Jul
26
Hitchens is not Great, but He Thinks He’s God
July 26, 2007 | 1 Comment
I love this stuff. From a post at Taki’s Top Drawer by Tom Piatak:
The effectiveness of Hitchens’ book is also undermined by the large number of errors it contains, many so glaring that they will be picked up by even a casual reader with some knowledge of history and theology. The Gnostic gospels are [...]
Jul
25
The Follies
July 25, 2007 | Leave a Comment
In 1511 Erasmus wrote a wonderful little treatise called Encomium Morae, literally “Praise of Folly” but also a pun on the name of his friend, St. Thomas More (in medieval Latin, the final -ae of the word morae would have been pronounced the same way the final -e in the name “More” would have been [...]
Jul
24
Classical Metaphors
July 24, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Lee T. Pearcy has written a fine little review of Robin Waterfield’s recent Xenophon’s Retreat: Greece, Persia, and the End of the Golden Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), said review appearing in the online Bryn Mawr Classical Reviews (2007.07.41). He begins with some observations about the intersection between classical scholarship and contemporary culture:
This [...]
Jul
24
Space and Concepts of Space
July 24, 2007 | Leave a Comment
In his Physics, Aristotle, famously, denies that there can be such a thing as an actually infinite magnitude. That seems plausible enough, but he goes on to deny that anything can be actually infinite, which is a slightly more problematic claim. The most notorious example of the infinite, the continuum, was only potentially infinite for [...]
Jul
23
The God of the Philosophers
July 23, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Another item from the August/September issue of First Things not only caught my eye but impressed me as being, perhaps, the most interesting and thought-provoking thing I have ever read in that interesting and thought-provoking journal. It will come as no surprise to some of you that the piece can be found in the While [...]
Jul
14
Restraint and Moderation
July 14, 2007 | 2 Comments
The most recent issue of First Things has a nice essay by Henry Luke Orombi called “What is Anglicanism?” (August/September 2007, pp. 23-28). Orombi is the Anglican Archbishop of Uganda, and writes with both clarity and passion about the troubles besetting the worldwide Anglican Communion. Among the virtues of (authentic) Anglicanism that Orombi extols are [...]
Jul
13
Racism
July 13, 2007 | Leave a Comment
My daughter is African American, and this is something that gets noticed here in Athens County. There are relatively few African Americans here, even though there is a major university in this town whose president is also an African American who has explicitly stated his desire to increase “diversity” on campus, principally in the form [...]
Jul
13
The HTC Strikes Back!
July 13, 2007 | Leave a Comment
A few posts back I wrote about the high standards at Ohio University’s Honors Tutorial College. Less than twelve hours after publishing that post, two of the best HTC students I ever taught had written thoughtful and intelligent challenges to my position, which are worth reading. (My responses to them are, perhaps, less worth reading, [...]
Jul
12
Subsistence
July 12, 2007 | Leave a Comment
I was going to write a rather brief response to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s recent Letter clarifying the doctrine on the Church, but I see that Mike Liccione has already written a long one, so I will content myself to quote a passage from Mike’s post that I find particularly interesting:
When [...]
Jul
10
Why Not Pray for People?
July 10, 2007 | 1 Comment
Dr. Michael Liccione has some thoughtful and important things to say about the Pope’s new motu proprio, Summorum Pontificum regarding the use of the 1962 rubrics for Mass. I entirely agree with what he has to say there regarding the value of the old rubrics compared to the new when it is remembered that Vatican [...]