Summary: What does it mean “to create”? The word has seen a conceptual shift in the Western world, as the influence of deep Christian understanding has waned and a cosmologically nihilistic worldview has supplanted it as the default background. Today, one finds it applied (albeit vaguely) not only to those engaged in the high arts… Read More Call for Papers: On the Meaning of Creation
Professor Catherine Brown Tkacz ABSTRACT: This article explores the concept of the imago Dei (image of God) as manifested uniquely in female human persons. The study begins with the Biblical affirmation in Genesis that both male and female are created in God’s image, emphasizing spiritual equality yet acknowledging the significance of sexual differences. This leads… Read More [article] The Incarnating and the Female Imago Dei
ABSTRACT: This essay offers an extended, reasoned walk-through Nathan Lyons’ path-breaking text, Signs in the Dust. Every so often, a book comes about that manages to show how a variety of philosophical paths, hitherto regarded as separate, are converging on a common terrain. The value of such texts is to name this common terrain, and to go beyond mere juxtaposition of different philosophical trajectories, actually to disclose the deeper affinity that makes them belong together in a coherent whole. This is what this book manages to accomplish: by showing the rich tapestry of inquiries converging around the nature/culture relationship, it successfully retrieves the medieval conversation on natural culture and cultural nature.… Read More [article] A Theory of Natural Culture and Cultural Nature
Michael Tkacz has offered an insight that Avicenna’s emanationist position commits the cosmogonical fallacy of assuming a kind of prior potency outside of the act of creation; this assumption of a prior potency amounts to a denial of creation. Given that instrumental causes would be a sort of power that is prior to the act of creation, this is a useful insight. In thinking of creation as a production through intermediaries, Avicenna is thinking that in some way creation is a process. God creates the First Intelligence, which creates the first soul and first sphere and also the Second Intelligence; this process is repeated until the Ninth Intelligence, which creates our world and gives forms to bring about substantial change. In this sense, creation is a process and a kind of becoming (fieri). The insight here is that emanation is not just an alternate theory of creation; it implies something that is incompatible with creation ex nihilo.… Read More [article] Theistic Creation and Natural Philosophy
In this paper we shall explore Jacques Maritain’s definition of “Christian philosophy” with regard to how it is practiced, how it is to be distinguished from non-Christian philosophy, how it differs from theology, and what in particular Christian philosophy offers to the search for truth. … Read More [article] Christian Philosophy as an Existential Habitus
To speak of the Christian roots of Europe, or the Puritan founding of America, should be approached with great prudence and a deep caution. The temptation that needs to be explicitly alluded to is that pertaining to a sort of “re-enchanted” nationalism. The City of God is not an attempt to undermine the need for the embodied realities of home and political life. Rather, the nuance or caveat is to say that the City of God offered by Christ as witnessed in…… Read More [essay] Civic Life and Home
Alan FimisterSt. John Vianney Theological SeminaryDenver, CO In a recent review in this journal, the book Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy is criticised apparently on the assumption that it a) rejects democracy b) proposes no concrete steps by which the social and political order it describes might be attained. The first of these assumptions… Read More [essay] Make Disciples of All Nations
Catholic integralism, generally speaking, comprises a return to the past in order to move beyond the modern problem. In effect, its answer is to discard the political developments of modernity wholesale and return pick up where the Middle Ages left off. To many who do not hold this view, and who are not as familiar with the Integralist movement, such a suggestion appears strange to the point that this characterization may seem to be an uncharitable. To the contrary, however, it appears to us that the integralists themselves characterize the spirit of their philosophy in the same manner.… Read More [review] Integralism
Where, and how, do we bring meaning into the living of our lives? A movement from our assumed passive nihilism to a conscious active nihilism, Nolen Gertz argues. Despite this self-actualizing attempt at nihilism, it remains now as always a deleterious belief for any human being to adopt—the active no less, and perhaps quite a great deal more, than the passive.… Read More [review] Nihilism & Technology | Nihilism
Francisco Plaza, PhDCathedral High School, Houston TXEditor, Reality In the encyclical Evangelium vitae, Pope Saint John Paul II listed several crimes against human dignity, such as murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, and suicide, all of which are “opposed to life itself.”[1] Apart from harming the victims themselves, these are also understood to do violence against society… Read More [essay] The Conflict between Human Dignity and Abortion – Part II
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