Reading in Exile

Today, at my family's beloved parish of St. Agnes , we had a lovely Corpus Christi procession, after Fr. Mark Pavlak's first Mass, set to Mozart's Mass in C Major . Today, on the streets of St. Paul, our God walked among us, radiant in His beauty, arrayed for love and battles. What joy there is in a Eucharistic procession, to walk in the ranks of Our Lord, to follow behind Him as a member of His army with my fellow soldiers, singing his praises, or to walk before Him as my eldest daughter did, sprinkling rose petals before His Sacred Feet. What unity with all Christendom, past, present, and future, I felt, walking as a foot soldier in that marvelous pilgrimage. I can put my feelings no better than Dom Gueranger did, in his Liturgical Year , quoting Fr. Faber at length: "But to us Catholics, faithful adorers of the Sacrament of love, Oh! the joy of the immense glory the Church is sending up to God this hour! verily as if the world was all unfallen still...How many glo...

Since the beginning of my philosophical life, I have been interested in the the question of whether individuals are intelligible in and of themselves. You might think they aren't, and, if you thought this, you'd be in good company. You might think that when you get to know an individual, you know it only by considering it through various universal concepts--that is, concepts that apply to many things. You might think, for example, when you get to know another person, you come to know him not as intelligible in and of himself, as this unique individual, but inasmuch as he is kind, is intelligent, loves Indian food, is tall, is a reader of Jane Austen, etc. The uniqueness one sees in him is just the unique combination of these (potentially infinitely) many attributes. I don't think that view is right, but it's hard to articulate why. I've tried to do so in some of my professional writings, arguing, for example, that we see the unique intelligibility--where we unders...

I've recently been asked to write two papers, one on Max Scheler's theory of value perception for a forthcoming volume from Oxford University Press on spiritual perception, and the other on Dietrich Von Hildebrand for a special issue of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly . This has led me, especially during the last week, to revisit a lot of material I haven't looked at closely in some time. While I've dealt with these thinkers in my  papers on personalism , I haven't concentrated on Hildebrand  since my undergraduate days at Franciscan University of Steubenville , and not on Scheler  since I was working on my dissertation. In my professional writing, I've focused more recently on Thomistic metaphysics, especially the Thomism of the 16th and 17th centuries, and on more contemporary French phenomenology. It's been quite a treat this week revisiting in a focused, daily way, this older, more realist, more German phenomenology. The fundamental idea...

Today, the Church celebrates the Feast of Corpus Christi; indeed, not only is today given over to the celebration of the most holy Body and Blood of Our Lord, but the next seven days as well, after which we shall be presented with the holy mystery of Our Lord's Sacred Heart (to which my family is consecrated.) To receive a Sacrament is to be initiated into the power and energeia, the activity, of God. I know that I too often think of the Sacraments, even the Blessed Sacrament, occasionalistically--that is, I think of my reception of the Sacrament just as an occasion for God to act upon me, rather than thinking of the Sacrmanet as really having the causal power to bring about God's power and activity in me. But God's action upon us is nearly always mediated by creaturely causality. And in the Sacraments God does not just act upon us in the way He does in all natural events, moving creaturely causes to their natural activities as the primary cause of all creaturely events ...

You might think that this disqualifies me from calling myself a classic film aficionado, but up until last night I had never seen a French New Wave film. Recognizing my deficiencies and wishing to rectify them, I watched with my wife last night Francois Truffaut 's Les quatre cents coups (which is translated into English literally as The 400 Blows ), which I recommend to you all. My serious resolution to engage in the intellectual life dates to when I read The Stranger by Albert Camus. Meursault's disconnection from the reality that others so easily navigate, his estrangement from ordinary morality, the way in which he drifts, meaninglessly but more or less happily through life: all these impacted me immediately and in a way that has shaped my entire outlook since then. Ever I have felt the lurking absurdities of the world: I too could slay a man for no reason. Faith, reason, civilization, tradition are thin bulwarks, but bulwarks that must be defended, that I must defend,...

I've been slowly (the way I seem to read everything) reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest since December, and the other night I reached the chapter, about half-way through, where Joelle Van Dyne/Madame Psychosis explains to Don Gately why she always wears a veil. In the world of the novel, veils are worn by the members of the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed. Earlier in the novel, Madame Psychosis spent an entire episode of her radio programme listing out ways in which one could be hideously or improbably deformed. But she's not deformed; rather, she is so beautiful that anyone who sees her becomes obsessed with her, longing to be with her, seeing her as what will fulfill all of their desires. She is so beautiful that, in her words, her beauty is a deformation. When philosophers, especially Catholic philosopher, talk about beauty, it's often in glowing terms. Beauty is what is ordered, proportionate, splendid; what pleases when seen ; it is the r...

We're coming to the end of lilactime here in The Cities. For the last few weeks, the lilacs have been a burst of purple on every corner, on the border of my garden, on the quad at school. There's one yard in particular that I pass walking from my car to my office that is rank with overgrown lilacs, its scent wafting far up the street, especially in the evening. The lilacs that emerge everywhere along with the first signs of the full, mature green of summer, after the early, impressionistic dusting of chartreuse on every branch, are for me the image of late spring. It is easy to believe in the love, the eros , that draws the sun and the other stars, when there are lilacs out. This time of Spring is, as everyone knows, the time of attraction. The German phenomenologist Max Scheler describes how many in the early twentieth century held that all life forms a single substance, driven by a single interior vital force, which we, who as Spirits rise above the pulsing stream of life,...

I'm beginning this blogging exercise on Trinity Sunday , which I think is an auspicious day for an Anglophile like me. This exercise is meant to help me write a little everyday, to establish more regular writing habits during this summer, and to help me write on topics other than those I'm currently writing on professionally. I hope some of you will read along with me, and offer your own thoughts on what I say here. I'm starting with what will probably be a longer post that what I'll normally write, but I wanted to get some thoughts out here about some directions I think I'll be taking my thoughts on this blog. Over the last year, I've become involved in an ongoing research project on spiritual perception --that is, the sense-like perception of God and other spiritual things. It seems obvious to me that many people spiritually perceive--that is, that many people see or hear or taste God, whether in Himself or in created things. But I'm currently perplexe...