As I come to the end of my readings in the Summa Theologicae, I am working my way currently through the suffering of Christ. It is a meditation upon which the work of Mel Gibson provides elucidation and imagery that cannot begin to express the suffering described by St. Thomas. Thomas' concern is not only in the power of Christ's physical suffering, though that is truly a concern to him, but also the suffering of Christ's soul in the sadness the Man of Sorrows underwent.

The Passion of Christ

It is a good reminder of the effect of our sin in the very God who loved us so much that He died for us. It is a powerful deterant in those who love God.

Good old Holland. We've always known that the Netherlands were ahead of the curve, but now they've really pulled out ahead with their toilet technology. It's quite clever, yet... slightly disturbing. It has a certain degree of artifiical intelligence. When will the ethical question be raised: is it ok to use another sentient being as a commode?

I guess it's better than televisions.

Talking Toilets in Amsterdam

After you check out that article, check out some commentary on the phenomenon by Achewood here.

I can't edit posts at the moment, so I'm just starting a new one on the same old subject. I thought I'd post the link I've been reading off of for anyone whose curious to glance over. It's about 70 pages long, so I doubt anybody's going to want to read this for fun. Treatise on God as the First Principle

Scotus is an amazing architect of reason. He builds up a bunch of conclusions and uses them to prove his points, slowly putting one conclusion upon another. He tests each piling by considering objections, and then moves on. As I said before, his reasoning is very concentrated. There is a considerable language barrier to overcome to really tap into his Aristotelian Medieval Christian thinking.

John Duns Scotus is the most boring person I have ever read, because he is the least rhetorical logitician that I've ever read. Straight argument, no frills, from a fire-hose.

Unfortunately, my poor soul's accustomed to poetry. I feel a bit like Boethius, right after he meets Philosophy.

Blame Canada!

Read her where a Canadian MP calls us stupid

I don't feel sorry for her. I don't appreciate her attitude, of course, but she's entitled to her opinions about our country. And I'm entitled to my opinion about hers.

*wink*

Check this out!

Time Travel Fund!

What a brilliant idea. Let's make a church... that believes in true things!

What the? Are they really this daft?

The Church of Reality

This, truly, is classic.

I really love Mockingbirds. They're probably some of my favorite birds. They are vibrant and full of life, but their eyes sparkle with a glint of intelligence and knowing most other birds lack.

They also have spunk. I've seen mockingbirds chase after hawks and divebomb cats numberless times. And they have such a variety of voices to choose from in scolding their enemies. The funniest mock I've heard is a car alarm. It was from a bird that lived along the parking lot behind my parent's house.



Anyway, I thought I'd share my love of the mundane today.

This Saturday at work, my coworkers and I were passing the time by marveling at marvelous men of history: the kind of people that seem to come along only a few times in a millenia and change the course of history forever. In our discussion I brought up the remarkable St. Thomas: the kind of mind that comes along once a millenia and changes the world forever with its brilliance and forcefullness. As I am reading Chesterton's hagiography about him at the moment, I was struck by the ignorance that so many people today have about him, the middle ages, and the Church.

While on an academic level, the middle ages is appreciably better understood, in high school we are fed straight lies that disagree with the majority of the history of critical work on the medieval period. While many still speak of the Dark Age, even in academia, there are good reasons to believe there was no such age. But, thanks to Gibbon, the Enlightenment, Moderns and the Rennaissance, millions can't consider the possibility that there wasn't. But people during the Middle Ages never believed there was a dark age. Learning never died. The written word was preserved by the Church. Civilization was preserved by the Church. Europe was more unified than it has ever been at any other time by a giant overarching authority structure that spoke with words of light rather than demanded obedience by the sword. Maurice Keen, a historian of the period, defines the Middle Ages as the time when Europe was Christendom: Charlemagne to the Council of Basel.

What historians sometimes mean when they refer to the Dark Age, I have come to understand, is that it was a time when many classical texts were lost. There are two observations I would make on this: First, this is partially true, but not completely so. While many Greek works, notably most of Aristotle and most of Plato were lost, many Latin works were not. And, while there was interest in these works, there was greater interest in the educated class for the Christian Fathers and the Bible. This is not surprising. Nor is this a sign of ignorance. This is my second observation: it is actually a totally understandable and reasonable view of the world that they lived in. Do not works breathed by the Holy Spirit merit a greater degree of inspection than works created by man alone? In a society that held to the Dogma of the Church, this behavior did not token ignorance or stupidity, but virtue and intelligence.

As a scholar who envies the life of the students in the universities of the twelth century, I find the arrogant position of the modern or post-modern student as being of superior intelligence and knowledge (usually because of a more accurate model of the natural processes of the world) annoying. Natural philosophy, or what we call "science" is not the Queen we take her for. The Queen of the sciences is, and always has been, Theology. And Saint Thomas, a friar who gave up the joys of the world out of a love for God, was one of her most brilliant handmaidens. It would be well for more of us from this darkening age to read him.

Go to Homestarrunner.com and play the new Peasant Quest game if you've ever been a fan of the King's Quest series. Great fun!

Hey all.

I know I haven't been posting much lately. There really isn't very much to post about, though. My life has been continuing pretty even kealed throughout this summer, and it's gotten a bit repetitive and unexciting here towards the end. All the same, I do not desire it to come to an end. I relish the calm that comes with summer, and the absence of stress. 40 hours a week beats all work all the time that I have during school sometimes, although it is certainly a lot less stimulating.

I would like to point out that I tried to post last week. Unfortunately that didn't work. So we're trying again exactly one week later out of the vain hope that somehow I'll do this thing right.

Alright.