A Little Blue School – “Even more difficult than opening a classical Catholic school in East Tennessee is opening a Chesterton Academy, for the mere reason that no one here knows who G.K. Chesterton is.” Not with a Fight, but a Frame (Gilbert)
Specializing in Double Standards – “To understand the rules that Democrats play by, it is important to realize that they are not meant to bind liberals—only their enemies.” Democrats’ “No Kings” Hypocrisy (AMAC.us)
Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Virtue – “Do we commonly, repeatedly, habitually prefer ‘quick success’ to ‘the toil of patient enquiry’? If so, then there is a real danger for our minds.” To Think Things Through to the End (What We Need Now)
A Priest and His Dad – “Michigan pastor and his father go to emergency requests for sacraments in a pickup truck.” Priest’s Dad Rides Shotgun on Last Rites Calls (National Catholic Register)
Concerns With Papal Indications – “For those of us who hold out hope that the pontificate of Pope Leo XIV, the Chicago-born bishop and missionary to Peru, Robert Prevost, will lead to more Christ-centered and less ideological leadership from Rome, the last few weeks have been disappointing.” Christianity and the West, Part III: Pope Leo XIV and the humanitarian temptation revisited (the American Mind)
Culturally Elite Orcs – “Woke scolds are once again decrying Lord of the Rings as racist, far-right propaganda.” Why They Hate Tolkien (The European Conservative)
Reforming the Anglican Communion – “The Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (GAFCON) has announced it is rejecting the Church of England’s leadership, and is reordering the Anglican Communion.” Global Anglicans announce break in communion from Church of England (The Christian Institute)
A Challenge to the Christian Conscience – “Just a week after its publication, Dilexi Te has almost disappeared from public discussions. Is the first major teaching document of Pope Leo XIV really destined to be so soon forgotten?” What’s missing from Dilexi Te? (Catholic Culture)
Venezuelans Are Not Safe – “He told me – in Venezuelan Spanish – that I couldn’t ask questions about the government. As Peña Parra tried to continue, the man took my phone from my hands and threw it on a desk.” Pillar journalist assaulted (The Pillar)
Weak Men and Unhinged Women – “It seems obvious that decaying Western societies are in fact not femininized, because our societies do not champion female hallmarks.” Western Culture Isn’t Feminized, It’s Transgender (The Federalist)
What Makes the Faith Stick – “The Catholic Woman Podcast asked on Instagram for people to weigh in on what their parents did when they were kids that kept them faithful as adults. Hundreds of people responded.” Here’s what Catholic adults say their parents did right when they were kids (Aleteia)
Literature That Does Not Flinch – “Catholic writers and publishers must reclaim fiction as a medium that can carry the larger public imagination into the future.” Concerning the Death of Catholic Fiction: An Author’s Perspective (Crisis Magazine)
(*The posting of any particular news item or essay is not an endorsement of the content and perspective of said news item or essay.)
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Regarding Christianity and the West, Part III: Pope Leo…:
The author makes a strong attempt to list the good things of Leo’s first six months as pope and the not so good things. But, I do not believe they do balance out, especially with regard to his analysis of the Apostolic Exhortation “Dilexi Te.”
So, with regard to the pope I am reminded of the phrase, “What you say has elements that are both true and new. However those that are true are not new, and those that are new are not true.”
@ Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Virtue
Do we experience the use of our minds as a kind of freedom, as an experience of play, and, consequently, as a source of joy? Or, to the contrary, would we say the time we spend thinking is mainly burdensome (John Paul II).
Essayist Blum takes this wisdom and runs with it racing past the tools the internet offers to make our efforts quicker, less taxing. The bot, for myself Google AI. Although convinced the seemingly unnecessary effort to think it out is what will forestall hopefully avoid entrapment in a nursing home geri chair with oatmeal dripping from our mouth.
The more we challenge our own intellect to think things out the greater increase in perspicacity, for the Christian fine tooling the mind to identify where faith in what is revealed has drifted off and away ending with a product of technology rather than truth.
Feeling pangs of guilt gruffly describing the poor mentally compromised aged, only Our Lord knows how many saints I’ve anointed and sought to comfort in that condition.
God bless you Father for ministering to those elderly & afflicted.
@ Reforming the Anglican Communion
We read: “Earlier this month, Dame Sarah Mullally was nominated to become the first female Archbishop of Canterbury in the C of E’s almost 500-year history. But GAFCON, which represents 85 per cent of the world’s 85 million Anglicans, has rejected her authority, saying she has ‘repeatedly promoted unbiblical and revisionist teachings regarding marriage and sexual morality’.”
Having trouble, here, of understanding what the stated problem is about. After all, Henry VIII was no less inclusive (!) than Ms. Mullally, having died of syphilis presumably contracted from one of his six wives.
Goodness, did he die of that? I didn’t know.
No, Henry did not die of syphilis. Let’s let that old canard die. His health problems did not resemble those of syphilis nor did his physicians administer any treatments for it. A simpler criticism would be pointing out all the post-Reformation English monarchs who kept mistresses, Charles II and Edward VII most spectacularly but a majority of their other kings were adulterers, despite being Heads of the Anglican Church.
Thank you for your reply, Miss Sandra. I’ve read that Henry VIII had an old wound or ulcer on his leg that never healed & it gave off a bad odor. Also that he was knocked on the head in a jousting match & it may have affected his reasoning. People said his temperament changed after that.
@ Concerns With Papal Indications
Reading through Daniel Mahoney’s ‘Leo XIV and the humanitarian temptation revisited’, I revisited my own thoughts line for line, disappointment to disappointment. It’s clear the Church is being moved away from traditional moral doctrine to a secular humanist agenda.
What does it say to those of us who are committed to Apostolic tradition. Awareness of the error and continued reverence for the Chair as distinguished from the occupant. A deepening of faith and practice, witness to the truth on all the contested issues from normalization of disordered sexual behavior to deification of the poor as pretense to focus on egalitarianism.
We are living in a moment for sanctification when practice of the faith will require the fortitude of heroic virtue. A revelatory witness to the beauty of our life in Christ.
@ Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Virtue
Unless a built in clock were added to its resource bank AI cannot measure time. Whereas Man is capable of measuring time without an inborn physical mechanism. For example, have you ever awakened during the night and knew precisely what time it was, verifying it by checking your clock? We don’t have a wristwatch device within ourselves. What then?
The reason why we can measure time, the measurable transition of nature, of all that exists around us is that we are in essence not ruled by time, that is, not in reference to the physical body, rather in reference to something within whose essence isn’t subject to transition. Except for the accruement of knowledge we remain stable allowing us to measure what is in transition around us.
This human ability speaks to the immortality of a substance that possesses the feature of timelessness, or immortality. The soul.
For further thought if the universe were to collapse into nothingness a time measuring instrument would be useless being that there’s nothing to measure. The human soul, if such were the case, would remain independently aware of its existence within its reflexive capacity to apprehend its own thoughts. These reasoned features can be said to validate our immortality.