Category: My Commonplace Book

• Aslan: The Doctrine and Practice of Revelation

  “‘And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearances. Remember the signs and believe the signs. Nothing else matters . . .’”

• Douglas Wilson, on Eucharist: “You belong here. A place at this Table was purchased for you through the blood of Jesus Christ. He invites you to come and eat, come and drink. Come. We insist.”

  BLOG and MABLOG It is our custom, one that we believe to be scriptural, to practice insistent communion. That is, if you are here, and if you are baptized in the triune Name, then you must come. We insist. The Spirit and the Church together say come. We are not seeking to protect the Table…

• Our genes are selfish, but we can decide whether to evolve or not

  The Chronicle: 11/17/2006: The Social Responsibility in Teaching Sociobiology The logic in this discussion is so bad as to be maddening. If the gene is selfish, and there is no ethic other than what “emerges” from our biological selves, how can anybody else tell me what I OUGHT to do? Why should I not kill…

• 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…