Category: Book Notes
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Whoops
The intellectual consciousness of modern Europe as commonly delineated and accepted even in our day proclaimed those three ideas: a Nature subsisting in itself; an autonomous personality of the human subject; a culture self-created out of norms intrinsic to its own essence. The European mind believed further that the constant creation and perfection of this…
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Psalm 19, 18 in the Vulgate
The calm dawn gave no promise of anything uncommon…The sunrise we did not see at all, for we were beneath the shadow of the fjord cliffs; but in the midst of our studies, while the Indians were getting ready to sail, we were startled by the sudden appearance of a red light burning with a strange, unearthly splendor on…
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A Narrative Summary of Alphonsus Liguori’s Uniformity with God’s Will
The devout Father John Tauler relates this personal experience: For years he had prayed God to send him someone who would teach him the real spiritual life. One day, at prayer, he heard a voice saying: “Go to such and such a church and you will have the answer to your prayers.” He went and at the door of the…
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Good Advice
No one is obligated to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid this folly and live his life in order. Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, 17
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A Window into the Mindset Underlying the Current Era
Reading E.B. White’s One Man’s Meat, a book which thoroughly underwhelmed me,1 I stumbled on a passage that struck me as illustrative of the mindset that has shaped a great deal of culture and policy in the years since the Second World War. White is writing shortly after Pearl Harbor: The passionate love of Americans for…
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Fruits of Enlightenment
Alternatively, A Response to Steven Pinker. There has never been as society that was more civilized in the humanist sense than the French society of the Enlightenment, nor one more completely convinced of the powers of reason and science to solve all the problems of life and to create a completely rational culture, based on…
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Thomas Browne
I was first introduced to Thomas Browne in one of my favorite books, W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. How could I not be intrigued by Sebald’s distillation of Browne’s thought? What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance, in the shadow filled edifice of the world. We study the…
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2017 in Books
Prior entries: 2015, 2016 Over the past few years, I’ve lowered the total of books I hoped to read, in an effort to better savor my reading and also because there’s a glut of very long books on my To-Read shelf. Thus, I aimed to read 125 books in 2017 and surpassed that goal, reading…
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The Hollow Earth
The wonder of history lies in the fact that it is only available to us in fragments, tantalizing scraps that glimmer amidst the obscurity of the past. Take, for example, this brief mention found in the letter of Pope Zachary to Boniface, the indomitable English missionary and destroyer of pagan oaks. For Boniface, the greatest threat…
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A Mysterious Fellow
Herodotus is full of wonderful things. Aristeas, they say, was in lineage the equal or superior of any citizen in his town. One day he entered a fuller’s shop in Proconnesus and died there, so the fuller locked up his workshop and went to announce to Aristeas’ relatives that he had died. The news of his death…
Dan Yingst 