Philosophers & Saints

The Problem of Undertheorized Agrarianism in Most Actually Argued Localism

April 25, 2013

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]
That’s a terrible title for this post, I know. But hopefully it’ll make sense, if you actually make it to the end.
First of all, if any reader of this blog has missed out on…

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The Pythagorean Temptation

April 19, 2013

Berwyn, PA.… In his Degrees of Knowledge, Jacques Maritain argues that one central fault of the modern mind has been its propensity to think of mathematics rather than metaphysics as first philosophy. If we take number for the foundation of

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Ruthie Leming’s (and Rod Dreher’s) Little Way

April 8, 2013

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]
Rod Dreher’s 2006 manifesto, Crunchy Cons…, was an inspiration (and provocation) to many, on both the left and the right. It wasn’t that the book was a tremendous intellectual break-through or an entirely new

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On the Localism of the Spheres

March 13, 2013

I have a friend who is a cloistered Trappist monk and his current obsession is the ‘outer’ and decidedly non-sedentary goal of running a marathon (on the back forty of the monastic enclosure). The sense of accomplishment inspires him. In…

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Catholic Education Today: Scientiam Viarum Tuarum Nolumus

March 8, 2013

About a month ago I happened upon a copy of The Concord…, student newspaper of Bellarmine University. In particular my eye was caught by a letter to the editor whereby undergraduate Wesley Scott addressed a contraversial 4.9% tuition raise.

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An Ancient Legacy of Form: Guardini on Mastery and Nearness

February 26, 2013

Our dwelling place is the state not of nature but of culture.

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Faith, Wonder, and the Method

January 30, 2013

In Summa Theologica 2-2.1.4, Aquinas argues that every action can be understood in two ways: according to its order of intention–…the goal one has in mind when one acts, and aims to bring about by acting–as well as its

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Abstraction Rightly Understood

January 16, 2013

Part III in an ongoing series, Localism and the Universal Church. Read Part I, and Part II.
Berwyn, PA. …In the last installment of this series, I contended that an abstract conception of human nature has helped lead modern

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Glenn Beck Gives Utopia a Bad Name

January 15, 2013

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]
So Glenn Beck has proposed his grandest scheme yet: the construction of separate planned community, literally built around (in terms of architecture and overall design) the idealization (and arguably the idol-ization) of what he understands…

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Conservative Wisdom from an Original Radical

December 10, 2012

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]
Last Friday, Tom Hayden, co-founder of the Students for a Democratic Society, principal author of 1962′s Port Huron Statement (or, if you Big Lebowski fans insist, the compromised second draft), Freedom Rider, anti-war activist, social…

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Adam and Eve on the Porch: The Place of Majestic Man

November 13, 2012

Lately I’ve had the privilege of working through The Lonely Man of Faith (1965) by Joseph Soloveitchik (1903-1993), an influential Orthodox rabbi with deep ties to Yeshiva University and a series of secondary schools in New England and the New…

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Life Under Compulsion: The Billows Teaching Machine

November 6, 2012

This is Part III of a series of essays titled “Life Under Compulsion.” See Part I here and Part II here.
Charlie Chaplin is working on an assembly line. He tightens bolts with a pair of wrenches. He does this…

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What’s Paleo About Evangelicalism?

October 31, 2012

The Baylor University historian, Thomas Kidd, wrote a post recently in his regular column at Patheos about evangelicals who are neither liberal nor comfortable with the GOP. He referred to this group as “paleo evangelical” and mentioned that some of…

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Why the Christian Philosopher and Christian College Need Each Other

Botticelli, detail from St. Augustine in his Study

October 18, 2012

As Alasdair MacIntyre has shown, human knowledge is both “tradition-constituted” and “tradition-dependent,” as well as “tradition-transcendent.” And as he suggests in his latest book, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition, that institution most indispensable for the…

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Thought Control and Controlling Our Thoughts

September 21, 2012

Last evening I had the joy of taking a dozen-plus college students to the Abbey of the Genesee for the first of this year’s “Newman Community Book Discussion with Monks.” The Trappist monastery is just a few miles down the road…

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