Category: Ratzinger
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Pope Francis Dead at 88
I have issued some trenchant statements over the years about the late Pope Francis, but for now my watchword is: de mortuis nil nisi bonum. I will only add that in the wee hours of yesterday's vigil, before I became aware of Francis's passing, I was re-reading Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's 1968 Introduction to Christianity in…
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Philosophy and Christianity
Substack latest Ruminations on Ratzinger
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Pope Benedict XVI Dead at 95
I was mightily impressed with the power of Joseph Ratzinger's intellect when I first read his Introduction to Christianity in 2016. I have been recently re-reading it. Ratzinger makes quite the contrast with the benighted Bergoglio. How do we best honor a thinker? By re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically yet critically, appropriating and developing what stands…
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Ratzinger on the Resurrection of the Body
Substack latest. You will note that in my writings I use the gender-neutral 'man' and 'he.' It is important to stand in defense of the mother tongue. She is under vicious assault these days. You owe a lot to your mother; show her some respect. On Easter Sunday and on every day. Anyone who takes…
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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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Self-Made Meaning is Unmeaning
One can bake bread, buy bread, or beg bread. Can one bake for oneself the bread of meaning? Or must one ask for it? (One cannot buy it.) Some say that the only meaning a life has is the meaning the liver of the life gives it. This is a mistake as I will argue…
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Meaning as Bread
As an addendum to yesterday's Platonizing entry on "Give us this day our daily bread," I draw upon Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trs. Foster and Miller, Ignatius Press, 1969, p. 73, orig. publ. in German in 1968: Meaning is the bread on which man, in the intrinsically human part of his being, subsists.