Devra Torres

Diversity: Reclaiming a Buzzword

Apr. 19 at 12:29pm

God is clearly fond of diversity.

Last week, I posted about the striking variety in personality, temperament, talents and style among Catholic priests.  Several readers noted the same individuality among the saints. 

But is it just the Church?  Reader (and friend) Jessica Essolen pointed to a Baptist minister and a Jewish philosopher who display plenty of flourishing individuality.  And what about those Catholic "reductionists" we all know who misguidedly promote particular devotions or styles or images as the only authentic piety?  (Steven Greydanus has some worthwhile thoughts on the subject.)

So, it's true: on the one hand, some Catholics do act as if they had very little use for …

Katie van Schaijik

Von Hildebrand’s view of love

Apr. 19 at 9:52am

One of the students in my courtship class has just brought to my attention a great primer on von Hildebrand's philosophy of love, happiness and sexuality, by his long-time student, colleague, and friend, William Marra, who died in 1998.

Dr. Marra, who taught philosophy at Fordham University for more than 40 years, had a winning warmth and down-to-earth simplicity and humor that are lamentably rare in philosophy professors.

Here are three paragraphs from the article, to give a taste.  But do read the whole thing, which convey the von HIldebrandian essence in an especially lively and accessible way.

Scattered throughout von Hildebrands works are many references to the great errors that …

Jules van Schaijik

Silence

Apr. 17 at 3:45pm

Today, on Facebook, Mark Griswold quotes Archbishop Chaput on the importance of silence:

We need silence, more than anything… If people can create some time every day — even just an hour — when they eliminate all the distracting noise of American life, their spirit will naturally begin to grow. Daily life in the United States is so filled with appetites and tensions stimulated by the mass media that turning the media off almost automatically results in deeper and clearer thinking. And that interior quiet can very easily lead us to God. (As far as I can Google, this interview from 2007, about how to live Lent well, is the source.)

This brings to mind a thought from Max Picard, whose book …

Devra Torres

Catholicism and Personalism: Not Such Strange Bedfellows

Apr. 11 at 6:18pm

Something in Catholicism seems to foster a flourishing personality. This was my family's distinct impression upon converting from evangelicalism. (That conversion was a major subplot of our altogether uninventable family microcosm of salvation history, recounted by my mother, Marilyn Prever, in Honey from the Rock. But that's a story for another day.)

How is it, though, that a church that proclaims that truth is fixed and unchangeable, and that some actions are just plain intrinsically wrong—indeed, a church that claims for itself a certain immunity to error (under carefully defined conditions)—turns out to be so congenial to the flourishing of each person's inner freedom? You might not …

Katie van Schaijik

Alice von Hildebrand comparing compassion, pity and mercy

Apr. 5 at 8:47am

Jules recorded these very personal and moving remarks on a recent visit.  Good food for Holy Week reflection.

Katie van Schaijik

The interior sufferings of Our Lord

Apr. 5 at 7:54am

The hallmark of personalism is its focus on interiority.  This may explain why I have never yet been able to bring myself to watch Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.  I've tried more than once, since so many of my friends recommend it.  But I've found the depiction of the brutality of Jesus' physical sufferings not just disturbing, but somehow distracting. They yank me away from sorrowful reflection on the inward drama taking place.

Nothing helps me enter the mystery of the Passion like Newman's sermon on "The Mental Sufferings of our Lord in His Passion." He reminds me that the interior agony in the garden was the "first act" of His oblation, "the seat of the suffering" Jesus …

Jules van Schaijik

Kierkegaard in search of solitary individuals

Apr. 2 at 8:07am

Our next two reading circles, on April 21 & May 19, are on Kierkegaard's Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing. It is a great book, worth reading slowly and reflectively. As Kierkegaard says in the preface:

It is in search of that solitary "individual," to whom it wholly abandons itself, by whom it wishes to be received as if it had arisen within his own heart; that solitary "individual" whom with joy and gratitude I call my reader; that solitary "individual" who reads willingly and slowly, who reads over and over again, and who reads aloud — for his own sake.

This kind of reading is not easy for contemporary men and women. All the more reason to make the effort. And, hopefully, doing it …

Michael Healy

The Transcendent and the Practical Perspectives on Life—I

Mar. 28 at 11:29pm

We are all immersed in the practical, “workaday” world since we all have pressing temporal needs each day—even the most contemplative monks!  Most of us, of course, are much more inundated by daily practical cares than are members of the contemplative orders, who arrange their lives specifically in such a way as to remind themselves regularly of the transcendent.  We have to attempt to do this too in a way compatible with our lay vocation in the world; but, we do have to try to transcend just everyday practical cares and worries—which threaten to sweep us along each day in only one perspective.  How can we do this and what is the nature of this transcendence? 

Spiritual considerations, …

Jules van Schaijik

Fr. Barron’s take on “The Hunger Games”

Mar. 28 at 5:46am

This morning, at national review online, I found this interesting article by Fr. Robert Barron on The Hunger Games. Using insights about the human tendency towards scapegoating, from Rene Girard, and about Christianity's role in eliminating it from western civilization, he suggests that the books/movie might be prophetic. In a post-Christian society, in which Christ can no longer take our sins upon his shoulders, who can?

The video below, nicely put together, covers the same ground as the article:

Michael Healy

ND prof says, “The immorality of birth control is no longer a teaching of the Catholic Church.”

Mar. 26 at 7:39pm

The philosopher Gary Cutting, possessor of an endowed Chair at Notre Dame, recently published in the New York Times a defense of Obama’s birth control mandate and an attack on the authority of the Catholic bishops. He argues the tired old case (as if its new—I’ve been hearing it for over 40 years) that because the majority of Catholics reject Humanae Vitae (forbidding artificial birth control, which as we know is often also abortifacient) therefore the bishops do not represent the Church and their “teaching” has no force. He says flat out, “The immorality of birth control is no longer a teaching of the Catholic Church.”

I was wondering how all this might look if transposed back about 2000 …

Michael Healy

The World of Work and the World of Leisure

Mar. 26 at 6:29pm

“We work in order to have leisure,” says Aristotle.  By this statement, he does not wish to undermine the importance of the workplace and of accomplishing great things there.  All the practical necessities of our lives depend upon responsible people working hard to satisfy the basic needs of society: food, shelter, clothing, etc.  Christianity confirms the moral relevance of such concerns by labeling them the corporal works of mercy and says that to help the widow, feed the orphan, etc., is Christianity pure and undefiled. 

However, what Aristotle is insisting on—and it is good to be aware of it in today’s world with its tendency to view all things, even people, in a merely utilitarian …

Jules van Schaijik

The Selfhood of Mary

Mar. 26 at 11:06am

Today's meditation in Magnificat is a good example of the sort of piety that may have been perfectly fitting for the Middle Ages, but that, in my view at least, is no longer quite right for now. Today we celebrate the solemnity of the Annunciation and so the meditation is about Mary, and about why she was so well suited to become the Mother of God:

Mary was rapt into God ... she was all moved and guided by him, being absorbed in his blessed will, intensely devoted to his honor—moved and guided by him as a tool in the hand of a workman. ... She was self-annihilated, will-less, passive, and without any longing except for God. And it was by reason of this state of her soul that God found an …

Katie van Schaijik

What’s wrong with opining

Mar. 21 at 9:02pm

The other night, watching an episode of Downton Abbey with Jules, I was struck by something the housekeeper, Mrs. Hughes, said.  Someone she'd been helping had come to a hard decision about her future and was seeking reassurance from Mrs. Hughes that she was doing right. "It's not for me to have an opinion about that," said Mrs. Hughes. 

It wasn't indifference; it wasn't false humility.  It was, rather, conscientious self-restraint, and it cost her some effort to exercise it.  It was an expression of a value that I think has been almost completely lost in our culture—the idea that I ought to try not to form, nevermind express, opinions about matters that are—objectively—none of my concern. …

Jules van Schaijik

Phenomenology and the art of persuasion

Mar. 20 at 8:39pm

Karol Wojtyla's most important philosophical work, The Acting Person, is not easy to read. So when I picked it up again recently, I decided to use a book by Rocco Buttiglione, a former professor of ours and a close friend and collaborator of Wojtyla, as a guide to better understand it. That was a good decision. (Though sometimes I feel the need for a third book to help me understand Buttiglione!)

So far I am re-learning some things about the way in which Wojtyla approaches his topic (the human person). This approach is so fruitful and so central to the mission of the Personalist Project, that I thought I should highlight at least 3 characteristic features of it.

1. Learning from the …

Katie van Schaijik

The Hunger Games

Mar. 20 at 8:43am

The other day my fourteen year old son asked whether he could go to see the new movie, The Hunger Games, with some friends. He'd read the book, he told me, and thought it really interesting.  He described it to me, and it sounded hideously unreal: an imagined life-and-death moral drama without God, and without any sense of eternity.  

Maybe it's not all bad, though, since today at Public Discourse, philosophy professor Stephen Heaney, uses the story as a jump-off point for a consideration of totalitarianism and bullying. He explains why the Obama administration cannot be content with birth control being freely available to all who want it, but must force all of us who object to participate …

Katie van Schaijik

To restore marriage, teach truth

Mar. 18 at 8:31am

Over at Public Discourse, David and Amber Lapp have a thought-provoking article about the decline of marriage among working class Americans.

They conducted interviews of young adults in southwestern Ohio and found reasons to be both concerned and hopeful.

Hopeful, because in spite of the “new normal,” most of the young adults who spoke to us do aspire to marriage, or at least to what marriage stands for in their minds—mainly love, fidelity, permanence, and happiness...

But sobering, because even as working class young adults dream of love, commitment, permanence, and family, they inherit a cultural story about love and marriage that frustrates those longings.

Katie van Schaijik

Purposeful emptiness

Mar. 15 at 3:58pm

For Lent I am reading Caryll Houselander's book about Our Lady, Reed of God. It deserves a long thoughtful post, but since I lack time for that, let me at least share one beautiful passage.

Emptiness is a very common complaint in our days, not the purposeful emptiness of the virginal heart and mind but a void, meaningless, unhappy condition.

Strangely enough, those who complain the loudest of the emptiness of their lives are usually people whose lives are overcrowded, filled with trivial details, plans, desires, ambitions, unsatisfied cravings for passing pleasures, doubts, anxieties and fears; and these sometiems further overlaid with exhausting pleasures which are an attempt, and always …

Jules van Schaijik

Bonus wisdom from Alice von Hildebrand

Mar. 12 at 12:38pm

Saturday morning, over breakfast, Alice von Hildebrand began telling me things she had meant to mention the evening before in her lecture on the role of the heart in human life, but hadn't. Thinking others might like to hear what she was saying, I started recoring. I captured two nuggets I thought especially worth sharing.

The first is on sentimentality as a perversion of the heart, and on Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a perfect example of it: click here to listen

The second, a bit longer than the first, is a beautiful philosophical and scriptural reflection on the meaning of nakedness: click here to listen

Another point came up in our conversation, which I didn't record, but want to add …

Josef Seifert

Does Freedom of Conscience not Matter if Obama pays? - AND Socrates’ Advice to Cardinal Dolan

Mar. 11 at 9:40pm

Socrates’ Advice to Cardinal Dolan: it is better for man to suffer injustice than to commit it.

Many concerned citizens, Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, Jews, Muslims, and even some atheists, have voiced their deep concern over the attack on the freedom of conscience and religion that we now suffer in the USA. Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, in his impressive letter of March 2, 2012, expressed his deep concern and shock, alluding even to the hard times which may expect the Catholic Church in view of the unbending and frontal attack on religious freedom by the Obama government. Also Pope Benedict has shown signs of deep alarm, saying to some US bishops during their ad limina …

Anna Halpine

What is authentic healthcare for women?

Mar. 9 at 12:27pm

Women’s reproductive health is a hot topic and claims about it are made freely. Given that, it’s worth pausing to reflect about the nature of the woman at the heart of these rights, and the type of health care that can best serve her and her needs.

Women’s health begins with respect for women. Caring for her reproductive health should not be a political agenda, manipulated to serve ideologies or ends. It should not be an agenda driven by profit, in order to sell women pills and commodities. It should not mask contempt for women, in an attempt to encourage her to give in to the urges or demands of men who do not care for her or treat her as a subject with dignity and rights. Authentic …