Plato: a Theonomist

Charles Taylor, in Sources of the Self, contrasts Augustine and Plato by pointing out that Plato does not actually hold to “innate ideas” in the way that Augustine does.  For Plato, even memory is really a means to point one outside of himself to the prenatal vision of the forms.  Augustine, on the contrary, believes [...]

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Question

Is cynicism compatible with faith?

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For All Interested

If you’ll follow this link, you’ll notice that one of the speakers on Sept. 12 is me.  Of course if you’ve been following me over the last year or so, you know that I’ve been intensely concerned with Protestants leaving for Rome or Orthodoxy in their efforts to find tradition, catholicity, and all-around coolness.  I [...]

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Plato on Music

You always hear that Plato is a rationalist, the great promoter of brains in the sky.  He certainly didn’t want man’s emotions getting in the way, and thus he didn’t appreciate the arts or music.
I have some idea of where this came from, but it has to be said that it is demonstrably false.  Here’s [...]

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Cosmic Personalism

Hesiod.

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The Not-Quite “Modern” Luther

Charles Taylor, in his Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Idenity, rebuffs the sometimes-typical presentation of Martin Luther as the first “modern” man, having a personal crisis of faith and identity.  However interesting Luther’s case might be, it hardly measures up to our current questions of epistemology and meaning, for Luther still [...]

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Carl Schmitt on the Partisan

At the recommendation of Peter Escalante, I just read Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan.  It is a relatively short book, adapted from lectures given in 1963.  That date makes it pre-Middle East crisis, but much of what Schmitt says about “the partisan” can easily be applied to what we now call “the terrorist.”  For [...]

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Robust

Robust really is a silly word when used in the realm of theology.  I know that it is the cure for all things “static” or “Hellenistic,” but I’m not sure that it really has any meaning at all.
For instance, I recently heard someone speak of a theologian possessing a “robust doctrine of Hell.”  I thought [...]

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Finally a Sane Orthodox Thinker

I read this post a few years ago, but it was promptly taken down or moved, and I could no longer find it.  It is a very good exposition of the popular presentations of Eastern Orthodoxy and how they misrepresent both their own tradition and that of the ever-dreaded “West.”
Father Ephrem rightly smells the underlying [...]

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BVM in Birmingham, AL

So I was driving on I-10 this weekend in South Louisiana when I saw a billboard advertising this event.  The sign simply said “Apparitions of Mary: July 1-5″ and left an internet address.  I didn’t know what it was.  I thought that there was probably some sort of traveling museum exhibit on Marian visions or [...]

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