Reading in Exile

This past weekend I attended a silent retreat based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, led by a priest and a brother from the order Miles Christi . It was an extraordinary experience (though, not having been on a retreat for 11 years, I have little to compare it to), and I strongly encourage all of you to go on a retreat like this, if you have the opportunity. You can see when and where the Miles Christi priests are preaching these retreats all over the country here . I'm very grateful to my wife and my cousin who each recommended that I go on this retreat. I hope that it has made a real difference in my life of prayer and seeking virtue. I wanted to share some thoughts after this retreat. The Spiritual Exercises are a series of meditations based around the life of Our Lord. But their aim, at least as they were preached this last weekend, is to evoke acts and affections of repentance and resolution to reform one's life. Too often I, at least, think about re...

I've been reading Alice Von Hildebrand's biography of her husband Dietrich . In December 1933, after he had fled from Germany and was living in Vienna, Dietrich Von Hildebrand gave a number of talks in Belgium and France, some of them explicitly in opposition to National Socialism. While in Belgium, he visited Zita, the empress of Austria and Hungary who had been deposed after the fall of the Empire at the end of World War One. Dietrich at the time was working closely with Englebert Dollfuss , the Chancellor of Austria, and one who was trying hard to implement the Catholic social teaching and corporatist political vision of Pope Pius XI on a national scale, as well as oppose Nazism and Communism. The situation is instructive for conservatives today: [Zita] favored Dollfuss' political vision, but as an archmonarchist and a member of the deposed Habsburg dynasty, she could no share her visitor's enthusiasm for his leadership. It was a strange situation for Dietrich von ...

My wife and I are embarked on a project to watch all of Shakespeare's plays, in the fine productions put out in the 1980's by the BBC . We just finished the three parts of Henry VI , which I have seen before, but which certainly bear many re-watchings (and re-readings.) I am always struck by the depiction of Joan of Arc in Henry VI Part One : not the visionary and saint of our now-familiar Catholic tradition, but a lascivious, power-hungry woman who calls on demons to come to her aid, who is willing to sacrifice herself to them for her country: Cannot my body nor blood-sacrifice Entreat you to your wonted furtherance? Then take my soul, my body, soul and all, Before that England give the French the foil. (Act 5, Scene 3) This is, of course, what one should expect from an English depiction of the saint. The fact that Shakespeare is writing in Protestant England makes no difference here; had Shakespeare been writing in more Catholic times, surely his depiction of Joan woul...

This question gets tackled frequently by various Catholic thinkers, bloggers, and apologists, and generally the answer is an unqualified "no". Indeed, frequently philosophically-inclined Catholics (and other Christians) express anger at those who say things like "now God has another little angel" in the context of a child's funeral. A conversation I had yesterday at a philosophy conference led me to mull this question over a bit, and my answer to this question is a qualified "yes". For this reason too, I don't think that people who say these things about the dead being angels should be corrected. Part of this issue is the question of what is meant by 'angel'. If by 'angel' one means a person who is necessarily immaterial--that is, a person who cannot have or be a body--then of course it is impossible for a human person to be an angel. You have or are (again, it depends on what you mean by 'have' and 'are' which is ...

On my family's road trips, we listen to audio books, to pass the time, and to amuse my wife and I and our children. We've taken a few trips in the last few weeks, and on them we listened to Little Women by Louisa May Alcott , and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson . Both of these books were among my favorites when I was a boy, and it's a pleasure now to share them with my children. When I read a book, I'm always sensitive to how it is trying to form me, especially how it's trying to form my worldview and my morals. I know that literature is not chiefly meant to be didactic (indeed, extremely didactic literature is boring) or like a work of philosophy, but is meant to be a thing of beauty. Nevertheless, one of the great extrinsic effects of literature is that it teaches us, it forms us, preferably without our even noticing. Human beings are called to greatness. My heart resonates before those books that show me this greatness. There is a place for books tha...

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I'm reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest . Wallace describes, rather plausibly (more so than, say, Camus' account of Don Juan in The Myth of Sisyphus ), the motivations for anonymous sex. The description comes in the midst of one of the character Orin Incandenza's many sexual encounters, which are always with women he names only as "the Subject", who are mostly young mothers: "It is not about consolation...It is not about conquest or forced capture. It is not about glands or instincts or the split-second shiver of leaving yourself; not about love or about whose love you deep-down desire, by whom you feel betrayed. Not and never about love, which kills what needs it. It feels...rather to be about hope, an immense, wide-as-the-sky hope of finding a something in each Subject's fluttering face, a something the same that will propitiate hope, somehow, pay its tribute, the need to be assured that for a mome...

The Western Catholic intellectual tradition is built as it were in layers of texts, with one writer commenting upon another, and then further writers commenting upon that one. Consider, for example, the following chain of commentaries: the Neo-Platonic philosopher Porphyry wrote his Isagoge , which was a commentary on and introduction to parts of Aristotle's logical texts (his Organon ); St. Boethius, in turn, wrote a commentary on the Isagoge , as well as on parts of Aristotle's Organon e.g. the Categories and the De interpretatione . Peter Abelard also wrote a commentary on the Isagoge as well as on various parts of the Organon , but his Isagoge commentary is in large part a commentary on Boethius' commentary on the Isagoge . Abelard in turn influenced later commentators on these logical works. To "comment" is to engage in a paradigmatically traditionary actitivty. It is not merely to merely explain the meaning of the text on which one is commenting. Rather, i...

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...