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One of the perks of being a philosopher is that you get a quite a lot of contact with a creature who, as the last post suggests, is really quite rare in the United States: the (relatively) honest atheist. I haven’t done my own survey, but I’m willing to bet that a very disproportionately high percentage of academic philosophers not only disbelieve in God but, even more unusually, don’t even talk to Him.
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Archive for December, 2006
Wanted: more atheists
Conversations with God
In the December issue of First Things, I found this fascinating little tidbit:
“Look at those thousands of people passing by on Fifth Avenue. What are they thinking about? A new nationwide survey by Beliefnet suggests that many of them may be praying, sort of. Although 6 to 8 percent of Americans say they do not believe in God, 97.5 percent say they talk to God, and 77.6 percent say they do so every day. And 72.8 percent say they talk to God ‘through prayer’ and 80.6 percent say ‘through my internal thoughts’ (13.5 percent write letters to God.) Not only that, 57.9 percent say they have argued with God, and 49.3 percent say God argues back. ‘Does God talk to you?’ Yes, with words, say 35.8 percent, and yes, without words, say 56.1 percent. God speaks and they hear a voice (23.8), God speaks through answering prayer (55.4), through dreams (43.5), through Scripture or worship (43.3), through other people (61.5), and, at the top, through an internal voice or conscience (75.7). Where do people find God ‘most accessible?’ In daily life (42.3), in nature (9.6), in meditation (15), and, at bottom, in church or other house of worship (2.5).
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Better a pig than Antipater!
A glance at the Lion and Cardinal and then at the Catholic Encyclopaedia informed me of a tradition in connection with the Holy Innocents of which I had not been aware. Peter Abelard, logician, philosopher, and perhaps most famously one of those qui facti sunt ab hominibus (to use the words of Matthew 19:12), in a hymn in honor of the Innocents, wrote the following verses:
Ad mandatum regis datum generale
nec ipsius infans tutus est a caede.
Ad Augustum hoc delatum risum movit,
et rex mitis de immiti digne lusit:
malum, inquit, est Herodis esse natum.
prodest magis talis regis esse porcum.
The Catholic Encyclopaedia explains: “Macrobius (Saturn., IV, xiv, de Augusto et jocis ejus) relates that when Augustus heard that amongst the boys of two years and under Herod’s own son also had been massacred, he said: ‘It is better to be Herod’s hog [ous], than his son [houios],’ alluding to the Jewish law of not eating, and consequently not killing, swine. The Middle Ages gave faith to this story . . .” The last phrase indicates to me that the Catholic Encyclopaedia doesn’t give faith to this story, which lack of faith in them I would think impious, but I suppose I should let them off given what follows: “But this ‘infant’ mentioned by Macrobius, is Antipater, the adult son of Herod, who, by command of the dying king, was decapitated for having conspired against the life of his father.”
Merry Christmas!
Puer natus est nobis, et filius datus est nobis, cujus imperium super humerum ejus et vocabitur nomen ejus, magni consilii Angelus.
Ero Cras!
Last year, it was pointed out on this blog that there is a mini-season of Advent called Sapientiatide (analogous to Passiontide at the end of Lent) that runs from Dec. 17-23. “Sapientia” is Latin for “wisdom,” so “Wisdomtide” would be the English translation. At Vespers on those nights, the Church prays the “Great O Antiphons.” In order, these begin with the words:
O Sapientia (hence the name of the season)
O Adonai
O Radix Jesse
O Clavis David
O Oriens
O Rex Gentium
O Emmanuel
You may remember these titles of Our Lord from the English hymn, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” Well, the initial letters of these titles create a backwards acrostic: ERO CRAS. That’s Latin for “I’ll be tomorrow,” or, more loosely, “I’ll arrive tomorrow.” Of course, the night after the 23rd is the Vespers of Christmas Eve, so the “speaker” of the acrostic is Christ, the Incarnate Wisdom of the Father. It’s as though Christ, after being addressed in the antiphons by those seven titles over the past week, is answering the prayer Himself. So the folks who arranged the prayers for Sapientiatide must have been pretty “wise” themselves!
For some edifying reading on Divine Wisdom, that which the Three Wise Men came from the East seeking (see painting above), see St. Louis de Montfort’s work here at EWTN.
Quiet at Christmas
Things have been quiet here of late, and so I thought I’d let our readers know that we’ll probably not return to posting regularly till after Christmas — sporadically during the twelve days, but full-time starting after Epiphany.
May this holy season of our Lord’s birth be filled with grace for you all. And please be sure to continue to pray for my (”the president’s”) special intention.
Quiet at Christmas
Things have been quiet here of late, and so I thought I’d let our readers know that we’ll probably not return to posting regularly till after Christmas — sporadically during the twelve days, but full-time starting after Epiphany.
May this holy season of our Lord’s birth be filled with grace for you all. And please be sure to continue to pray for my (”the president’s”) special intention.
Catholic guilt
One of the interesting things about becoming a Catholic is that other people stop telling you why they’re not one anymore.
It used to happen to me all the time. Like Nick Carraway of The Great Gatsby I’ve always been someone to whom (don’t ask me why) people seem to like to divulge their inner thoughts and dirty secrets. People I’d just met, say on a plane or at a party, would discover that 1) I went to Notre Dame for college, and 2) I wasn’t a Catholic, and immediately open up with, “You know, I was raised Catholic, but…” and I’d get the whole story. Some had personal bad experiences to relate (an unfriendly priest, an unfriendly parish, or an overly pushy grandmother who had dragged them to Mass by the ear.) Lots had beefs with the Church’s stance on one thing or another; homosexuality and divorce seem to be the biggest ones. Then there was always the poisonous, “You know, it’s really not a modern Church!”
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A Mishap
This is just to let our readers know that we had a little mishap last week with regards to guest comments. It seems that someone (okay… it was me, of course) accidentally turned on the “moderate comments” feature while attempting to do something else. This made it impossible for visitors to post comments to any of the threads. You’d think we would have noticed this before yesterday, (and I did muse a couple of times over the last week, “Hmmm, wonder why we aren’t getting much blog discussion. Maybe everyone’s doing their Christmas shopping?”) but it’s finals week here at Cornell and things have been a bit hectic. And everyone is doing their Christmas shopping.
The problem is fixed now, and as I’m the only person here foolish enough to make this mistake even once, I think it’s a good bet it will never happen again. But we profusely apologize to any and all readers whose comments never saw the light of day! You’d think we would have gotten them somehow, wouldn’t you? But we’ve never tried to moderate our comments before, and we can’t figure out now where they all went. Anyway, I’m very, very sorry, because there’s nothing I hate more than typing out a comment and having it get lost somehow. If this happened to you, at least you should know that nobody was deliberately censoring you! If there’s anything you really wanted to say on any of the existing threads, it will work now, but we (or I, at least) will also try to stir things back to life with some fresh posts over the next few days.
The Miraculous Virgin Birth
I’ve been reading a little bit about the Virgin Birth, in light of the discussions provoked recently by the new Nativity movie. I have not seen the movie yet, but I have for a long time been interested in questions concerning the Virgin Birth, and so this new flash of interest in the topic intrigued me. The question I have been pondering concerns the degree to which Our Lord was miraculously born.
There is a long and formidable tradition of people who say that he was not born in the natural way. The early Fathers seem mostly to have been of the opinion that the birth of Christ was miraculous, not only for the fact that it happened, but also in the way that it happened; not only was his birth was painless, but it also happened through some supernatural means not described in the Gospel. In an entry on the Virgin Birth, Catholic Encyclopedia suggests, “that the supernatural influence of the Holy Ghost extended to the birth of Jesus Christ, not merely preserving Mary’s integrity, but also causing Christ’s birth or external generation to reflect his eternal birth from the Father in this, that “the Light from Light” proceeded from his mother’s womb as a light shed on the world; that the “power of the Most High” passed through the barriers of nature without injuring them; that “the body of the Word” formed by the Holy Ghost penetrated another body after the manner of spirits.” I believe the Council of Trent made a similar suggestion.
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Papal Photographer
These folks sold Catherina S. and me pictures when we met the Pope this summer. They have a fun, if somewhat frustrating, website containing many many recent and old papal photos. It’s worth a browse.
Apostle to the Which?
I got my kicks for today from a story I found through a link from the “Ephemeris” column of our own blog. The story was from the news section of Catholic Online, and it was about recent archaeological discoveries that seem to confirm that the traditional burial place of St. Paul is in fact his tomb. It was an interesting little piece, but it concluded with the following helpful lines:
“Paul was a Roman Jew, born in Tarsus, in modern-day Turkey, who started out trying to fight Christianity but later converted after seeing a shining light on the road to Damascus.
The saint, who called himself the apostle to the Gentiles, was a great traveler and writer. His 14 letters, which form part of the New Testament, are largely written to churches that he had founded or visited.”
Now, was it really necessary to explain that to the readers of Catholic Online? Heaven help us!
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Pray for us who have recourse to thee
My favorite personal story in connection with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception happened during my first year at Cornell. I had just finished a year at Oxford of Hebrew and Jewish studies, and I was eager to keep up my knowledge of Biblical Hebrew. So I was sitting in on a class in the Near Eastern Studies department - one isn’t allowed do theology at Cornell, certainly not to have a department with that name - a class which was basically a glorified reading group for selected Old Testament texts. There was one graduate student, not Jewish, and the rest were very much undergraduates and very much Jewish. (Keep in mind that at Cornell, out of every three undergraduate students, one is a well to do WASPy person, the other a Corean, and the third a Jew. And the latter two both come from the greater NYC area.)
I can’t remember exactly what the context was, but it must have been something to do with the development of Hebrew theological thought as seen through the different eras in which the Old Testament texts were written. (Warning: when going into such a class or course of studies, it is very, very difficult to avoid referring to the Old Testament by that name; the preferred nomenclature is the “Hebrew Scriptures”, which can avoid offending both Jew and Christian, I think.)
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Pray for us who have recourse to thee
My favorite personal story in connection with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception happened during my first year at Cornell. I had just finished a year at Oxford of Hebrew and Jewish studies, and I was eager to keep up my knowledge of Biblical Hebrew. So I was sitting in on a class in the Near Eastern Studies department - one isn’t allowed do theology at Cornell, certainly not to have a department with that name - a class which was basically a glorified reading group for selected Old Testament texts. There was one graduate student, not Jewish, and the rest were very much undergraduates and very much Jewish. (Keep in mind that at Cornell, out of every three undergraduate students, one is a well to do WASPy person, the other a Corean, and the third a Jew. And the latter two both come from the greater NYC area.)
I can’t remember exactly what the context was, but it must have been something to do with the development of Hebrew theological thought as seen through the different eras in which the Old Testament texts were written. (Warning: when going into such a class or course of studies, it is very, very difficult to avoid referring to the Old Testament by that name; the preferred nomenclature is the “Hebrew Scriptures”, which can avoid offending both Jew and Christian, I think.)
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Feast of the Immaculate Conception
Declaramus, pronuntiamus et definimus doctrinam quae tenet beatissimam Virginem Mariam in primo instanti suae conceptionis fuisse singulari Omnipotentis Dei gratia et privilegio, intuitu meritorum Christi Jesu Salvatoris humani generis, ab omni originalis culpae labe praeservatam immunem, esse a Deo revelatam, atque idcirco ab omnibus fidelibus firmiter constanterque credendam. Ineffabilis Deus Pp. Pius IX.
We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful
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St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,