Category: Athens and Jerusalem
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Étienne Gilson on the Jewish Philosophers He Knew
Étienne Gilson (1884-1978) writing in 1962 about his experiences as a student at the Sorbonne circa 1900: . . . instead of resorting to philosophy for a better understanding of their religious faith, as Christian philosophers do, the Jews I have known have used philosophy to liberate themselves from their religion. Christians philosophize to identify…
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Athens and Jerusalem, Disagreement and Dogmatism: The Case of Gilson
Elliot in a comment from an earlier thread writes, . . . I mentioned negligence about the truth. Something similar seems to be the case regarding reasons and arguments. Folks might be interested in them (and even in weak ones) if they support a belief already held. But the same folks might turn away from…
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Philosophy and Christianity
Substack latest Ruminations on Ratzinger
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Jews and Christians Together
A reader of this blog recently opined, "And there isn't any "Judeo-Christian" anything: there is just Christian and Jew, and ne'er the twain shall meet." This provocative comment ignited some animated push-back from other commenters. And so it was serendipitous that I should stumble this morning upon Jews and Christians Together by Ian Speir. If…
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Lev Shestov on the Fall of Man
Substack latest.
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Is Atheism Intellectually Respectable?
On Romans 1: 18-20. Substack latest.
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Felicitas Theoretica et Visio Beata: Monasticism and Christianity
The bliss of the bios theoretikos as described by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics is the model for the Beatific Vision as described by Thomas Aquinas. The ultimate salvific state is a contemplative state. Monasticism is an institutional expression of this root commitment. The monk's life is decidedly biased toward the intellectual and the theoretical.…
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Doubting the Teachings of One’s Religion
I argued earlier that besides its salutary role in philosophy, doubt also has a salutary role to play in religion. But I left something out, and Vito Caiati caught it: I have been thinking about your recent post “A Comparison of the Roles of Doubt in Philosophy and Religion” and would like to pose a…
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Platonism and Christianity
Brother Dave writes, I'm re-reading Boethius' Consolation. Boethius does have a foot in Athens and one in Jerusalem, it seems to me. Now you sir are a Christian, and argue your positions in a blog subtitled Footnotes to Plato . . . . Would it be fair to refer to you, as I would to Boethius, as a Christian…
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Thought, Prayer, Meditation
"Prayer is when night descends on thought." (Alain, as quoted by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.) Knowing Alain, he must have intended his aphorism as a denigration of prayer. I see it the other way around. We cannot think our way out of our predicament; thinking merely allows us to map the terrain…
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Roger Kimball on Roger Scruton (1944-2020) on Tradition, Authority and Prejudice
Here: Sir Roger wrote several times about his political maturation, most fully, perhaps, in “Why I became a conservative,” in The New Criterion in 2003. There were two answers, one negative, one positive. The negative answer was the visceral repudiation of civilization he witnessed in Paris in 1968: slogans defacing walls, shattered shop windows, and…