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It is possible that Russell Jacoby has me dead to rights. In his IMHO column in the Chronicle Review, dated January 11, 2008 (”Big Brains, Small Impact“), Jacoby reflects on the 20 years since the publication of his book, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. In sum, despite sometimes fair criticism, Jacoby…
“The act of faith consists essentially in knowledge and there we find its formal and specific perfection.”—Thomas Aquinas Beginning with the Cartesian rationalistic, dualistic paradigm of perceiving reality there is within Western Civilization an unfortunate tendency to see science and religion in an adversary relationship to each other, but that is a false dichotomy. It…
The author engages himself in a conversation on the conundrum of how it can be that (a) Evil exists, and yet (b) God is beneficent, and (c) God is omnipotent.
How can we put social intelligence online? Poor Michael Brown. During the darkest days of the Hurricane Katrina debacle, Brown, then director of FEMA, the agency that so badly bungled the rescue efforts, sent this email: “Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go home?” His words—surely meant in jest—cast him…
I In her Magnificat the Blessed Virgin Mary proclaims that her name and memory will continue to be blessed in generations to come (Luke 1: 48). The history of Marian art testifies to the enduring truth of this prophecy. Such art also provides the ardent student of Christian culture with ample resources for faithful reflection…
This recognition will resolve what may seem like a paradox to some: that profound and creative scientific minds can also be profoundly religious. Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton were mystically religious, Galileo Galilei and Augustin Cauchy were deeply Catholic, James Clerk Maxwell and Michael Faraday were personally religious, Srinivasa Ramanujan and Chandrasekhara Raman were traditionally…
“You can’t change other people. All you can do is change your attitude.” People say this sort of thing when they’ve decided to stop trying to change someone. Maybe generalizing like this helps convince them to let go, but of course it’s not true. Influence happens. Influence is as old as ecosystems. We are extensions…
Vico is particularly interested in demonstrating through his science of humanity the presence of a reality, which he calls providence, immanent within man’s history and operating primarily through man’s freedom, but also through social phenomena and institutions such as shame, honor, utility, authority, religion, family, language. In his De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia Vico had already…
That’s just the kind of question Frank Furedi tells us we’re asking too much but not asking well-enough. It seems we have gotten scared witless by the specters of global warming and jihadism–so much so that we cannot focus on much more widely significant problems like the potential for a global recession, which would affect…
To understand the imaginative universal one has to begin with myth which for Vico is the primordial spiritual movement of primitive man, the mediator between nature and spirit, between what is useful and what is moral, between natural necessity and law. Vico is the first thinker to be aware that indeed myth is truth that…