Implementing Laudato Si – Bethany Land Institute integrates environment and economics in Uganda. Restoring God’s Creation (Notre Dame University)
The Rise of the Biomedical Security State – Every few years a book comes along…that hits a cultural nerve and mustn’t be ignored; that combines elegantly lucid writing with vital and timely content. Understanding the New Abnormal (First Things)
Courting Polygamy – It wasn’t a “drafting error” when a New York judge recognized polyamory late last month. NY Judge: The ‘Time Has Arrived’ to Legalize Polygamy (Washington Stand)
False Context – A photo appearing to show a Catholic priest standing at an altar has been shared thousands of times in social media posts in Hindu-majority India about a “Father Anthony Fernandes” who converted to Hinduism. The picture, however, has been shared in a false context. Picture shows scene from Polish TV series, not Catholic priest converting to Hinduism (AFP Fact Check)
Taiwan Pilgrimage – Exploring the less visited areas of the sleepy island off the coast of Keelung, starting with the ruins of a 1626 Spanish church that was recently opened to the public. A brief look at 400 years of Taiwan’s history on Heping Island (Taipei Times)
Metaphysics and Theology – “The deepest problems with our political order are not themselves political but metaphysical and theological.” Are We Postliberal Yet? (NewPolity)
Vaccine Misinformation – “Like so many other “fact-checking” efforts, I observed, CatholicFactChecking.com presented a completely one-sided view” Checking up on the Catholic fact-checkers (Catholic Culture)
Gender Idealists – “The left doesn’t just want you to deny biology in the present. They want you to ignore that it was ever valued as reality in the past.” The Left’s Trans Agenda Is All About Erasing The Past To Control The Future (The Federalist)
Extreme Censorship – It took the administration at St. Vincent College only hours to cave to the woke mob, which was comprised of a handful of students and alums, an activist board member, and some local agitators. What Happened At Saint Vincent College Demonstrates the Moral Collapse of Higher Education (Spectator)
Ideological Colonization – “Villanova University has decided to pressure its faculty, staff, and students into complying with a view of gender identity out of step with its Catholic mission.” A New Kind of Orthodoxy at Villanova University (Real Clear Education)
Famous American Scientists – Last spring, I gave a talk at St. Vincent College on “Black Privilege and Racial Hysteria in Contemporary America.” It went exactly as you’d expect it to go. White Guilt and Black Science (Newsweek)
Pro-Life Event Canceled – Up until two weeks ago, the Brink Lounge was one of the few venues in Madison where you could host a pro-life event. Theology on Tap Falls Victim to Woke Mob in Madison (MacIver Institute)
Catholic Football – Former Pope John coach Brian Carlson convened a meeting of his fellow non-public colleagues to pitch them the concept of a national Catholic football league and found interested parties. He called it the National Catholic High School Football Association and wrote a motto: “Family, Faith, Football.” Should there be a national Catholic HS football league? It may happen someday (NorthJersey.com)
History and Tradition – Considered the gold standard of constitutional interpretation, originalism is a philosophy that has been adopted by Supreme Court justices like Amy Coney Barrett, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas (all Catholics, by the way). Originalism: A Catholic Constitutionalism (Crisis Magazine)
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In Metaphysics and Theology (item #6), Michael Hanby concludes this about rebuilding (not simply restoring) access to reality: “It will mean keeping alive the memory of what it has meant to be human and coming to terms with the real depths of what we no longer believe, that its ubiquitous presence might be rediscovered in the longing engendered by its apparent absence.”
On this insight, and as an aid to “memory”, Whittaker Chambers offered this:
“It is idle to talk about the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth”(Whittaker Chambers, author of “Witness,” 1952; in a letter to William Buckley, August 5, 1954, in the collection “Cold Friday,” 1964).
@Metaphysics and Theology. De Lubac’s view, “If traditionalism is a kind of ‘extrinsicism from above’ that pretends to view history from without and thereby fails to comprehend it, historicism is a kind of ‘extrinsicism from below’ that eliminates every form of transcendence—God, being, nature, an ontological conception of truth—from both its apprehension of the world and its order of intellectual operations” has similarity to Blondel although appears the more concise, apparently viable insight [as compared to a presumably more liberal minded Blondel who advocates a middle position].
Extrinsicism is emphasis on external praxis to the detriment of comprehending the principles determining praxis. As de Lubac perceives historicism’s elimination of God, being et al and Hanby in politics. Old hand Krauthammer understood this, “Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians” (Charles Krauthammer Things That Matter).
Although I believe Hanby may have got it wrong. If he perceives traditionalism to include a traditional theological political posture. A true traditional [person] is the opposite of the definition of extrinsicism. Because it’s the very comprehension and living interiorly principles that motivate his practice.
@”There is no hope for it, that is, unless we are able to ‘comprehend on our own time on thought’ in the light of a truth, a Logos, that transcends all times” (Hanby). Michael Hanby is clearly correct. Although, the impression is his favor of Maurice Blondel’s middle road extrinsicism and historicity.
While his final commendation is correct, a renewal of the Catholic mind, that does not require an ingenious intellectual diagram, ‘to comprehend on our own time on thought’. Rather, simply put, all that’s required is actually being Catholic.