomas Collins and Terrence Prendergast than for Timothy Dolan.

It's all for fun anyway.

BTW, Jesus yields 428,000,000 results. Mohammad only 74,400,000. Buddha only 66,200,000.

Victoria Day Miscellany

2011-05-23T09:04:00.001-04:00

1. Don't forget to tell me what you think about the idea I have to join the Conservative Party. (See previous post.)

2. Is this a time to rejoice or a time to despair re. the state of the Church today? There was a long editorial-type piece on Lifesite last week on dissent in the Church by Mr. Hoffman, focusing on John Allen's role in it. See it here. I was left with the impression that this article is sadly out of date. Hey, we've won all the important battles. Bishops, priests have all been chastened away from 'the spirit of Vatican II' to the actual faith, and have been reminded there are people watching, and one of these people is the Holy Father. And then... I went on 'Campus Notes' on my blog roll and read story after story of Catholic universities supporting this same-sex thing and that pro-abortion politician... I guess I owe a apology to Mr. Hoffman for my mental crime against him. Alas. But of course, I still maintain that things are very much better than, say, the 90s when the voice of the obscurantists was so much stronger than it is now. No one doubts what the Church stands for now after the pontificates of JPII and BXVI. Those who speak of 'the times they are a-changin' are now greeted with just disdain. Speaking of just disdain:

3. Yes, you are so smart, not like those end-of-the-world-on-May-21st people! I laugh - not at the predictors - but at those who were so intent on them being wrong. What is the proper attitude to all things childish? The paying of no attention. What would you make of someone getting in a shouting mass with an 8-year old over the age of the world or with someone suffering from schizophrenic delusions over the true identity of the Anti-Christ? Embarrassing. A friend once said to me, "Answer the ignorant with silence." Good advice.

4. I am reading Blessed J H Newman's Idea of a University again after the previous read c. 10 years ago. Expect numerous boring references to this amazing work in days to come on thetheologyofdad. The last time I read it I was in my last semester of course work for the PhD. and was simultaneously taking a reading course on Newman and a course on Lonergan's Method in Theology. I must have driven the instructor of the latter course nuts with reflection paper after reflection paper on how much better Newman was than Lonergan! I don't hate Lonergan - don't get me wrong (he's better than Rahner!) - but he's no Newman, and many of his basic positions re. theology are completely untenable.

5. I still have no idea about interest - money interest, that is. Take my house, for instance, or my credit card (eek!). My house is mortgaged at 4 point something percent. Why then will I buy my house twice by the time it is paid off? Do I owe them 4% of my house every year? If my house were worth $100,000, then I would owe them $4,000 every year on interest, right? And, if it's mortgaged over 20 years then it's $4,000 x 20 (although as the principle diminishes, the $4,000 diminishes). If my credit card balance is $10,000 and the interest rate is 14%, then I owe them $1,400 each year? Makes sense to me. Did I get it right?

6. Super-kudos to my friends, Patrick and Jenna Craine, on the birth of their second child last week. Isaiah Brendan Joseph. Mother and baby seem very well. (I love those guys!)

Make sure to pray for all dead Protestants too!

Should I Join the Conservative Party?

2011-05-21T12:35:00.004-04:00

I feel like someone who buys the cap of a team that just won the Superbowl.

Don't get me wrong, if the Party ever came out as formally for abortion I would drop them like a hot potato. That seems very unlikely now, or - if were are to believe those who say that the pro-life position is becoming ever more popular - ever. I get that there are strong pro-choice elements within the Party - they are everywhere. But they do not dominate, it appears.

I don't know why this has been coming into my mind more and more, but it did precede their win - honest!

A friend of mine is active in the Party, and she inspires a confidence in me that one can be a part of it and a serious Catholic.

Yet when you look at the stats this was an election of one polar opposite against another. Conservatism is a viable option against what had appeared for so long to be an unassailable socialist, feminist, homosexualist mindset. As I've said, the leftist dominate Canada. The government is Conservative only because there are three leftist parties splitting the vote. But the Conservatives do represent at least 30 percent of Canadians. I voted for the Reform back then, I vote for the Conservatives now. So, if I vote for them, why not just go one step further?

My reasons are my reasons for never joining any other organization than the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. But is this determinative? Are my reasons solid? Actually, I don't have reasons, I just have hesitations.

Why not make my voice heard in the Party on issues of life and family, freedom and justice?

This is the part where I welcome feedback.

Summer Means Boring My Readers with Yard-Shots

2011-05-20T10:11:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned last post - it has been a very rainy week, but not quite as bad as it was forecast. The grass has grown up long and thick, so I'll have to cut it today. We are promised a two or three day stretch of mainly sun.

This is the most trammelled pathway in our yard, that which runs from the backdoor to the driveway. It is a mud-mess in the spring, so I put in this walkway to deal with that. It was more work than you'd think. But it looks nice and I'm sure will be worth all the effort.

A beautiful sky. The moment when they were finally opening up after several days.

All parents cringe when they see barefooted children (two in their pajamas) planting grass seed and watering.

Moustache-man surveys his works from his lawn chair, declaring them just and right.

Assorted Biographical Thoughts to Aid in my Self-Obsession

2011-05-17T23:45:00.000-04:00

1. I changed the description of me to the left of this blog. I was sitting at my desk at work and Sarah-Grace's Father's Day card from last year caught my eye. She has said there everything that's important about me better than I could. So there it is. If I could live up to that card - not the actions detailed in it but the love signified by it - then that would be a live well-lived, wouldn't it?

2. Feeling overwhelmed at the start of my summer? Yes. I was biting off more academia than I could swallow. Just small bites, Kerr.

3. The forecast for this week has got to be the worst ever: rain for the next 5 days, more or less. Oh well. Grow grass, grow.

4. If I had all the money in the world, tomorrow I would: a) visit my grandfather at his old age home in New Brunswick. He's actually in the hospital at the moment. Please pray for my wonderful grampa! b) go to listen to the Holy Father's Wednesday address (since tomorrow is Wednesday), c) go to Kenya, thank them for their wonderful (best!) coffee and hand out wads of cash to the children, d) spend a night in some hotel in Rome with Anne-Marie, and eats spades of pasta - wouldn't I be tired and hungry after all of that? So New Brunswick to Rome to Kenya back to Rome all in one day.

5. Short of that (4), I live in a great town, with rain (3), it's summer break (2) and I'm a part of a wonderful family (1). There you go.