I haven't started reading it yet. Any reactions?
In Honor of Lumen Fidei
60 responses to “In Honor of Lumen Fidei”
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It’s really good!
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I kept wanting to put whole paragraphs on FB and I had to say to myself, stop, stop.
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I did see one excerpt there and and thought it was impressive. I’ll probably read it over the weekend.
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Grumpy, I had no idea your ‘Beauty’ book had anything to do with the Fugitives. A friend gave me an old review copy last night (he used to write for Touchstone way back when) and I was skimming it and was excited to see those references! I have a nice collection of books by and about them, and I actually have a copy of ‘God Without Thunder’ waiting for me in the UK — A friend is bringing it back. One of the books I enjoyed reading the most in the last few years is ‘Fugitives’ Reunion,’ which documents their 35th anniversary convocation at Vanderbilt, and transcribes the discussion sessions. Great stuff — lots of insight into both the poetics and the cultural criticism.
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To think I came this close to going to Vanderbilt…
Looks like I may not get a chance to read Lumen Fidei this weekend after all. -
Do you have to read Lumen Fidei online, or are print copies available?
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I see Ignatius Press is offering a hardback, but not available till mid-August. Oh wait, here’s a paperback at Amazon, apparently available now.
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Grumpy, don’t know if you saw my comment above from the wknd about your book and the Fugitives…
Thanks, Mac. I’ll probably borrow the encyclical from one of my (many) Catholic friends. Btw, I just bought Fr. Schall’s little book on the Regensburg lecture. Haven’t had time to look at it yet, though. -
Hi Rob, I just saw your comment now. Don’t know how I missed it before. I loved the Fugitives and writing about them. I think the book has two chapters on them, no? I wrote it wooh, mainly in 1985-1989, when I got my PhD. Then I was teaching in colleges and trying to get it published for six years. So I wrote it twenty five years ago! It came from spending a year in Dallas, where I was taught by Louise Cowan. When I started teaching, I couldn’t teach much of that stuff. For a start, most of it is not in print (like God without Thunder! Or The Glory of Hera!). Eventually for a few years I was able to teach Flannery O’Connor, when I taught in a college that had a course on Christianity and the Arts. I loved teaching that course! But then I got my first University job, and a course on Christianity and the Arts was not welcome in a Presbyterian divinity department, in those days. So I had to leave it all behind and become more of a theologian.
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It was getting the book published finally, in 1995, which got me the University job, which led to my no longer being able to teach the Fugitives. Which is ironic.
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Well, that’s fascinating. I guess I had always sort of vaguely wondered about that mix of lit & theo in your background.
As a southerner, I’m embarrassed by how little I know about the Fugitives. I guess I slighted them when I was in Literature School because I wasn’t convinced that Americans could write. -
Must’ve been quite an experience studying under Louise Cowan. She knows that whole Fugitive/Agrarian thing really well.
I’ve just discovered the Southern poet Wilmer Mills, who passed away in 2011 at the age of 41. He studied with Andrew Lytle at one point.
Mac, there’s a good anthology of the Fugitives’ poetry available, edited by William Pratt. Has a good intro too. And Glenn Arbery’s recent ISI book ‘The Southern Critics’ is worth getting for a selection of the prose. -
Speaking of Glenn Abery, the three books by Prof Cowan’s students, published by the Dallas Institute, on Comedy, Tragedy and Epic are worth reading.
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Grumpy, it turns out that you and I have a mutual friend: David Mills. He and I were out for drinks last night (he’s in town visiting his old Pittsburgh haunts) and your name came up in connection with LODW. He said that you were up there not long ago for some sort of symposium or something.
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Mills’s work with Touchstone was always excellent. I think he was about my favorite writer there. I don’t run into him that often since he left. I know he’s with First Things but it isn’t one of my regular reads.
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Yeah, I’ve met David Mills a few times at FT events. He’s a super person. I kept trying to persuade him to force Mac to write for FT all the time.
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Yes. Then I would enjoy my ROFTers group more.
I basically quit reading Touchstone when Mills left.
AMDG -
For some reason the Ignatius Press edition of Lumen Fidei is only being sold in the United States. That leaves those of us in the scorched outer regions of the earth feeling rather forlorn.
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I’m afraid your efforts haven’t panned out, Grumpy. Nobody’s tried to force me to write for anything. I did have one piece in Touchstone when Mills was still there.
I still like Touchstone, Janet, although I might agree that it’s fallen off to some degree. Just got a new issue and there’s an article in there about Hilton Kramer. That should be interesting. The Wikipedia article on him is very inadequate but you can sort of get an idea. Not a Christian as far as I know. -
My guess, Craig, is that the Vatican is the problem with that. Or maybe the bishops’ conference. I can’t think why Ignatius wouldn’t want to sell their books everywhere. I was reading the other day about the Vatican and the bishops’ conference coming down hard on a blogger who posted the text.
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A PDF of it can be downloaded from the Vatican website: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/francesco/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20130629_enciclica-lumen-fidei_en.html
Or is that not the full text? -
I’m pretty sure that’s it. I was thinking I had mentioned it, actually, but I see I hadn’t.
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Grumpy, David was telling us that you had them laughing over some historian that’s written a bad book on the martyrs???
Touchstone did fall off somewhat after Mills left. My favorite writers there, Reardon, Esolen, and Hutchens, weren’t having things published as often, and I sort of lost interest. -
Would that be the book I’ve seen mentioned a few times recently which purports to prove that widespread Roman persecution of Christians didn’t actually happen? Can’t remember either the name of either book or author.
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Yes, I think that’s the one. I don’t know the author/title either.
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I know I can get the PDF, but reading at the computer is not my thing, and printing 80 pages uses a lot of ink (and annoys my wife). I’ll figure it out.
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That’s funny. I take it your wife does read on the computer? Casual very unscientific observation has led me to think it’s more often women than men who want to print things rather than read them on the computer.
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Yes, that’s a book called The Myth of Persecution
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She won’t sit at the computer and read either, but she has one of those tablets and reads from it. I’ve never tried that for a long document — mostly, I suppose, because she always wants it! — but also because I prefer paper.
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At that Vatican link, if instead of downloading the PDF file you instead print what’s on-screen, the print preview shows it’s just 21 pages rather than the 80+ in the PDF version.
I’m not at printer right now, so don’t know the quality. -
That might be worth trying. Thanks, Marianne.
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My wife has “one of those tablets,” too. She is very much attached to it. In principle it belongs to both of us, but in practice it’s hers. Which is ok, as I’m not that interested in it, beyond a certain isn’t-that-amazing appreciation.
I’m afraid I very much bored some strangers on Facebook (friends of a friend) the other day by responding with many details to a comparison of the iPhone as a computer to the computing power available to NASA in the 1960s. -
The Vatican site’s print version comes in at 28 pages incl. the endnotes. It’s very readable.
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Btw, Janet, the new Touchstone has a piece about…oh, heck, the name is escaping me…popular fiction writer with Christian themes…Dean Koontz.
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Ha. Yes, I was at a friend’s last night drinking a glass of wine and he walked up to me and put the magazine in my lap. I was going to say something about that later. So, I guess I’ll give Touchstone another look.
I’m afraid, though, that Koontz is losing some of that Christian emphasis. I didn’t care for his next-to-last book. I have the newest one now. So we will see.
AMDG -
I`d like to read that comparison, Mac. I am always most impressed by GPS systems: what an incredible technology! (Though I believe the GPS receivers in cell phones are not “real” GPS receivers — that is, they compute their co-ordinates from cell tower signals, not from satellites. Is that right?)
As for our tablet, we bought it about 18 months ago, and I think I’ve used it for only about 10 minutes. But my wife uses it every day (for work too), so it was a worthwhile purchase.
I printed the encyclical as Marianne and Rob suggested. It doesn’t look too bad at all. -
Okay. I started reading the magazine from the front. I haven’t gotten very far, but so far I’m not impressed.
AMDG -
You’re ahead of me. I still haven’t made it farther than halfway through the first piece. Can’t seem to find a moment to sit down with it.
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It’s just the first bit on homosexuality. I see what he is saying, and mostly agree with it, but I think he is saying it in exactly the wrong way.
AMDG -
I don’t remember whether it’s signed or not, but it seems to be in the very distinctively hard-nosed manner of S.M. Hutchens.
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That’s who it is.
AMDG -
You’re right, he says it very much in the wrong way. “There is no such thing as a homosexual Christian” will not be heard in the way he means it.
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I used to prefer Touchstone to FT. I haven’t seen it since David Mills went to FT, ie for ages. But I never liked the sometimes overbearing moralizing tone of it. I thought the problem was that it is a self-consciously ecumenical magazine, and what Orthodox, Catholics and Ps have in common is the ethics – so that tended to be relatively exaggerated.
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I guess that does partly explain it, although I don’t know that the articles are disproportionately about ethics…maybe, I’d have to look. But I remember you saying some time ago that it was very…I’ve forgotten what word you used, but something to the effect that it was very masculine. It wasn’t exactly a criticism but seemed to indicate a certain lack of enthusiasm.
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Yeah, I certainly would have said that. It’s the same thing, if you are going to get conservative Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox together, it’s going to be about the guy side of things.
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Re your first comment Grumpy, I would have said the same thing. And I think both magazines are very masculine. I think that Touchstone is more deliberately so, and that doesn’t really bother me, but it’s not always what I’m looking for.
I’m glad you see what I was getting at, Maclin.
AMDG -
Interesting that y’all see it that way. I hadn’t thought about it but now that you point it out, I agree.
I should probably take another look at FT, or at least look at their web site more often. Way back when it was pretty new (pre-web) I saw it occasionally and usually there was something in it I liked, but there was also usually a predominance of stuff that was too academic for me: detailed comparisons of two theologians or philosophers I’d never read, etc. So I never subscribed. -
Hey, Grumpy has an interesting looking article in the June/July issue of First Things. Just found a PDF of it in my local library’s online magazine database.
And it doesn’t look very masculine :). -
Cool. I’ll have to seek it out. I’m not sure if any of the libraries around here subscribe to the paper edition anymore.
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oh darn. I get the Kindle version and it disappears when the new one comes.
AMDG -
My wife doesn’t usually read Touchstone. This morning I was telling her about the Hutchens piece, preparatory to describing y’all’s reaction to it and general remarks about the mag. As soon as I stated Hutchens’s point, in more or less his terms, she bristled. And she is by no means in the homosexuality-is-fine camp.
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Of course she did. I always knew she was of the race that knew Joseph. 😉
AMDG -
She is that.
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“There is no such thing as a homosexual Christian”
Is this maybe a not very good translation? -
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/francesco/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20130629_enciclica-lumen-fidei_en.html
Oh wow! That is an improvement on their website, isn’t it? Glad the Ents at the Vatican finally got around to changing it! -
heh
No, that’s an exact quote or very close to it. But it’s out of context and even in context a bad way to put it. What he means is that you can’t simultaneously be a Christian and believe that homosexual activity is a good thing. Comes down to what the Church and a lot of other people say. But a terrible way to say it. -
Yes. It pretty much slams the door in the face of people who could be reached if you used other terms. A long time ago, I told a priest that I was a glutton, and he told me not to identify myself with my sin like that. That made a lot of sense to me. If I had been a person that was on the borders of the Church and he had said that I couldn’t be a glutton and a Catholic, I guess I might have left.
AMDG -
It will be interesting to see what reaction if any Touchstone gets to this piece.
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That “no such thing as a homosexual Christian” in context:
In 1 Corinthians 6, St. Paul gives vital clarification on a subject where there is much foggy thinking among those who ask questions like, “What should the Church’s approach to homosexual Christians be?” The apostolic answer is that there is no such thing as a homosexual Christian. There are brethren who struggle with various temptations, to be sure, and may on occasion fall to them before rising again. But believers who resist homosexual lust are not “homosexuals.” They are just Christians, as are the rest of us with our own besetting sins.
A pity about that sound-bite-heaven second sentence. The last two really say it all and I don’t think could be misconstrued. Of course, “lust” would probably give offense. Minefields all around.
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The biggest problem with it is that in everyday use “homosexual” means someone who is attracted to his/her own sex, whether or not he’s engaged in the activity. “sound-bite-heaven” indeed.
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