Author: Tim

• Peter Leithart: Virgil, on the tears of things…

  Leithart.com | Tears of things …in those tears Virgil expresses the the painful recognition – perhaps just beginning to dawn in the Roman period – of the costs of a peace won through the blood of victims. Those tears express the sense of waste of pre-Christian civilization – the waste of defeated victims every bit…

• The short life of the nation-state: 1789 to 1918 (Peter Leithart)

  Leithart.com | Pro Patria Mori The history of the modern nation-state, and the disillusionment with it, can be told as the story of changing responses to Roman-inspired patriotism, tinged with the rhetoric of Christian martyrdom and sacrifice. Simplifying to an extreme, the story of modern politics is about the resurgence (in France in 1789 or…

• Confessing Sin in Narnia, by Douglas Wilson

  Learning how to say you were wrong about something, and that you are sorry, is one of the most important lessons anyone can learn in his life. It is basically a question of learning how to be genuinely honest. And as such an important lesson, it is not surprising that the Narnia stories are full…

• Walker Percy: “A poor show.”

  This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you make of it and have to answer, “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should…

• “The other…embarks within the mind of the knower”

  Peter Leithart, on Milbank on Maritain: Leithart.com …knowledge pertains not to information, nor to representation, but rather to a particular state of being in which a creature, while remaining entirely within herself, is nonetheless so directly present to another creature that she in some sense becomes this other, while inversely, the other that was once…

• Quote: “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion”

  Note:  the link is broken.   So I don’t know who the writer is.   TCS Daily – We the Sheeple? Why Conspiracy Theories Persist   The Hermeneutics of Suspicion This is, in fact, part of why the medievals had the respect for authority that they did. They by no means believed in following authority “blindly” – indeed,…

• Tony Esolen: “…an egalitarian destroys the very things whose equality he asserts.”

  Touchstone Magazine – Mere Comments: All Flattened Things are Equal In academe, it is simply assumed by almost everybody that sex differences are at most superficial. To quote a coarse and not terribly perceptive female member of the Army: “The only thing the men can do that the women can’t do is urinate through a…

• Tony Esolen: “All Flattened Things Are Equal”

  Touchstone Magazine – Mere Comments: All Flattened Things are Equal All Flattened Things are Equal…how can Christians fail to see that equality and hierarchy are not necessarily contradictory, seeing that they have the examples of the obedience of the Son to the Father, and of the inner life of the Trinity itself? Which brings me…

• Unknown: To Replace A Lightbulb

  I stole this from somewhere. During a Eucharistic Congress, a number of priests from different orders are gathered in a church for Vespers. While they are praying, a fuse blows and all the lights go out. The Benedictines continue praying from memory, without missing a beat. The Jesuits begin to discuss whether the blown fuse…

• On Alienation, prompted by Jacques Ellul

  Quotes are from “The Ethics of Freedom”… The Bible often talks about the bondage of man…We read of the institution of slavery. We also find bondage to corruption, to the stoicheia of this world….The ending of formal slavery has softened the term. But the situation described remains the same. In our own age the equivalent…