Sunday Night Journal 2006
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St. Edith Stein 5 “When a person lacking faith reads Holy Scripture—for example for the purposes of philology or religious studies—he does not come to know God. he only learns how God is conceived in the Bible and by those who accept the Bible in faith…” Here is the story of what has gone wrong…
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St. Edith Stein 4 It’s the Fourth Sunday of Lent (“Laetare Sunday,” which has a bad way of turning in my mind into “Laertes Sunday”). I haven’t read nearly as much of my saint as I had planned, which is not surprising. But in my defense I can say that the amount of reflection provoked…
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St. Edith Stein 3 …we form words for the purpose of setting an image graphically before our eyes and doing it in such a way that it points beyond itself to what the words are meant to express mediately and what the images are meant to represent. (This and other quotations are from “Ways to…
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St. Edith Stein 2 Because Lent is a time for reflection, events naturally seem to line up so as to prevent one from doing much reflecting. This past week I made no more than a start at reading Edith Stein’s “Ways to Know God,” a somewhat lengthy essay in explication of the teachings of Dionysius…
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Edith Stein 1 For some time now I’ve been wanting to study the writings of St. Edith Stein, or, as she is formally known, Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. I prefer to think of her as Edith Stein; it makes her seem no less holy, and closer to our earthly life, and, specifically, closer…
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Staying Put The extremely interesting discussion of so-called “crunchy conservatism” continues at National Review Online. These folks obviously have a lot more time for such talk than I do, and I can’t keep up with it, but I was struck by an exchange lamenting the unfortunate tendency of people to move away, often very far…
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Something Broken I’ve been intrigued by the question of the psychological differences between men and women since the attempt to deny their existence which was mounted by the feminist eruption of the early ‘60s and ‘70s. I took that attempt seriously for a while, but it soon became clear that the movement had two impossible…
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The Chilly Cocoon of Materialism I’m still thinking about that Paul Bloom piece in The Atlantic that I wrote about last week. What’s most striking about it is Bloom’s determination to hang on to the doctrine that materialistic natural selection is responsible for everything in human nature even as he admits that his own research…
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Wired for Belief We—my wife and I—subscribe to too many magazines. We don’t have time to read them all, and the time we do spend on them leaves too little for reading books. Magazines are by nature bound up with current events and therefore create a certain pressure on one to read them within a…
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The Social Justice Challenge One of the unhappy effects of the attack from within the Church itself on Catholic doctrine is a tendency for the orthodox to be almost as much occupied with preserving the faith as with practicing it. I think it is becoming possible for us to move past this, now that the…
Light On Dark Water 