Tolle Lege

The Full Story: How I found Rome (Revised)

2010-01-08T18:11:00.000-08:00

For most of my life, Roman Catholic culture has hardly ever had any real pull on my heart or senses. As an American raised in the States, I have a general tendency to be skeptical about any politico-cultural system that is not built around the "respect" of individual rights. It is in my blood to think that way. Any environment that expects me to act in a prescribed form of behavior strikes me as a threat to my liberty and free rights. It is "Communism", "Socialism", "Totalitarianism", or whatever - it is anything but Capitalism, which is a cultural cornerstone of the concepts of "freedom" and "liberty" for any American, whether they consciously acknowledge it or not.

But that has only been my first hindrance to any real attraction to Catholicism. I was also raised as an American Evangelical. I think it is fair to say I was unintentionally raised to think that every true experience of "freedom" must only be expressed in enthusiastic spontaneity and bold charisms. For instance, I do not talk to the people I genuinely love in the same scripted and ancient words every day to express my love for them. Whenever I greet my mother, I do not say "Hail Dana, Full of Grace..." or "Peace be with you." I do say "I love you" every time I hang up the phone with my mother, but that is not said in some pretentiously holy and archaic language. I would not say "I loveth thou" in Old English, and certainly not in Latin. Why would I talk to God that way?

I perceived Catholicism (along with all its rituals, statues, mosaics, tradition, and images) to be an artificially forced movement that built on its own dead and dying doctrines to keep itself alive. It accidentally survived through the Protestant Reformation over 500 years ago but no longer had whatever life it might have had before that. There was hardly any breath left in its over-aged lungs. It was bound to die out in the next couple of hundred years or so; that is, unless it morphed with the changing colors of the world.

But, as I have already implied, Catholicism was mostly not worth my focus. It was just that other thing going on with other people who were unfortunately raised in that wholly other and tragic environment. My idea of being a Catholic was being raised in shackles. Only the enlightened Catholics, or the ones who received a helping hand from a “real Christian”, were able to break the chains. Occasionally there were a few Catholic stragglers who stuck around in the Church, but that was just because they had some deep nonrational feeling of obligation to their families. Either that or they just did not believe all the Roman Catholic Church taught.

I remember a lot of the Christian cultural trends and movements in my high school years, ones that are still breathing and flourishing today. I remember when the mega-Church movement became very prominent in the 90's and early 2000's, and, sure enough, that was curbed by Christian leaders wanting to bring "Christ-following" back to grips with its more rugged and revolutionary roots. And there were (and still are) quite a few other young churches digging a little deeper into orthodoxy, in order to retain some type of form to Christian worship while still breeding its creative expression in art and culture. I think modern theologians often call this type of thing "ressourcement". I have recently discovered that it was a very important term used in drawing up the Vatican II documents in the 60's. Each of these movements, in its own way, was and is essentially trying to find a way to bring life to a western culture in great need of cultural identity and better health. This is all very attractive to me. In my high school and early college years, I did not notice that the Roman Catholic Church had been taking these same actions and initiatives for a very long time, while leaving a most noticeable fingerprint. It was always right under my nose, but I could not ever manage to see it.

26 percent of the world's healthcare facilities are overseen by the Catholic Church. A plethora of colleges, universities, and other educational institutions have been founded by various religious orders within the Catholic Church. She has also produced some of the most pivotal voices in global history (Tertullian, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, John Henry Newman, Pascal, Edith Stein, Flannery O'Connor, Mother Theresa, Pope John Paul II, Dorothy Day). And after learning about the Catholic social teaching of bringing salvation to the entire embodied human person (physically, intellectually, and spiritually), I can't help but to begin to see the relation between this Catholic social doctrine and these international phenomena.

As I grew up in a Christian school system, my developing ideas of Christianity were gradually collected from literature and different people from diverse religious, theological, and philosophical perspectives. I was really hit in the face with how complex my world actually was the first year I became a student at a more or less secular university, however. Sense that first year, my life has never been the same. My education gradually exposed me to the variety of religious representations of the Christian faith, and how plausible each one was in itself. In this way, I developed a strong sense of respect for the tradition of my faith, including Catholicism, as well as other cultural and religious traditions.

My general appreciation for Christian tradition probably began during my first encounters with Presbyterianism. My attraction to Presbyterian tradition (about my senior year in high school) struck a positive note in the context of my search for much bigger things. As a young teenager, I generally assumed that traditional church settings (e.g., Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Catholic) were reserved for cramming spirituality into a methodical category, allowing people to inhibit the possibility of a slightly less comfortable life. As a matter of fact, I often thought these people had no sense of true "spirituality" whatsoever. They did not know "true freedom" and had a repressive hand over their children and grand-children to keep them in the same fold. Like the Catholics mentioned previously, the life goal of these other Protestant groups should have been to free themselves of this enslavement. Yet, I learned that just because every-Sunday-Churchgoers at a Lutheran or Methodist or Catholic church rarely expressed their personal feelings about their faith did not mean they were not deeply and freely committed to that faith. On the contrary, I found this pervasive silence culturally reflected a reverence for faith and sincerity in one's commitments that was not present in louder and chattier contemporary church settings. Like contemporary Evangelicals, these more orthodox types had a very special way of communicating their faith. They would talk about "prayer" and the need to "live a more holy life" but would rarely announce they "loved Jesus", out of fear of being vain or simply not living up to that statement. It wasn't because they didn't deeply love their God; it was because of a holiness they recognized in their God that they rightly did not recognize in themselves.

Whenever I was painfully forced to think of Catholicism, the big word that emerged next to a stained glass window and a crucifix was “tradition." Although I never consciously thought or spoke this way, it was always in the back of my mind that tradition was inherently comprised of old and dying things. But I learned more and more, through reading Reformers like Luther, Calvin, and Edwards that upholding my Christian heritage, like any and every family heritage, was a natural component of my life as a human being. I was no less obligated to the life given by my spiritual family than my biological family; both should have mirrored each other. There was an important parallel here. I was naturally prone to honoring and loving my parents and siblings at home, because I had an inborn affection for these family members and the biological/cultural life I shared with them. We played Scrabble, barbecued outside the house, sang the same happy birthday song on everyone's birthday, and watched the same family films and shows together. These festivities comprised and nurtured the life we already shared together. They were the familiar places and activities we so often turned to and developed into rituals. Even more, I had to acknowledge that there was nothing vain about celebrating our lives together at dinner tables and living room games. They truly reminded us of who we were as a family and as individuals within that family. Every family had its rituals and familiarities that made its life, as a single unit, meaningful. My friends' families had rituals and traditions, just like ours, to illuminate the cultural uniqueness of their own households, as well. They were traditions that kept us under a common roof and a common family and allowed us to respect, honor, and celebrate our family members as fellow natural participants in the same unique narrative.

I am convinced I gravitated toward more traditional religious environments because I developed a need for a more profound and synchronized experience of the rituals I was already, albeit subconsciously, keeping. One of the most memorable experiences I had in a more formal, higher liturgical environment was attending R.C. Sproul’s conference at Twin Oaks Presbyterian Church in 2006. From the moment I walked into the church, I could not avoid the reality that these Presbyterians had a deep sense of reverence for who they were worshipping and how small they were in light of it. After more exposure to Presbyterian and, later, Lutheran celebrations, their church architecture and hymns successfully communicated this vertical dimension of the Christian Faith to me. It was something they obviously had in common with Catholics. Presbyterians and Lutherans first opened my eyes to the meaning of Catholic architecture, liturgy, and sacred space. Their archways, vaulted ceilings, organs, and vestments collectively embodied an atmosphere that taught me something about the grave importance of silence.

Sometime around my first year in college my dive into theology deepened. Authors like St. Paul (the Apostle), St. Augustine, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and contemporary authors like Thomas Merton began to paint a more complex image of Christian devotion for me. I began to understand the depths of what it means to humbly listen before speaking. Christian devotion, I learned, demanded the full offering of my whole self: mind, body, and emotions. Forms of sacred worship were to express that offering; the offering of body and soul was the same offering of Christ in the Crucifixion and Resurrection. Following Christ was self sacrifice (giving Christ our body, souls, and our undivided attention). This more holistic sacrifice of listening was a way of sanctifying the basic human act of listening and thus made one even more human and more free. It was a remarkably beautiful paradox of the Christian Faith. Through genuflecting, kneeling, and other humble postures of the human body, these high cultural and liturgical environments preserved the necessary and non-verbal form of this expression.

I progressively found this expression of devotion to be a desperate need for American Christians to understand. American Christianity was and still is in desperate need of a deeper and stronger aesthetic sense of reverence, silence and devotion. It's the type of devotion one might find at a wedding ceremony, a devotion performed with extreme care and attention to details. This was a certain beauty I later found in the Catholic Mass. Mass was that wedding ceremony I had been looking for all along. When I found the Mass, I found the depth of Christ's ultimate sacrifice. I found the Sacrifice of the Eucharist. The Eucharist is a mutual sacrifice. We come to give, because, in giving, we receive. We come to actually receive Him in the Bread and Wine by allowing Him to receive us, and this is harmonized in the ceremonial wedding portrayal of the entire Mass. It was a pivotal and humbling realization the moment I came to it. Unfortunately, I was not yet there on my journey. I did not experience the unspeakable joy of joining Christ in the sacrifice of Holy Communion just yet.

As I entered my first year of college, I met my philosophy advisor, Dr. Brown. Dr. Brown’s presence as a devout and informed Catholic had a way of provoking me to account for why I was not a Catholic. I never exactly knew why that was. For some reason, informed people who are simply “around” have an unspoken way of commanding our justification of why we are who we are and not them. It is a very unique phenomenon. Not only was Dr. Brown informed and a very reasonable person to converse with, he was a Catholic convert. “Who converts to Catholicism!?” Nonetheless, within about a year I was reading and hearing about various Protestants and other non-Catholics who later entered the Catholic Church: G.K. Chesterton, John Henry Newman, Jay Budziszewski, Scott Hahn, St. Augustine, John Neuhaus, Steve Ray, Francis Beckwith, Tony Blair ... the list goes on, and names are still being written on that list.

My stronger and more intellectual sympathies for Catholicism began taking form at this time, but I was still very far from her. I liked looking at her from a distance. Anything closer would have made me feel irritated and uncomfortable. Nevertheless, this sympathy provided me with a security in picking up Catholic literature. I was less afraid of getting “duped" into appreciation for Catholic culture, because Catholicism was already becoming an institution and culture I could sentimentally identify with at that safe distance. My exposure to Catholic literature began with ancient and medieval works (I never got into Catholic apologetics at that time).

The Catholic tradition, I grew to believe, was a sacred tradition of scholarship. It was not simply authoritative on its own two legs. Its beginning root was in Christ and the Apostles (as persons), and that was why Catholics professed belief in one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church every Sunday. I then realized the signifiance of Catholics reciting the Nicene Creed every Sunday. It was an acknolwedgment of the Apostles' personal, authoritative presence and the groundwork they laid for the Curch (as St. Paul writes to Timothy, “the church is the pillar and foundation of truth").

Regardless of all these wonderful musings about Holy Mass, at that time I still thought my arguments for my staunch Protestant beliefs could not be answered, let alone addressed, by Catholics. I did not care to hear what the Catholic Church had to say regarding my soul. Not because I was scared. It did not grip me, on a salvific level. It was not a threat. Like many Protestant seminarians and informed theology students, I acknowledged myself as a "little 'c' catholic." I was comfortably situated in a cozy and confusing middle ground between orthodox Protestant versions of Catholicism and contemporary Evangelical sentiments. I was never hostile toward the Roman Catholic Church. I did, however, feel some antagonism toward her because of my misconceptions. Archbishop Fulton Sheen once wrote that “there are not over a hundred people in the United States who hate the Roman Catholic Church; there are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church.” That was very true of my condition.

New Covenant Church, the church I was raised in, had a very firm footing in community life. I naturally appreciated family and valued obligation to elders and parent figures in this church. For this reason, it may be important to make a point clear at this stage. To say I was not Catholic just because of my satisfaction with misconceptions would not entirely be true. I felt a strong obligation to New Covenant, and I felt I had no right to become Catholic even if I shared a good portion of sympathies and agreements with the Catholic Church. I certainly did not feel a moral obligation to the Catholic Church. That obligation would have to be generated by a much deeper encounter with Catholicism. For an institution that claimed to be the only true Church founded by Christ Himself, my decision could not merely come about by abstract convictions. I found this type of consideration would demand a certain experiential knowledge of Catholic people and the rituals that defined them. Like John Henry Newman and many others, I did not authentically understand Catholicism until I engaged, on some basic level, in its liturgical activity and parish life. One has to share in some kind of life of a certain culture to truly understand its scripts, stories, and sacred texts. We learn by imitating other people. It is fundamental to how we understand the world. Yet, when I did this I knew I was playing with some kind of fire, but it was fire I felt I had to play with.

As an odd combination of general religious skepticism and considerations of Catholicism loomed larger and larger in the background of my life and academic studies, I gradually became an unsteady person (emotionally and intellectually). I distinctly remember expressing some of my religious struggles with a certain friend and student I frequently confided in on a daily basis. I found myself utterly frustrated with the tension in my life. More importantly, my cultural attachments to New Covenant were certainly dying, as they had since my parents’ divorce when I was seventeen.

As controversial as they are, these are some of the convictions I came to. The influence of skepticism had me thinking that if Christianity, in particular, was going to be meaningful at all (aside from whether or not it was really true), its texts would have to be an outgrowth of an already existent tradition of people that at least claims to have written those texts in the first place. As a philosophy student, I was well aware of all the ways you can twist a text to fit your presuppositions and desires. I learned I could do it anyway I liked, and feel pretty damn honest about it, too. Because of that, I was not happy with choosing a tradition that agreed with my individual notions of Scripture or religious texts (a pervasive cultural and epistemic turn after the Protestant Reformation). It became very far-fetched and implausible to me that anyone could come to even a basic objective understanding of a cultural text written 2000 years ago (e.g., "the Bible") without the strict guidance of an identifiable tradition. At some point in our lives, we have to acknowledge that we already do receive our knowledge from other people. No one reads the Bible and has an "aha" moment without that moment being prepared by some language and culture. We define ourselves and our world by our relationships, and those relationships are given to us. We are born from, out of, and into relationships. Our freedom is in our response to those relationships and their influence on our lives. In this way, Catholic converts do not suggest anything new by responding to Rome as their Mother. They acknowledge a mother that claims to have been and still is there, before, during, and after a social revolution like the Protestant Reformation. The Protestant Reformation was a stance on something new. Rome already explicitly rejected the Protestant pillar of Sola Scriptura 3-400 years before Luther. That was the difference between me wanting to join Catholicism and someone wanting to become a Protestant. Instead of standing "alone" on some other entity (e.g. the Bible), Catho are acknowledging a Mother that claims to have the rightful claim over who they actually are. In this sense, I could not avoid the fact that the very soul of Protestantism rejected a fundamental cornerstone to Christian living. Whether or not Protestantism was "right", it cut itself off from its Mother. Although their original intention was to preserve the identity of Roman Catholicism, the end result was that the Reformers came to reject their fathers and mothers. By standing "alone", Luther affirmed his commitment to his own individual convictions, whether it was about what St. Augustine and other early church fathers "truly" taught or what Scripture taught, or a hodge-podge of both (which it was). Even more, various others joined him in that stance even after the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent, which made it clear that the pillars of the Reformation (e.g. Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide, etc.) were misguided and inconsistent with the Roman Catholic faith. Could western Christian culture truly understand itself at that point? I experienced an identity crisis after continuously mulling over this. I cannot say that an “identity crisis” is too bold of a categorization for this experience, either. I suffered much stress and anxiety from this personal acknowledgment. It swept everything I stood on right out from under me, before I even knew I stood on it.

At this point, the struggle was not so much figuring out what to believe. Rather, it was figuring out where I belonged, and what beliefs came along with that sense of belonging. The more I read Scripture and the more I read early Christian perspectives, the more I realized that community was absolutely essential to the foundation for individual beliefs. Most American Christians like the idea of community, because they think of things that comfort them (e.g., "support" and “fellowship”). However, for most, if not all of the early Christian writers and Fathers, the community was binding on every aspect of your lifestyle (your beliefs, your thoughts, your convictions, your actions, your decisions, and your cultural identity). You did not have a right to disagree with your pastor, because your pastor was not only your pastor; he was your father. In his Letter to the Magnesians, St. Ignatius of Antioch (at the end of the 1st century) wrote, "Take care to do all things in harmony with God, with the bishop presiding in the place of God, and with the presbyters in the place of the council of the apostles, and with the deacons, who are most dear to me, entrusted with the business of Jesus Christ, who was with the Father from the beginning and is at last made manifest." Many modern minds (which includes my own) think they have the right to judge the appropriateness of their mother and father's decisions and teachings before respectfully acknowledging them as a mother and father. The idea behind true Catholic reform is to dialogue, and maybe even argue, with Mother Church for the hope of future reform. At the end of the day, however, as harsh and overbearing as it first sounds, mother holds the right for the final say. If you still disagree, well, that's a risk you must be willing to take, and I was certainly unwilling to take that risk. I have told many people, time and again, that this was the pivotal turning point of my move to the Catholic Church. Christianity made too many far-fetched claims for me not to recognize an appeal to the final authority of Rome's Magisterium, anyway. There was too much to figure out and so little time for me to try. And it was time I was unwilling to spend, as a non-theology student.

As long as I was outside the walls of this heritage, I was on unstable ground, and I would be until I formally submitted to it. In February of 2007, I had a drink with a close friend of mine at the time. He was a fellow philosophy student and member of the church I grew up at. That night, a night that will never escape my memory, I told him I needed to regularly attend Catholic Mass. I spoke with some of my other close friends within my non-Catholic circles (greatly admired and respected) and with two of my elders at New Covenant after that. It was a very difficult and nerve-racking decision to make, but I knew I had to make it. So I made a decision I cannot deny as hasty. When you are at the point that you are feeling much like a prodigal son, however, it is hard to see any other option but to run back home. For me to deny the call of Rome, at this point, would have done moral damage to my character. That is why I did not waste any time, and one might even say I was in a daze when talking to my elders and leaders about my decision. My obligation to the Church, at this point, was a moral obligation more than anything. It involved my safety and health as a human being.

The problem may have been that I identified with the Catholic Church too early (as many have suggested). Maybe I gave too much of myself without enough evidence, and that is very possible; there is nothing unsettling in that admittance. I began to identify with the Catholic Church like I identified with my own biological family. It was not about disagreements or agreements at that point. It was about identity and which community had the rightful claim over who I actually was meant to be and how I was meant to live. I found the Catholic Church to have this human right long before the Catholic Church even gave me Scripture. St. Augustine argued that "I should not believe the gospel except as moved by the authority of the Catholic Church." The point here is that St. Augustine, like me, belonged to the Apostles before we ever belonged to the Apostles’ Words (Scripture). It is very easy to manipulate a mother's words, but it is not so easy to pretend the authority of your own mother is not actually there, that she really isn't your own mother. I belonged to a household before I belonged to that household's beliefs. That was the crux and heart of the whole issue, no matter how much I wanted to fight it. John Henry Newman rightly observed that Roman Catholicism was a fundamentally person-oriented Faith, in this regard.

Again, St. Augustine (who would later become my confirmation saint) influenced my personal desires to join Rome: "In the Catholic Church, there are many other things which most justly keep me in her bosom. The consent of peoples and nations keeps me in the Church; so does her authority, inaugurated by miracles, nourished by hope, enlarged by love, established by age. The succession of priests keeps me, beginning from the very seat of the Apostle Peter, to whom the Lord, after His resurrection, gave it in charge to feed His sheep (Jn 21:15-19), down to the present episcopate." It soon became the case that I no longer could find my identity outside this Church, nor did I feel any other heritage had the right to claim it.

Since I became apart of this Family on the night of the Easter Vigil, March 22, 2008, I have not had a single doubt that this is where I should be. I imagine doubts will come in the future, but there is also much to learn about this heritage that will keep my thoughts busy for a very long time. It is very hard to doubt when you sense you are on Holy Ground. And when you realize you are on Holy Ground, it is impossible to leave. That is how I presently feel, and it is my hope that I will spend the rest of my days here. I have always felt like non-Catholic Christianity was a part of a whole (whatever that “whole” was) that I was implicitly aware of the moment I began to take religion seriously. After being received into the Catholic Church, I never wanted to reject what I learned or lived in that non-Catholic community, and, in a certain sense, I am still living and learning in that community; I have just found a much bigger community that contains it. I have discovered that the Catholic Church rejects nothing and nobody, and she accepts everything and everyone - whether you’re coming in as a Charismatic, a Calvinist, a Jew, a Muslim, a Presbyterian, an Anglican, an Orthodox, deist, atheist, non-denominational Christian, or a Lutheran. Some people do not understand this, because all of those rigid Catholic doctrines and dogmas give the impression that it is an intolerant and repressive institution. Understandable, but within those Catholic household rules, however, are values and beliefs exchangeable and sharable with every other religion, sect, and ideology. This is true because the Catholic Church believes all of Creation is good and sacred, and a good part of a bad system is, regardless, a good part. Rome has been around too long and has learned from too many mistakes to avoid this truth. When converts enter the Roman Catholic Church, they do not often like to refer to their conversion as a “conversion” but a “full reception." Rome receives everything good that you once believed and allows you to keep it. There is a reason why the Church calls Confirmation “full communion.” Every other person in this world, by means of whatever good things and deeds they endorse, are, in some way, communing with the universal (literally, “catholic”) Church. But we are not fully a part of the Mother Church until we fully commit to her. In this sense, I always was Catholic.

I get the impression that many people expect a canned answer when they passively ask me why I became Catholic. I suppose this is mostly an American mentality. I simply cannot respond with a couple of cliché sentences when asked of my decision. It does not work. I have practiced for some shotgun lines in response to these sorts of questions, but I have never been able to settle with one. No two or three lines can communicate the immensity of this experience. That is partially because the Catholic life does not begin at any identifiable point in time. Rome is not a school of thought that can be bagged and handed out. You cannot make someone Catholic by giving them a Bible tract. The Catholic life is a life lived in dutiful and familial love, and, as I mentioned earlier, we all live part of it without even knowing it. The way I see it, asking me why I am a Roman Catholic is like asking me why I acknowledge the Nichols family as my family. It is just a part of my heritage. It is a part of who I am as a Christian in western civilization, and it is part of my duty to who I am. I feel wrong to ignore it or set my beliefs above it, at least at this point in my life. Thus, I acknowledge that my mother is my mother and my father is my father, no matter how many mistakes they make.

"Wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be; as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic Church." - St. Ignatius of Antioch (written between the year 98 and 117, Letter to the Smyrnaeans).

The Converted Heart

2009-08-23T18:40:00.000-07:00

I should probably add the tune of chirping crickets to this sleeping blog of mine, and I don't have much of an excuse. It’s been a summer of decision-making, friends’ decision-making, and deciding to talk about decision-making. Work and play.

More specifically, this summer has been a hotbed of faith transitions and deliberated faith transitions among many old friends and new friends. I am questioned here and there about acquaintances recently deciding to enter the Roman Catholic Church. I can only say so much about fellow students and friends entering and wanting to join Rome. I run the risk of trivializing their experience when I do that. Conversions of friends are not subjects of commentary for me. I’m not a spectator. I’m involved, and I am partially responsible for their decisions (as everyone else is). I am very enthusiastic about anyone willing to become Catholic.

As I seep myself more and more in the devout culture of Catholicism, everyday it seems I hear a new story about some friend or friend of some other friend running to the front doors of Rome. It’s really not uncommon. When I was a non-Catholic this was, at best, befuddling, and nothing much more than that. It’s not that non-Catholics don’t care or they don’t even talk about these conversions for a very long time. They do. It just doesn’t grab them in an enthusiastic way. They are interested and fundamentally detached, while feeling some things in between. And that is what I’ve learned about westerners in most every intercultural confrontation. In previous centuries, someone who deserted our culture for another would be ostracized to the point of ceased interaction. Nowadays, instead of criticizing a conversion, we project it as a comedic move (not necessarily comedic in a “haha” way). We place ourselves above a convert’s experience by treating it as a subject of interesting, sentimental, and trivial talk rather than a stimulant for reflection. We are much like a Jane Austen character in one of her drawing rooms. Instead of reflecting, we talk around it, chat about it, pleasantly misrepresent it, and thereby steal the same sort of pleasure we might gain from reading an entire book. It makes us feel as if we’ve confronted a conversion experience without genuinely confronting it. That is why it is interesting, at best, sentimental, and not disturbing, frustrating, mesmerizing, or gripping.

I avoid lengthy conversations about my friends’ conversions. I do care, and I have not lost my zeal for the drama of Catholic conversions. I only fear the comedy routine. I want friends and family to truly share in the silent drama of giving up everything. Non-Catholics need to understand that this is not, at bottom, a change of beliefs or ideas. It is a dramatic and heart-breaking cultural change. It is a conversion that converts the whole person: spirit, soul, and body. After all the tiring explanations are finished and these Catholic candidates are finally confirmed in the Sacraments, they feel different and start acting in dramatically new and different ways. It is sometimes painful and sometimes exhilarating and sometimes depends on the day.

My new Catholic friends know I wholeheartedly support their decisions and know what it means to leave behind Protestant America. I left my background because I wanted to complete it, not reject it. It’s not that the Protestant sect of Christianity didn’t have what I found here, it just didn’t have everything that I have found here. Catholicism is a colossal Yes to works, to sacraments, to family, to sacred teaching, to more mothers and fathers, to more community, and to every belief and activity a human needs to fulfill their humanity. It is big in every possible way to explain it.

To speak from experience, recovering from the loss of family (biological and religious) involves stress and sacrifice, and it’s not a true conversion without stress and sacrifice. At the end, however, it is truly exhilarating and even rehabilitating. You have to push and push and push, and it takes determination. There is nothing more heart-breaking than feeling misunderstood and also disappointing those siblings, parents, and closest friends. It is devastating and makes you want to squirm in your pew if you think about it too much. There is no complete apologetic for this decision, and that is why Catholic converts must always hold themselves responsible for their family’s sadness and expressed disapproval. At the bottom of all this is a movement that is sometimes paradoxical in theory but, at the very least, respectable. It is taxing to take responsibility and keep silent, but no one can take away the work you put into it. Silencing your heart while others demean it, degrade it, and demoralize it is more than a sweat. It is emotionally tormenting. And, unfortunately, you humbly learn to bear it, without puffing yourself up as a hero.

An older Catholic once wrote me a letter for my Confirmation. In a brief and pointed part of the letter, he wrote: “win souls, not arguments”. I continue to learn that every time I engage someone in an argument without the intent of showing them the Body of our Lord, I have given them ugliness. Mother Teresa puts it this way, “This is what we have to learn right from the beginning: to listen to the voice of God in our heart, and then in the silence of the heart God speaks. Then from the fullness of our hearts, your mouth will have to speak…. Then in the fullness of your heart, because it is full of God, full of love, full of compassion, full of faith, your mouth will speak.” When we take in the Body and Blood of our Lord, we are first silencing our rambling mouths. We are trying to find Christ’s voice before we find our own. That is the particular burden of every Catholic convert. We must learn sincere, genuine, and charitable silence. We can’t win or win souls without it.

There is no full-fledged defense for our decision, because this is not an experience comprehensively defined by a conversion of thought or interpretation of Scripture or Scriptural principle. It is in essence, as it is defined by its end, a movement. We are no longer struggling through a theoretical maze. We are, rather, moving to our home, even though theorizing showed us where that home is. Because this is a movement and not an apologetic defense at the end of the day, it is foolery to everyone else. We can not propositionally define a movement. We can only give ground, provide space for it, and pray that others will make sense of everything else. We can give probable reasoning, but, after probability, come virtues of a non-rational force: faith and charity. John Newman, in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, wrote, “…It is faith and love which give to probability a force which it has not in itself. Faith and love are directed towards an Object; in vision of that Object they live; it is that Object, received in faith and love, which renders it reasonable to take probability as sufficient for internal conviction.” When they see that reason must stop short, when we make a decision out of sheer dutiful love, they will learn that, at the end of all these spats, we had to give ourselves up. That is always what the world must see. Such is sacrifice. When we have explained ourselves, our mouths must shut, and there is nothing left but love.

“… in certain instances it is, undeniably, more worthy of respect to give oneself up to an enthusiasm, even though it be an irrational one, which none the less proceeds from a great love, than not to give oneself up to it at all.” – Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

Globalization: Our Poor Excuse for Sacrifice

2009-04-28T19:31:00.001-07:00

After reading through the April edition of The Antlantic, listening to the various subjects of interest on NPR, and giving attention to Obama’s recent world tour, I can not think of a more giddy subject for American political analysts than globalization (even amidst our current economic crisis). This also ties into an article in the January edition of The Economist, on the concept of “sharing” through internet networks like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. Amidst all the abstractions and romantic musings on this new exciting wave of chatter, it is really hard to identify what exactly is “globalization”. Of all the identifications given, Robert Wright seems to offer the clearest example of what the term “globalization” might connote in most circles. .

In his article, "Why God Loves Globalization", Wright focuses on the big question we all implicitly want to get at when we present “globalization” as a subject of discussion. Religion always seems to be looming in the background when we treat the subject. Understandably, westerners really want to see how we’re all going to get along at the end of the day, even if proselytizing is a goal religious westerners seek. In Wright’s view, values, within our religious traditions, will have to form given the practical demands of the difficult circumstances we find ourselves in. If I were to analogize Wright’s words: we all want a piece of the same pie, but particular cultures and religious groups will have to develop values to tolerate the other cultures who want a piece for themselves. Wright sees this increasing tolerance of other ethnicities and faiths as an ever-developing reality sense the Stone Age, and he attributes this cause to our ever-expanding network of trade and urbanization. The concept driven home presents “globalization” as something we might be able to grab, and that is “mutual understanding” while we all try to acquire the diverse ends we seek for ourselves.

I would agree that in many cases our improvement in communicative technology has allowed us to interpret and empathize with other cultures and religious traditions without resorting to an inarticulate battle of force. Although, it really is hard to mark a point of progress, given the amount of bloodshed spilled in the 20th century. At the face of things, this expanding “social” network would seem to allow for recognition of and respect for cultural dividing lines and barriers. Yet, through all the internet networking and shoddy treatments of other cultural distinctions in the media, the best we seem to produce is sentimentality. And what we mean by “social” when describing these social networks is really rooted in a fundamentally different notion of “social” than traditional and ancient notions.

In Roger Scruton’s book, Modern Culture, Scruton criticizes the substitution of “sentimentality” for “sympathy” in much of western high culture. Sympathy, Scruton argues, requires the sacrifice of an individual to develop a particular form of character in recognition of ideals existent outside of herself. Sentimentality is not open to this capacity for development as a necessary goal, because it is self-interested. The sentimental culture does not look above itself for any ideals or any rites of passage into adulthood, referencing no prescribed moral criteria for its development. It prescribes its own development.

Because this culture has no reference above itself, it is, instead, self-referential. I would argue that it creates its own concept of space, even, and consumes everything it wants from the rest of the world within this ever-expanding space it creates. Our current western culture has gone so far as to presume that nothing exists outside of its own form of language. And this is when Derrida truly hits the tip of the iceberg. Here, concepts like God and love and space and time are trapped in a world of language with no reality to reference outside of this self-enclosed linguistic world. We, essentially, create the space we want to work within. There is no moral space outside of us to subject ourselves to or discover. The motive of most internet networking is to create a space where all the pleasant feelings consumed in friendships are available for our selective consumption, without having to engage the people and cultural ideals providing these consumed pleasures. In the same way, we can control our own individual expansion, selectively treating the world as a market for our individual goals and appetites. We are able to withdraw or “sign out” or “log out” when we face a potential tragedy or conflict or moral demand. This form of “socializing” is hand-picked and resolves into marketed consumption. While the word “social” remained before our eyes, its definition was entirely substituted before we were able to put a finger on it.

As globalization develops, networking and increased international media coverage will never make a demand on us to see the world we do not want to see. So far, the concept of globalization has been cast under the umbrella of international diplomacy, communication, and global awareness of cultural diversity. Yet, we have never stopped to ask why this increased understanding is a good, and, if it is a “good”, where did that “good” come from? So far, we have only increased our desire to feed our own economic self-interest, while cooperating with other cultures pursuing that interest. In the meantime, tension is caked over with glamorous political smiles and cordial gestures. As long as we do not identify a moral space which demands our genuine sympathy, we will be trapped within our own selfish worlds along with our networking toys to provide us pleasure. And all this will be under the fantastic pretense that we are sympathizing, when really we are only reaping the sentimental pleasures derived from sympathy. Genuine moral values can not develop out of self-interest for their grounding, as Wright suggested in his article, because self-interest has no interest or demand outside of itself.

Prior to the References and Opinions: Origin and End

2009-04-23T22:37:00.000-07:00

The various years I have spent as a philosophy student have understandably been burdened by random spurts of darkness, which often resolve into a never ending game of skepticism. To many contemplatives, Plato’s depiction of the soul emerging out of the cave as it gradually acquires Truth always appears to be that tragically unachievable aspiration we all can relate to. But I think I can confidently say that most contemplatives and philosophy students eventually understand their seemingly endless whirlwind of skepticism to be a phenomenon that often occurs when they lose a sense of their belonging in the world. It’s that Dark Night of the Soul the religious contemplatives often refer to. Fortunately, it’s not the end of the game for many and most of us. In reflection, we often recognize those spurts of skepticism to only be chapters in our already written narrative - a concept we so often criticize but intuitively perceive as already there for us to discover and place ourselves in.

That concept of “what is already there” has been agitating my mind for the past several months, and I have been through a roller-coaster of anxiety in response to it. It agitates me, because, without an already existent reality, all of reality is human craft. In everything I have read in my life, I can not see any way around that consequence, and it is a very bothersome consequence. I have read a good portion of books with that concept infusing every page of every book I read this past year. Recently I finished a book by John R. Searle, entitled Mind, Language, and Society. I chose Searle, because I already read the argument from theist Natural Law thinkers. I wanted to see how the argument could possibly be extended outside of a theistic context. Searle was going to be my atheist bridge in hopes of finding a world existent outside of my language (as I used language to get off the ground in talking about it).

In the very beginning of the book, Searle defends against the notion that all facts are relative to language (e.g. “The world is everything that is the case”) and the continuous flux of social constructs and meanings. His chief concern was that of thinkers like Derrida and Foucalt, who seemed to make all of what we mean by “reality” to be a craft or tool of man in his will to power. Yet, as I will elaborate below, this seems to truly only be a fear of Searle’s on an individual scale, not a collective one. Searle’s original response is one I would stick with: we would not attempt to get at reality or the world or explain reality if we did not presuppose an independent reality already there for us to discover in the first place. His argument is that there is an ontologically independent reality outside the meaning of our language (as in things and “facts” already existent before and after our explanation and meaningful portrayals of them).

This was not much of a disagreement on my end until he reduced teleology and human values (in a few pages) to the result of useful ends collectively sought by individuals. What begins as a system of use develops into a system of valued ends. A wall, for instance, is originally used to block out the enemy but then develops into a staple of cultural identity. It consequently receives its end value by its assigned function, which apparently arises out of a human need. Previously in his book, without explicitly drawing out the value of life in the same way, he argues that the functions of certain organs would not be assigned if there was not a presupposed value of human life. Even natural human and animal functions and values are dependent on the way we want to see the world. At this point, I could not resist…. If all value of human life and other relational values we hold are not independent of us (as were neutral scientific phenomena for Searle), then they are qualified by needs and are not values at all. If we are consistent with Searle’s system of causation, the value is only a product of utilitarian means. It is some purely biological need we have. The social institution is constructed for the manipulation of brute facts in service of our biological urges. If values are only seen and assigned as good ends, then, following his original argument against anti-realists, what is the point in aspiring to an explanation of them as existent? And if the end pursued is pursued on the basis of collective agreement, what basis does a society have to criticize the value system of another society? What is the resource for Searle’s “realist” at that point? This, to my surprise, was not much of a stated or recognized concern for Searle. Even if it is a misrepresentation of his argument, I am surprised it is not within his concern to treat the subject. But then I remember his original intent was to provide “clarity” to a world we can have a progressive understanding of, a way of getting at the world intelligibly, and his primary starting point in justifying knowledge was “consciousness”. I believe this is the fundamental result of a system that is closed within the world as we know it. Searle’s world is justified by human consciousness, and its value is at the service of humanity.

So I went back home to a religious response. I ran to Pope John Paul II’s encyclical on the relationship between faith and reason (Fides et Ratio). A very small principle can go a very long way, and John Paul II’s principle did. According to John Paul II, Man, in his approach to the world, must see himself and begin his enquiry about the world in relation to the rest of humanity. Hence, at the outset, he finds himself theorizing within a context of faith, hope, and love with other beings. He thinks and must think with and for them. He can not rip himself from this context, and he is destined to theorize about his world within it. He can try to ignore it, but his system inevitably falls into a system like Searle’s or Derrida’s or Hegel’s when he fails to recognize a world of value to be discovered, and a world of value he is already in. Following Searle’s logic, it does not logically follow that because we are bound to explaining value and function within our accepted system of meaning and biological needs, that those values and functions must be reduced to those systems and needs. Man can’t simply begin to justify his world in relation to his mind, because, at the outset, he excludes other minds, other values, and the entire human person (who is naturally received with intuited value). Man must see himself as a receiver. He must receive a spiritual heritage of concerns, ideas, values, and ends, and it is this complex pilgrimage to begin with. I cease to be so anxiously skeptical of my world when I place myself into this relation. I am fundamentally bound to it. The question I must then inquire after is the Origin and End of this relation.

“When we see the world as an end in itself, everything becomes itself a value and consequently loses all value, because only in God is found (value) of everything, and the world is meaningful only when it is the ‘sacrament’ of God’s presence. Things treated merely as things in themselves destroy themselves because only in God have they any life. The world of nature, cut off from the source of life, is a dying world. For one who thinks food in itself is the source of life, eating is communion with the dying world, it is communion with death. Food itself is dead, it is life that has died and it must be kept in refrigerators like a corpse.” – Alexander Schmemann

From Isolation to Ignorance: My Life in Philosophy

2009-01-27T20:36:00.000-08:00

I was required to include this in one of my applications. I figured it would be nice to share it here.
Kierkegaard, or maybe Socrates, taught me that the pursuit of wisdom is a fundamentally tragic pursuit. Since my exposure to ancient philosophy, I have progressively sought to clear the calculative grime from my mind and articulate this tragedy within myself. Before this, I only had a disinterested and propositional understanding of the human person. In all my years as a philosophy student, I have never found a sufficient answer to the question of “why philosophy?” Philosophers are aware of truth precisely because they are aware of their ignorance. “I know nothing” is not a proposition; it is a condition. A philosophical vocation is a recognized condition born out of the mind’s essential awareness of itself. This is the beginning of wisdom. Wisdom begins with a self awareness which begs the assertion: “I know nothing.” The vulgar do not recognize their ignorance, because truth is not any larger than themselves. Truth is their craft. They are truth, and this is their neglect of a life of wisdom.

My life in philosophical studies has ranged anywhere from petty focuses of in-house theological debates to the existentially unsettling questions more native to ancient and Continental thought. When I first attended Lindenwood University, my pursued interests were still largely influenced by an attempt to philosophically articulate and defend my Reformed beliefs in the moral arena of the world. Wanting to maintain my identity as a Reformed Evangelical, I chose to explore my options within the Calvinist culture of theology. For many years, I busied my philosophical studies with the background of a cultural conflict between Kuyperian theology and re-packaged versions of “Presuppositional” apologetics lingering in my mind. It took a very long time for me to get over this hump. Much of my time was spent confronting theological debates and dilemmas strictly within the Protestant sect of Christianity.

While my philosophical inquiries expanded, concerns about post-enlightenment and pre-enlightenment metaphysics began to demand a new consideration of how I could and should define myself as a citizen of the western world. My failure to first see myself within a western context was the cause of much directionless searching. As many philosophy historians have pointed out, the Reformation presented a paradigmatic shift in the way individuals historically defined themselves. Simply put, the post-Reformation definition of a western identity was now undertaken as an individual project rather than a communal enterprise. This social phenomenon set the platform for a new definition of human freedom to take form.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s more modernized approach to Aristotelian metaphysics helped me respond to this troublesome condition. His portrait of humans as inter-dependent co-authors of their own narrative was a depiction more feasible than many fragmented perspectives I was previously exposed to. This illuminated a deep intuited concern I had with modern depictions of human autonomy and faulty missteps in modern epistemology. Since the Enlightenment, modern intellectuals have continuously sought an autonomous definition of themselves without a presupposed end for their existence. I neither see this as a good or bad approach but a new beginning point we can not avoid in our human narrative.

I do not believe we will ever universally restore the old way of assuming an identity with a cosmologically evident telos (e.g. “eternal communion with God” or “the contemplative life” etc.). Yet, we can still open avenues for individuals to define themselves in such ways. Our human freedom is understood without this assumed horizon, but this horizon can still be offered as an alternative context to articulate our human freedom. This has given me hope that the quest for a religious identity is still not a lost cause. Augustine’s famous principle, fides quarum intellectum, may not be a condition in which we currently find ourselves anymore. The Post-enlightenment rejection of a cosmologically evident human telos has left us with a new creative beginning point.. We can not “believe in order to understand” in the way we once did, because our metaphysical ends are no longer “evident”; they are options in need of analytical exploration and definition. In Charles Taylor’s words, they are no longer “unproblematic”.

People have often suggested that my conversion to Catholicism was due to a loss of identity after my parents’ divorce. I can not deny this personal isolation was often echoed in my frustrations with many modern portraits of the Self. Yet, I also can not deny this personal dilemma revealed a new and tangible landscape of human isolation. As I mentioned above, the first step to wisdom begins with recognizing our condition. My parents’ divorce allowed me to identify that condition in a way many others have not. The best way to interpret a cry is to first recognize that we ourselves are crying. The mourned isolation of thinkers like Kierkegaard, Kafka, Sartre, and Camus is undoubtedly real, and I can not reject this as a universal cry. Divorce is a fundamental expression of this estrangement. It is a cry I fundamentally sympathize with. I have gradually adopted Wittgenstein’s argument that philosophical language is a way of projecting a picture on to our world. The ambiguity of the image we present is often the cause of our modern anxiety. The first misstep of some modern thinkers is their autonomous attempt to paint their identity without first objectively situating themselves within a metaphysical horizon and heritage. There is no landscape to the image in which they see themselves, because they have divorced themselves from this landscape. Hence, they have lost their location.

My conversion to Catholicism contained this very practical consideration. I felt my duty to the West was a recovery of a lost narrative. Before I was ever going to be a Protestant, I was first going to define myself as a Roman Catholic. Since my conversion, the rift and estrangement between the non-Catholic world and the Catholic world has been too strong for me to ignore. I have delved more into the philosophy of language and dialogue in hopes of improving conversation among various cultures. Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger have played a significant role in my understanding of the revelatory aspects of language. Language has a potency that discovers and articulates a problem which is previously unidentifiable. The tragedy is that along with this new articulation comes a new set of problems. It is a very unique condition we find ourselves in, but I do not believe we can ignore it. My interest in cultural dialogue and linguistic concerns is fed by a desire to translate these new problematic concepts.

I have been through many intellectual transitions in my life - from adherence to Calvinist theology as a younger Protestant, to a much larger belief in post-Vatican II cultural dialogue as a current Catholic. Above all, my pursuit of wisdom began after recognition of my ignorance. From the beginning of my philosophical pursuits until now, I have sought to retain and pursue all that has been good and true in my formation as a human being. I am now at the fore of a much longer academic road ahead of me. This same fundamental belief in the Good still drives my search for everything in all things and the contemplation of all these things to be passed on to the universal community.

Working out our economy and our problems

2009-01-21T19:59:00.000-08:00

The western world is very disillusioned with the prior dependence it has placed in its economic flow of mind. The greatest difficulty in academia is offering an answer that is right, and theorists are never always right. Life is and never will be a science, as far as we ever understand it to be "life". There will always be metaphysical leaps and bounds, missteps and enthusiastic hops, but we will never give up our attempt to approach our conflicts and problems with inadequate equipment. At times the theorist (whether his title is an economist, scientist, political theorist, or philosopher) projects dilemmas onto a world which was previously much better without them. He sometimes wreaks more problems upon the common man than were already there in the first place. It is part of the drama of our lives and theories about our lives to confront problems, difficulties, and conflicts, and the way that we approach these intuited conflicts is by articulating them. Sometimes we articulate them wrongly, or sometimes we articulate them ineffectively. In other words, nothing is concluded into a productive science at the end of this battle because of too many ambiguous or ineffective words. And yet, we are forced to dynamically engage a world that does not fit under our thumb. We have to approach it with the pen and the mouth as well.

I read an article once by a scientist (I don't care to remember his name) who argued that we are much better off without "philosophy", and that philosophy has never given us anything to hold on to. In short, it has never given us answers, facts. I do not know how to respond to this other than clarifying that the aim of philosophy has always been to pave the way for a clear methodical way to make our lives understandable. Physics was once philosophy. Biology was once philosophy. Economics was, and still is, philosophy. Yet, we always want to blame our philosophers for not giving us a clear-cut science. Alan Greenspan can not be held responsible for economic problems in the West because he got something wrong. Part of his job is to get things wrong. His social role is to theorize, to project frameworks and contexts in which we can articulately sift through our problems of judgment, value, and the network of money flow. Yet, this does not mean we are better without him. It means that we depend upon his mind. And at the end of the day, we can have a president very profoundly say that it's not about "big government or small government"; it's about what "works" and is working. The meaning of Obama's message here is that the old way of articulating our economic crises is not working, and so we need to let go of our attachments to the previously vocalized categories. At the same time, we would not be where we are if we had not articulated the problem this way in the first place.

Not everyone is responsible for a life of study or persistent academic pursuits. We are all situated in a world which demands a type of excellence in whatever condition we find ourselves. The intended life of excellence can not always produce excellence, and this is often very tragic. My life as a philosopher is full of mistakes, misgivings, and words I would have retracted if ever given the chance. Yet, I can not say that I ever regret being a philosopher for the distress and pain I have sometimes caused others, either immediately or intermediately through what I've written or spoken. Sometimes we are wrong, and sometimes we are very right. The wave of postmodern criticism that philosophical theory should be kept as fragmentary as everything else, because of its failure to provide answers to life, is really due to a misunderstanding of philosophy as theory. Theory provides and continues to provide a framework in which the interconnection of all the other sciences and doctrines of these sciences makes the most sense to us and improves our lives. We will always perceive a need to improve our lives as a community. For this reason, we will always keep defining and trying to define what is not yet working but needs to work. It's not an easy job, but it's important to always remain sober and reasonable before we become too intolerant and resort to force.

The Home of Love before Society

2009-01-18T17:47:00.000-08:00

The cultural milieu around me is developing too much beyond my categorizations these days; it's difficult to say much of anything about different social groups. The variety of cultural distinctions even in the suburbs is striking to me. An ever-expanding media network provides a market of choices for different people. I would also say that it's a social phenomena demanding a new type of reflective Stoicism if we ever want to adjust to the changes.

While working on my grad applications at the Bread company a couple of days ago, I had the privilege of sitting next to a good ol' home-body group of suburban Pentecostals (and I think they were UPC). I never know what's going to come out of a devout charismatic's mouth, so I'm always on the edge of my seat in settings like these. To my surprise, I developed a certain affection for them, as they continued with their conversation on inward change and transformation. There are too many religious groups trying to focus on contemporary social issues, under the pretense that it's time to start moving "out" and getting things done. It's my opinion that it's the simple pull of the market on these young and ambitious minds. Our excuse is that we must adopt the language of our current market in order to function effectively. We have to situate ourselves in the ever-transforming amoebic wave of society to facilitate some change and movement. Yet, it is one of the last places for us to situate ourselves. In order to spout about the proper political policies which best exemplify our notion of love or whatever, our first responsibility is to return to the kitchen and dining room table. It's the same reason why Aristotle constructs his theoretical society on the functioning of proper friendships. Our souls must first be transformed at home with our closest ones. Our identities must be shaped here in conversation with loved ones, and if we do not choose this priority, our identities will be shaped by a more impersonal and abstract social institution. We can not get caught up in implementing contradictory notions of the most important and complex virtues we have brought with us only half-formed in that place we once called our home. Such is what happens when the conflicting advertisements in the market become our new home. This quote, by Hans Balthasaar, stood out to me tonight as I was reading about the complications of what we mean by "love": "the site from which love can be observed and generated cannot itself lie outside of love (in the '"pure logicity"' of so-called science); it can lie only there, where the matter itself lies–namely, in the drama of love." We are too often satisfied with these half-packaged notions of love under the pretense that "at least we are actually doing something for society" or "living out love". The reality is that we only hurt our society when we are encouraged with unreflective social activity. We must spend time at home before we become marketers. The quiet and reflective pace prevalent in our homes is where we identify the true substance and value of the love we so often seek to find, or even proof that such a concept exists between people. It is at the home and in closest friendships where love actually exists between two people, not between a seller and consumer. This is where the true drama of love is actually played out. It's a social context which provides people in close quarters, where arguments are forced to be confronted and conflicts are in a constant state of repair. This is where we find our most evident forms of love and affection. It is where we can universally identify that fleshed out example we all seek and so often struggle to discover.

Speech, Chatter, Life, and Death

2009-01-14T20:36:00.000-08:00

“What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

This was quoted in Richard Neuhaus' essay, Born Toward Dying. It is ironic that I have spent much of the most recent weeks with a chip on my shoulder against unclear speech, but I have continued to mindlessly chatter about it. This essay really opened another chasm behind this unethical concept of unclear speech: the sheer fragility and delicacy of life which allows speech to exist in the first place. For many years now, I have been under a progressive conviction that the proper end, the telos, of all things is the nurturing of life. If I ever found myself at a question of direction or what to do or what to say, I often obligated myself to the reflection, "does this give life?" Yet, it is sadly the case that much of our criticisms and satire are oriented in an unconscious direction toward death. Our own worlds are tied up with our frustrations. Our picture of current affairs, of the religious world, the non-religious world, or the public square, is drawn by a self mostly preoccupied with its own petty concerns. Instead of seeking what to do, we look for something to chatter about. And why do we chatter? Because it is inarticulate, and what is inarticulate is not obligated to follow an articulate train of thought. Chatter kills things. It treats life trivially to avoid treating life delicately. I am reminded of Merton's reflection on solitude; sometimes silence is the most potent language. In a dialogue between the self and the world, the self can appropriate silence when nothing can properly be said. Hence, silence is apart of language, because it is a gesture. It is a gesture that does not resort to the short-sighted killing of a concept to ease one's frustrations. Silence is when the self waits until it sees an opportunity for life. Here, the self can finally choose to speak. It can finally choose to speak ethically and clearly, because it has reflected sufficiently beyond the simplistic divisions of reality that are hammered out by mindless chatter. This is the essence of a philosophical vocation.

Given the similarities between Heidegger and Wittgenstein, I would not be surprised if this stance on clarity, maybe translated as "a way toward Being" (in Heideggerian speech), was some where in the background when Wittgenstein wrote this. Wittgenstein was concerned about the whirlwinds philosophers get themselves in by irresponsible categorizations and philosophical dilemmas with no clear way out of them. Saying something, for both Wittgenstein and Heidegger, was tied in with a concept of showing. That is, when someone said something, their presupposed intent was to present a relatable image to their audience. When the image was not articulated in a relatable enough way, the image was no longer being shown; it was only hiding under the pretense of being shown. That is what we do when we chatter. We pretend, even to ourselves, that we are somehow drawing a relatable picture of life. In reality, we are saying nothing, only perpetuating a problem and busying ourselves with misrepresentations of what life is. It's an ironic way of how we preoccupy ourselves with something other than the respectable and conscious reality of life and death.

The religious landscape amidst gray secular cultures

2009-01-05T22:24:00.000-08:00

It’s my first post of the New Year, and there is much to talk about for 2009. But since all the American media really seem to talk about is economics and Obama, why not take a look at education?

I’m reading a book published in 2005 by a Jewish journalist who chooses to explore the structure of religious colleges throughout the United States, prying into the inner workings of a good variety of conservative and liberal religious universities. Naomi Riley’s God on the Quad is subtitled How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America. As one might guess, her main focus is the conservative side of the fence. It’s a great book for anyone curious about the sociological effects of conservative religious education on the young adult mind.

There is a lot of important information packed into it, although she does play around a bit much with personal testimony from the students. But the important aspect of her special take on the issue is her concern with the formative influence of these environments on the student body. The amount of faculty from highly accredited universities, she reports, are no less found here than secular universities. And the schools she visits are widely regarded as the most conservative. Among the many are Bob Jones University, the evangelical school historically known for its racial segregation policies, and Brigham Young University, the staunchly Mormon school. The latter has some of the most rigidly prescribed student/faculty etiquette I personally am aware of.

To accuse these schools of intolerance and imposing “sheltered” environments upon the students is a bit mislead, even though many of them are undoubtedly guilty of racial discrimination and maybe some forms of “homophobia” (which I still don’t exactly know how to define). Naomi’s emphasis is the direction these schools provide and the amount of social responsibility the students’ acquire while staying there. Social responsibility was the biggest one. You don’t find this in secular universities as much, and it is progressively dying. The biggest problem is that secular universities do not offer a definitive social context in which students find their particular role. Even if there is a bit of an amorphous social framework one might be able to identify in secular universities, they’re hardly intelligible. The ones that do are often pigeon-holed as “liberal” or “conservative”, and not much else after that.

The mistake of the secular universities is that they are concerned about providing students with a neutral education, but a “neutral” education isn’t an achievable reality. I don’t have a problem with attempting to be as objective and disinterested and even “neutral” as possible when treating very controversial topics. It’s my conviction that this is an important principle behind Western academia. The difficulty is, however, when the secular institution excludes the possibility of other ideals and values which are typically understood to already be favored or canonized. The Western religious ideals, in turn, receive a stale treatment, and there is no treatment of even medieval ideals (a topic you would expect to be an underdog by now) as anything worth plausible philosophical consideration. I’ve encountered such travesties time and again. At the end of the day, because we have practically assumed this postmodern position in most classroom settings, the less favored still only get a half-baked treatment. What people usually grab is an attractive idea romanticized in all sorts of aesthetically gratifying language; they leave behind everything that home once meant to them, under the impression that it was all just a scam to keep them under mom and dad’s hand. Religious schools, although they many lack the much needed consideration of other cultural ideals in opposition to their own, at least answer a very basic human need. They offer stability and direction, a social framework where explicit criteria is available for them to approach dialogue. And many of these students do end up receiving graduate degrees from schools like Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary.

Maybe religious universities do offer a “sheltered” education, or a “close-minded” approach – however you might categorize it. The point is that the secular universities can not avoid it either. They give up a meaty representation of an important philosophy in their anxious desire to openly respect the other students. Either that, or their curriculum treats most traditional religions with a terribly off-set bias, without the students consciously aware they are receiving such a bias.

There’s more to ask about these religious schools and how much they will actually maintain their intellectual and religious integrity. I imagine much of that will unfold as the U.S. continues with different political and economic policies. Demographics will change, but I do not doubt that the strong religious cultures will continue to prevail in an increasingly fragmented nation.

A world of marvelously clashing cultures and a need for definition

2008-12-26T09:49:00.000-08:00

This season was obviously different for me - my first year celebrating Christmas as a Catholic. Everything revolves around my Catholicism it seems. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between what might be an authentic conversion or the sheer novelty of a new religious landscape. I hope it is a little of both, because a little of both is just the right combination to make sense to the world around me. Spirituality must always have an aesthetic limb, or else it is simply untranslatable to the world around it.

I was able to drag my family along into a midnight Mass with me this year. It went over much better than last year. I am only curious as to what was floating through their minds as we participated in the Mass. I can understand the tension that must exist in their minds. Their awareness of my mind, associated with a separate sort of convictions, must spark a need for them to reconcile with the difference between my beliefs and their own.

At times, the only avoidance of broken relationships is to bull-shit through a conversation by ambiguous abstractions. Unfortunately, my convictions are rooted in articulated stances on what something is and what something isn’t (e.g., what faith is and what it isn’t, what the Church is and what it isn’t, what worship is and what it isn’t…) Not only so, but I am finding an increased ethical obligation to reference concrete points such as these when I am in a conversation. The poetic concepts that may be translated a million different ways by a million different people simply do nothing to help clarify who we are and what we believe as humans, or what SHOULD we believe. As this beautifully multicultural society in America expands more and more through the years, the need for clarity is becoming more imperative as we seek to understand what sort of people we are and what sort of people we should become as inheritors of all these different and diverse cultures and families. A social group that does not seek a category for itself is no group at all, and it deprives humans of a very definitive and objective human aspiration: that aspiration is to define ourselves. The more we seek unity without definition, the more we become sparse, disparate, and alone.

Because of this, our Holidays must have a definition. They must have objective value, and their cultural relevance simply can not be left in the dirt. To define things is not to exclude transcendence. This is why many people hate to confront theological topics or philosophical propositions, because they fear these propositions and arguments have lost the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of human life and God. The element of life which is missed is that life must be defined before it can ever be transcended, or else there is nothing to transcend; such are the attributes we give to humans, God, myth, and religion. Anthropology, theology, and the rest of the sciences can only go too far, and too many people misunderstand that most theologians and scientists understand this. Theologians and other scholars only seek clarity. They want to understand the human condition to help the human condition. We can only begin by defining ourselves against the backdrop of statements that contradict each other. This is the essence of Truth on a conversational scale. It must be referenced, and once something is referenced, it has taken a stance on what it is and isn’t.

Finding Rome through abstractions, metaphors, and prose

2008-11-13T23:31:00.000-08:00

Whether I believe all this or not in years to come, I can’t know. I at least know that when I found Her, I was taken by an aesthetic world of wholeness. She gave me the personifications of feminine love at its fullest. I found Eve, my once lost love, once again. I could finally believe in everything. It will always be the fondest memory of mine when looking back at those first moments of trying to talk to my mother and queen, in my room when the lights were finally turned off. My soul needed quietude. I needed silence as I listened for God in the dark, after my day of endless shouting was over.

I was terribly confused that night. I didn’t know what I was praying, because I had not the slightest clue who I was praying to any more. I cried, and I also kind of shivered. It was because I knew my life would not be the same after this night. And it wasn’t. I shook, because my body couldn’t handle the uncomfortable feelings my mind entertained those past weeks. Finally I shattered, and I told Him I was ready to drown. I didn’t really want to live at that moment, because I knew that the landscape for my life was about to be crushed and replaced by a much hated world.

The abstractions were killing me in the weeks before, by confusing questions with answers and answers with distractions. Everyday before this was an abstract trick. Day after day consisted of me telling myself that I was spiritually apart of her, even though I was in protest. It was a terrible delusion.

But everyday after this, I wanted to find the center of Existence. I knew there was a deep well somewhere facing the East, and standing at it was a Divine King; placed next to Him was his Mother and Queen, the Acceptance in Pure Fidelity. Solomon, that first son of David, made his mother the queen of God’s people in the East, and now the new Son of David made his Mother the Queen of the East and the West. The Jewish woman at the first well did not give her will up to God. This one did. And I was soon to find her hiding from having her Child aborted.

I found her in a few muttered words, only half articulate but honest – a half confession really. Then I found her in a string of beads which gave me her whole story and how I was born. She was Eve. She was the Ark. She was the Jewish Queen. She was every word of wisdom spoken of that bore God Himself. She brought me to my King’s birth. I was finally there at a pool of water. It was my birthplace.

Everyday of my life up to this was spent with a friend and a relative. They were brought along in every new thing I discovered and believed. Some things were false, and some were true. But this moment was different, because no one had the same eyes to see it. No one could see it, because their unaesthetic world was so far from any true sense of grandiose beauty in our universe. We all lost the bearing of a Family over our minds. No more incense or paintings or portraits. We lost fidelity, commitment, sanctity, images of femininity, of sacred pictures. The world we had was always reducing itself to something less, in hope of aimlessly finding a fundamental particle we could all eventually call reality or church or community or whatever we needed as home. It couldn’t find it but kept digging further and further and further until it forgot everything that a martyr was, what necessity a Mother’s love had, what aesthetic need a sacred image filled. It was true idolatry. It was the worst of idolatry, because it worshipped itself and its digging, its own exhaustive but endless work. All to tear down… and for what?

And that was where I was no longer, but a world around me was still there, or so it seemed. My new landscape wasn’t because of any specialty I had, no scholarly eye or hand, but because a humble Jewish woman once gave birth to Grace. I was mystically brought into the grandest of plans. It was a family plan, and now it’s called something like a “Natural Family Plan”- always open to new life. It does not prevent birth. It always welcomes it. I used to like writing about myself and my beliefs and theories, but now that choice was surrendered to a plan that would choose to write me into it instead. Goodbye to the land of “Sola this and that!” – a land of shouting, protesting, and chatter where everyone stood alone. I was now to be quiet. I had only to cry and to confess if I was ever going to put my head down on Christ’s breast and rest. For now, I had to rest on Jacob’s rock and spit out the gunk stuck in my rambling mouth.

I did a lot of musing, really. My ears were full of hymns, because I didn’t have the strength to see who was watching me in the most pitiful state I had ever been in. That old world was rotting and loving to rot, and it couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to rot with it. Of course I “lost it”, because I lost what anything ever meant to that old world. And what “lost” meant to that old world did not mean much of anything anymore. There was always a new definition with a form of stapled “unity” around it.

I sat in my room with stacks of explanations of why this new Magisterial Home was going to be my new dwelling, of all the different rooms, especially of the dining table, where we digested our Lamb and our Lord. Our Queen was there of course, because the meals of the Royal Court were not eaten without our Queen. I was in a land of prose now; the rigidity of “just this” and “just that” was the pride of that old world. That was the world of Shakespeare’s old forests, where all who were lost thought they were found. The rebel was the king in those woods, who prided himself in his own starvation and dehydration. He was going to leave the Majestic Home, because the King’s provisions were not his own provisions. He would not stoop so low as to let the Royal Court provide. That was “idolatry”. He would let his God provide for him and for himself alone, and soon all his followers would come together in “standing alone” to form their own kingdoms under that God.

I left and they all watched in bewildered silence as I approached the gate of that Royal City. When I kneeled, they prayed for me. When the gates opened, they turned around. After they gave up their calls, they gave themselves their own explanations and rumored of how I was lured there.

My first meal was not much, because the guards had to strip me of my clothes full of stench and rebellion. They brought me through rooms. The Book of the Feast was placed at the center of the courtyard. It was propped on a gold stand. Parts of the stand were ravaged from the old riot, and there was another copy with pages torn out; the old world took the torn pages with them as they left. Many older citizens had scars in Rome. I found some cleaning the walls of blood stains and pieces of shattered portraits, and they are still being restored today by those faithful enough to keep up the Court.

I still looked out of windows, and my friends saw me with tears in their eyes, out of sincere concern for me. And that’s what hurt me most, because I was hurting for them as they were hurting for me. Our eyes drew in pain when they met. And that’s because there was so much concealed. They could only see the outside: the terrifying walls, arches, and towers. And that was enough to make them hurt for fear of my life. I can only explain so much through dispatched letters, especially when those letters are delivered with a stamp of the Royal guard on the envelope. Too many of my friends won’t open those letters, because of these idolatrous marks; at least, that’s what they still call them.

I lost my old self along time ago, and somehow I lost it quickly. There aren’t many things you can say about such a transition of living conditions. Too much of it gets lost in those trying to translate without any criteria of translation. I just learn to keep quiet and tell them of what plans I have in this new life, but that hurts still. I know this, because this is all I can say without putting up the draw-bridge. There aren’t many sturdy bridges, and if you send a message over, it’s bound to meet with shouts in defense.

Yet at the end of the day, I can only take on the words of one Pope and sing:

“Wherever the Catholic sun does shine
There’s music, laughter, and good red wine
At least I’ve always found it so
Benedicamus Domino!”

That’s the best I can send to those outside, and I only hope they come back Home once again.

Quelling our nervousness and delusions of certainties

2008-10-22T20:51:00.000-07:00

When life gets too hectic and too complex for any interpretation of it to quiet my anxiety, it is always refreshing to turn to familiar things and familiar people. It is nice to sit and have a simple chat with my mom, with a cup of coffee in hand at a kitchen table so often associated with a gathering of my closest loved ones. It is not too difficult and does not require much professionalism in psychology or sociology to make an agreeable observation about the homeliness of familiar people and places. It brings a bit of sanity to our lives and a certain faith in consistency.

I’ve been reading through the various articles of The Philosopher’s Magazine the past couple of days. Article after article, one philosopher and rationalist after another, make the continuous and persistent observation that reason is our most useful human outlet to substantive meaning and happiness, while not admitting that this is the one first principle they might need to question. Understandably so, because once you admit the questionability of this unquestionable principle, religious affections come trampling in over that one period in history we all worked so anxiously hard at to achieve. And that’s why they say “Religion poisons everything”, because, undoubtedly, religion does poison everything. Religion is the greatest offense to a system which prides itself in tearing down the one Catholic colossus which stood against the assumed unquestionability of that central principle of reason alone or all those “alones” which liberated man from the tyranny of a tradition of unreasonable first principles.

The rationalist insists that to question everything is the best first principle to begin with when seeking to grind out the sheer beauty of brute facts. There is this intuited acceptance, since Descartes, to first trust reason above all things, to doubt everything, and to trust reason itself even if reason can not, in that ridiculously pure Cartesian sense, entirely get underway. “Of course we can split hairs and doubt to the point of silliness and insanity” says the rationalist, “Descartes’ errors already showed us that. But why should we doubt our first senses and affections if we ever want to eventually arrive at a conclusion?”

And so here we are, standing on the shoulders of some continuum that looks, feels, and smells like a tradition, but we will call it anything but tradition. The very reason why is because that single admittance will bring us back to square one, and the nervousness of pure skepticism rears its head once again. The point is that to quell our anxiety about a world we can not have absolute knowledge of, we always go back to some aesthetic beginning point, because without a first principle that appeals to the human mind, the human mind is in disarray. At this point, the Enlightenment’s search for certainty is as much of a joke as all the first principles it once criticized, when the religious mind was satisfied with a simply reasonable conclusion, and could carry on with life without having to mold the entire universe to the dictates of that little Medieval brain.

This is why Chesterton said, when you tell a Catholic convert he has lost his liberty, he will have a thousand good reasons to laugh. The reason why is because the Catholic intellectual isn’t driven by a nervous obsession with trying to figure everything out. He accepts the insanity of claiming the inability to doubt one’s first principles by the use of “pure reason” or “pure faith”. He also understands that these “pure” predicates are as fanciful as unicorns. As Newman put it, we can have certainty, insofar as certainty amounts to confidence; in that case, certainty is a very good thing to have. The Catholic intellectual can rest assured that his Fathers have answers, and very good ones at that. Tradition is not just something for the Catholic. It’s something for everybody, and it’s a continuum in which everyone operates, whether they acknowledge it or not. And just like the rationalist, there is no good reason to doubt a good principle which has landed in your lap, if you don’t have a good reason to give it up in the first place. The problem is that, after the Enlightenment, or maybe before, all the traditions don’t accept that they are traditions, and now this new identity crisis has produced its own nervousness. This social crisis, in its own special way, is an identity that identifies itself by persistently trying to nullify itself; it’s an age much like a suicidal but unsuccessful bipolar child, by closest analogy. To quiet intellectual nervousness is to recognize the other person’s arms that hold you up, and once you recognize this reality, it’s okay to keep inquiring about the world without worrying about falling.

A Cure for Modern Anxiety: Keeping a Fresh Understanding of Ourselves

2008-09-22T13:04:00.000-07:00

Traditionalist criticisms of modern philosophies and the current condition of the modern thinker have often been a bit misguided. Maybe it’s just that modern philosophies tend to carry an air of arrogance about them. Or maybe traditionalists cling to their heritage so much that they refuse to accept the fact that traditions are bound to unfold new values, or newly articulated values anyway. It will be some time for traditionalists to truly grasp the significance of this shift that follows many post-enlightenment tendencies, this idea that man must continuously reflect upon his own rational activity and find direction for himself through his own individual means of reason and personal virtue. We should not have a problem with this simple approach, because it is truly a wonderful gift of modern thought, that man discovered something about his own obligation to find an identity for himself, and that a preconceived notion is never a good one until it is first criticized and disassembled. In this sense, our battles are not with the new upcoming consumers of materialism or the modern existentialists or the new pseudo-Christian movements, but those who do not seek to offer these new groups a clear identity which helps the adherents to understand themselves and enter rational dialogue with the rest of the world.

Nowadays, we hardly attempt reform of the inherited traditions our intellectual forefathers provide us. Instead, we are incessantly seeking to overthrow them. I suppose some of this tendency has to do with our various notions of reform, and much reform has evolved into a form of revolution. I think much of this was true of the Protestant Reformation. Although, I am becoming less convinced that the Reformation was such a pivotally destructive moment in history, I am becoming more convinced that it concluded in nothing less than a revolt against a tradition under the guise of “reforming” tradition. I remember reading a book by Albert Wolters concerning the Protestant notion of reform, and his argument was a plausible one, as far as the definition of what reform should look like. Yet, a revolutionary marking point within the Protestant Reformation turned the entire direction of modern thought on its head by its inevitable conclusion that man’s narrative of himself is one which resolves into the slogan, “Here I stand”. I came across a book written by various Catholic converts who cleverly entitled their book “Their We stood, and Here We Stand.” The shift after the Reformation was from “We” to “I”, but I still suppose this new approach was not such a bad one… The difficulty is finding a consistent identity once we attempt to define ourselves outside arbitrarily adopted norms. The Reformation did not cause such a loss in this sense, because it was precisely Catholic theology of the time that bred this mentality… I suppose such an event was bound to happen, and it was already so that many under the headship of the Church were as apathetic and negligent as the masses are today. And that is another tragedy concerning mankind; most men will always be primarily unreflective and disengaged from intellectual concerns in comparison to the academics who feed them the notions they subscribe to everyday. Luther only gave the masses a new and fresh option. He gave them another opportunity to choose a different context and identity for themselves. And of course they took it. Schismatics always run out of an institution’s doors with at least a handful of followers. Their virtues stand in stark contrast to their previous contemporaries and attract the attention of many minds with good intentions.

That’s how we learn from our past. We must give careful attention to how we develop within our own identified narratives. The criticism should not target the modern schismatic but the way we allow ourselves to breed the schismatic in the first place. Schisms designate a break or inconsistency in the narrative, an immoral character or an inconsistency in the ideals, consequently breeding confusion and revolt. We also fail to provide the option of a new value to unfold before us when we cease to keep our ideas alive and dialogical. This was the Catholic mistake within the 16th century. A big mistake was arbitrary censorship in the Church’s desperate attempt to hold on to her own identity. Although she eventually recollected herself, she suffered many wounds and her foundation was shaken all the way from her marble floors on up to her highest steeples.

So where should the criticism of modern philosophies now lie? It lies within the mentality of much modern academia to offer no consistency of identity and no end that defines what man is and what he should aspire to. Modern thinkers seek to continue to give man an opportunity to continuously break from his inherited identity, but to the point of confusion, if he is not careful. These thinkers offer no guidance in this sense, and it is, perhaps, one value many could adopt from the new materialists, like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who offer a new materialistic way of life for young and directionless atheists and non-religious. Yet the new materialists are not without their problems either. They resort to the same mistake of too many institutions which seem to lose a foothold or suffer from insecurity; they threaten their followers with the belief that opposing ideas (primarily religious ones) must be excluded from healthy consideration. What will eventually result is mistrust in their fathers who are supposed to guide them toward enlightenment. I personally would predict a significant revolutionary shift in the frame of mind of their current young followers, if they continue to censor these religious reflections. When a tradition loses its rational and dialogical articulation of itself, it resorts to emotive force in hope of resisting breakdown in its system. We must clearly understand our ends, and we must always give answers to the big question we humans too often love to ask, “Why?” When those questions are neglected, we suffer a crisis. Consequently, the dialogues flourishing within our own communities transform into monologues, where certain notions are excluded from reasonable consideration.

Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes of modern thought is to assume that we can operate without subscribing to a system, but it is impossible for us to avoid confusion and anxiety when we do not submit to a consistent system which makes sense to us. When we are always questioning and never giving answers, or when we are never questioning and always giving answers, we lose that necessary binary structure to human inquiry, which must engage questions and attempt to offer clear and consistent answers. No idea is dead until it passes from sensible dialogue. When an idea is prematurely declared dead, we suffer another breakdown and a new directionless generation.

Philosophers, Duchamp, and the “Indie Artist"

2008-09-14T17:32:00.000-07:00

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra and some of his other now canonized works, Friedrich Nietzsche often wrote of the philosopher's obligation to “go under” for the sake of man to “go over”. Surrounded by a poetic context of ambiguities, I always had difficulty understanding what the old man meant by this prescription for his modern man. As I grow more and more and develop within this modern social system, however, I begin to see the meaning of these words more clearly.

Nietzsche was a nobody, an eccentric and crippled old man, although quiet and cordial. His night life consisted of nothing much more than sitting in his attic and straining his failing eyes to read his own ramblings poured out on a stack of stale papers. Although pretentiously addressed to the modern age, his writings and essays were intended for nobody. Much of his works were only later to be discovered and published arguably against his will by the only person he ever acknowledged to truly know him, his most beloved sister.

And what is strikingly fascinating about this reclusive man, whose most definitive social context probably consisted of his very own fantasies he autonomously constructed for himself, was that he gave modern man something much more than modern man ever gave to him. This certainly is very distinct about Nietzsche’s gift to our modern age. Yet, what is more distinct is his shaping of the new identity of the philosopher and modern artist. Giving man a pattern and an image to replicate was nothing much different than philosophers before him, but the nature of his self-prescribed task was certainly much different.

Whenever I reflect on Nietzsche’s above words, I can not but think of the general sacrifice philosophers make for every age, and especially this one, when philosophers largely go unrecognized and unappreciated. At least for our time, there will never be another celebrity like Hume or Kant. The intellectual celebrity is now the physicist, biologist, politician, or the psychologist.

So I think of Marcel Duchamp and immediately reflect on his piece, Fountain. For Duchamp’s world, and even the Society of Independent Artists, this work was nothing more than a urinal plopped down in the middle of an art gallery. Yet, we can not now avoid associating this piece with initial rejection, only to be followed up by universal recognition in years to come. Again, it is the same way with various experimental music artists who sometimes carry that title: “Indie”. When I now think of Nietzsche, I am tempted to bring in a primary task recognized in both the contemporary Indie artist and Marcel Duchamp. From separate angles and utilizing different language-games, all three of these aesthetic figures contribute to the formation of the ambiguous and abstract identity of modern man. The very hopeful and now greatly needed task of these aesthetes is to offer a new possible doorway, a pond of disparate and fragmented tunes, colors, and values, only to be recognized or rejected… And that is why it is a sacrifice. I think of the work of experimental bands like Radiohead, Animal Collective, or the Pixies… Such bands have all offered a pond of abstractions and something terrifying but original to the music scene, often to be criticized or receive, at best, a pat on the head by mainstream critics. Their job is to off-set the pattern, in the desperate hope of setting a new one. The difference between such pioneers as these and some figures such as Coldplay or Dave Matthews is that such artists have rested on the pioneering sacrifice of the more obscure and experimental bands. The former sacrifice is the trial and error for the latter’s recognition as art.

It is this element that Nietzsche, Duchamp, and the experimental artist share. They do not serve the audience but the voice which will be recognized by the audience, and, occasionally, they themselves will be the object of recognition. Nietzsche seemed to imply that original thought would require a deposit of that thinker’s identity; the pioneer of the age submerges himself in a sea of ambiguity. The potential tragedy is that he may not emerge. His baptism is determined by his surroundings. The philosopher offers a concept or maybe a few concepts, only to be adopted or trampled and never be discovered again. This is his “going under” only to hope that man will “go over”.

Wittgenstein wrote that man is an endless resource for possible values and intended ends. More particularly, it is the rejected philosopher and artist who offer this resource. It is up to the rest of mankind to choose what characteristics and values to draw from these resources. And it is not that such men and voices who choose to replicate and embody these characteristics are scum; it is only that they are in a different kind of work. For the philosopher, his voice becomes the theologian and scientist who consume and re-package his ideas for the world. For the Indie music artist, it is the “pop” or “mainstream” artists, as almost every modern artist seems currently to relate to Duchamp.

There is probably not a single philosophy student unfamiliar with that obnoxious question: “and what are you gonna do with THAT degree??” But if it were not for the philosopher’s general apathy in desiring to answer that question, we would not be studying philosophy. The philosopher’s job is much less trivial than gathering an audience or making a recognized living for himself. His job is to sacrifice his thoughts, which are everything to him; they are, essentially, his identity. And that is his intimidating and sometimes despairing task. Modern thinkers and artists are often too heavily criticized as arrogant or too abstract, but they are sometimes perceived this way because they do not work within the patterns set for them. They work to define those patterns. Nietzsche defined modern man. Duchamp defined the modern artist. Their deposit is their sacrifice, and their exposure to ridicule is their gamble.

A brief thought on words and the Word

2008-09-03T09:07:00.000-07:00

The uniqueness of words has been a topic of particular interest with me lately. Not too long ago I spoke with some Christian friends who claimed to not read many other books than Scripture. At that moment, besides being unable to entirely believe their testimony, the nature of script sparked a thought on the human responsibility to read.

The script is special in its own way, in that it pulls us along with it. Script articulates what was previously inarticulate. It clarifies the otherwise ambiguous world around us and interprts the wonder of other objects for the mind to exercise its intelligibility. I find it fascinating that I can not find myself truly "thinking" without conversing, or, at least, without articulating. So if the words of man are culminated in the Word, as St. John and St. Paul tell us again and again, what does this say about our obligation to familiarity with words, with script? If Christ came in any other form (say, an aesthetically pleasing idea) he would be merely an object, nothing more than the inarticulate other... one of Plato's Forms perhaps... But he would not be Revealed in a way that the understanding may grasp Him as the culmination of all written wisdom.

Contemporary Forms of Natural Law and Clarity in Dialogue

2008-07-30T21:11:00.000-07:00

I am reading a book right now by J. Budziszewski called What We Can't Not Know. Budziszewski is a Natural Law theorist. Although I enjoy many of his arguments in favor of the Natural Law tradition, I am not always sold by his criticisms of our modern culture and philosophical disciplines. Along with many other contemporary Natural Law theorists, I find myself a little flustered when reading many of the mainstream and seemingly straw-man criticisms he offers. When I was reading Charles Taylor's book, Ethics of Authenticity, I greatly appreciated the line he drew between what he called "boosters" and "knockers". The "boosters" are often the "progressive" types, the typically unreflective pioneers of modern society, militantly ready to usher in the new morality and stomp out the regressive morals of the evil conservatives and fundamentalist types. Then there are the "knockers". I like to picture them as old men in rocking chairs (because they refuse to use "indulgently luxurious modern ones") who negatively project a model of our contemporary western society. Instead of identifying the good and the bad within the model, they, in an often roundabout way, demonize the whole model and suggestively condemn it to the flames. They offer criticisms that would typically only work if we largely eradicated our focuses in psychological interests, technology, and our fascination with new forms of entertainment such as movies, music, and television. While my sympathies are often with them to a relative extent, I sometimes wonder how they ever plan on engaging the cultures and the public square while demonizing these new canonized forms of communication and platforms of dialogue. Budziszewski often follows this tendency, as well as beating the seemingly dead horse of "relativism" and "the culture of feelings", which I hope to explain, is missing the bigger picture. With our new obsessions with the above interests and social tools (e.g., Dr. Phil, television, video games, and psychology, etc.,) and our popular tendency to approach any "opinion" based issue as one that can only be relative to each individual, I understand where he is coming from. However, offering the only option of rooting out these dispositions and tendencies is not going to happen, and, essentially, only takes a surface look, ignoring deeper isssues which give rise to them.

Taylor's right. Confronting our moral dilemmas by attempting to resurrect some ancient or medieval golden age is not a realistic approach to a much needed dialogue between the educated and uneducated, the atheists and theists, the religious and non-religious, the conservatives and liberals... The point is that our society has found new forms of communication, new forms of dialogue (e.g. an emphasis on mutual fairness btw. opposing positions), new forms of identity (e.g., individualism), and we must learn to value and cherish these achievements and new emphases. To attempt to bring an old system back, perhaps a system where book reading is the primary source of information, in the way many of the knockers have approached these issues, is to throw our society into even more confusion. We can not simply attempt a shotgun approach at re-introducing conservative values by merely presenting a community with either/or options (e.g., the old way or the current), but we must learn to take the dialogical steps in illuminating these imporant values, learning to understand ourselves as well as our opposing voices. Dialogue is a rediscovered value that has been greatly emphasized by our current generation of philosophers, and it's a vehicle that would not hurt all of us to hop on. Traditional values do not have to come in a package delivered by a horse and carriage, and contemporary ones do not have to ride in on 2 door coupes either. We should learn to work within this dialogical framework if we are ever going to simultaneously sympathize with other positions and articulate ours.

Obviously we should trace our steps and identify where we have failed. Unfortunately, we have developed an obsession both with epistemic certainty and the centrality of the individual after Descartes entered the picture, and we may have very well failed in our obsessions with epistemic certainty. The problem is, however, we are where we are, and to mature past these immature obsessions is practically a long way away (but not out of the picture).

The modern westerner wears Cartesian spectacles. We do not have to teach him that these are necessarily bad spectacles, however. After all, to assume that they are is to fall into the same error we criticize progressives for: a fundamental assumption that our way is and must be the canonized way toward human freedom. To assume we can not bring about change while still viewing our world through Cartesian lenses (that is, "through a search for certainty") is to assume that we have found the end of the road already. After moving through Descartes to Kant to the Existentialists, we have arrived at a point where discussion and clarity between two positions is vital to a philosophical understanding of ourselves. It is my belief that never in human history has dialogue been so heavily emphasized, and it is truly a wonderful gift that modern westerners have discovered and learned to cherish. The philosophical breakdown of the old way that arose with Descartes and the Reformation did not begin with Descartes and the Reformation, however. Part of the problem was due to an inarticulate communication between the educated aristocracy and the lower class. Yet now we have understood the importance of articulation and dialogue between parties, especially in multicultural circles. Perhaps it is time to give an ear to the multiculturalists, the intellectual representatives of the homosexual communities, the intellectual liberals, and engage those willing to engage us if we are ever going to recollect ourselves. It is my conviction that this is the most practical, articulate, and reasonable first step for our current Natural Law theorists to take on the road to morality.

2008-07-24T19:14:00.000-07:00

The latest American dim witted reason for not voting for a politician: "he's too old"... I wonder what the statistics are for that one.

Play, Conflict, and Moral Character

2008-07-23T17:47:00.001-07:00

About a week and a half ago I was attending and assisting with the Lindenwood philosophy conference on the American decentralist tradition. Political philosophy has never quite grabbed me the way philosophical disciplines like ontology, metaphysics, ethics, and theology have, and I suppose much of this personal disinterest is a failure to see where all the nuts and bolts connect political philosophy to the latter disciplines. James Schall particularly helped me with this one, and many of these answers were hiding in the very title of his book I just recently finished: “The Unseriousness of Human Affairs”. Yet I think we could dig a little deeper than “human affairs” and illuminate human nature as an even finer focus, at least to make sense of connections between something like ontology and political philosophy.

I think, more than anything, the tension between ontology (the study of being and essences) and political philosophy and the complexity of the relationship between the two has engaged as well as frustrated my reflections. Nevertheless, Schall’s insight into this matter, however unintentional it may be, has particularly helped me identify the internal links between internal and external human affairs, for ex., how virtue might shape a character and how human character shapes executive decisions concerning political and governmental affairs. If intellectuals and philosophers are ever going to understand the relevance of political philosophy to the politically disengaged individual, we must understand the necessary connections between politics and human nature.

I would bet that there isn’t a more popular topic for our century in politics than war and not a more popular subject within the past decade for philosophers than dialogical conflict within the public square. But Schall hits beneath the surface. The most fundamental beginning point of a conflict, he suggests, is not on the battlefield or even in public forums. The primary source of conflict, resides in the minds and hearts of human beings during their leisure time, a topic I focused on in my previous entry. Conflict originally arises from a free choice, but once the choice has been made, necessity follows. It’s not so easy to repair hazards which arise necessarily, but it might be easier to curb the conflict if we can confront the human when he is perceived and perceives himself to be the most free, during his leisure time. In that moment we are faced with an obligation to make a responsible choice which forms our character, which in turn, influences our future decisions under the public eye and effects the world around us. This topic of leisure might be a pivotal bridge between the essence of human nature and the purpose of human government and politics. Leisure is when we find ourselves to be most free, to engage in activities which are often simply done for themselves as an end in themselves. And once we open this arena, theology, religion, and all those other out-of-fashion topics to discuss among philosophers become all the more pertinent to discuss.

At this point, virtue becomes important; moral development becomes important, and the shaping of the personal character of the philosopher becomes his primary task. The other night, a very insightful cousin of mine pointed out that conflicts which arise from semantic confusion are not essentially semantic at all. They are essentially misunderstanding and a failure on both sides to clarify and articulate. And a quote from Pope Benedict couldn’t be more relevant here, "The 'best hypothesis' which, to be accepted, requires that man and his reason 'give up their position of dominance and take the risk of humbly listening.'" An unwillingness to listen has the individual turned in upon his own reasoning or faith. We can only be more careful in our consideration of how much blood is actually on our hands. Selfishness and pride really do murder lives.

Excellence in leisure and the life lived in peace and enjoyment

2008-07-06T20:49:00.000-07:00

It is refreshing to be able to relax and have time to myself this summer, and I am reading the perfect book for leisure time, The Unseriousness of Human Affairs by Fr. James Schall. He is a professor at Georgetown, a priest, and a hell of a good writer. It is also very nice to receive a dose of Aristotelian ethics and teleology when one is unsure of how to balance contentment and productivity in one’s leisurely activities. We always have much to plan for but we also have much room for character development.
Schall is very good at arguing for the true status of war in society. His emphasis is that we should most often be concerned with how we condition ourselves while we are not overtly in battle. The essence and true meat of war take root in the home and in the public square, not on the battlefield. Yet, it is a marvel to me that we would rather obsess over federal concerns while our moral frameworks are rotting out from under our own homes. Well, I’ll be honest, it is not really a marvel… given our human tendency to obsess over other people’s mistakes, economic band-aids, and political scapegoats, only to direct our attention from our own grime and grease in our own garages.
But Aristotle and Plato understand free activity outside of our sometimes degrading bureaucracy, and Schall illuminates the importance of excelling at this free activity quite succinctly. Schall offers Aristotle’s belief, “to play is to contemplate” (“Tudere Contemplari” ?), as a metaphysical structure to all of our free activity, that is, activity that does not have to be done, activity that is not a must, as one would be if one was in a state of war or in a capitalist work machine. When we are not in a state of war, we act as we choose, not as we must. If we can act as we choose, this is an expression of true human freedom, and to choose to act excellently is perhaps the freest of human activity. Why? Because, to act excellently is to fulfill the virtue of being truly human, and a most intelligible and good action is seen to tend toward good goals and productive effects. That is, we are shaped, fulfilled, and appreciated by virtue of the final causes of our free activity. Thus, when we are not in the workplace, in the factory, or on the battlefield, we should choose our activity wisely, responsibly, and attentively. A good politician is a good mother or father, and a good school teacher is a good parent. Why? Because we are shaped by habits, by the choice of our habits, and our choice of how we perform those habits. Yet, we do not do this for utilitarian ends. We do this as an enjoyment in and of itself. Our activity should be appreciated for what it is, because every second and ounce of it performed is good. Therefore, “Evil for good” is a farce. Some Hegelian form of enslavement for the sake of freedom is not honorable, because such things are not good as ends in themselves. They present a future image of “good” and that is all. Not only so, but they obsess and work over time to make goodness and assure that goodness is brought about. They are fundamentally self-absorbed.
These are great concepts for a starving society. I look forward to more of this book.

A little glimpse into Obama's point of view

2008-06-24T07:48:00.000-07:00

I don’t know what’s more beautiful right now: Barack Obama’s face or this bird’s eye view of a white sandy beach in Panama City. I think I might favor the latter, but if I was in lighter spirits… maybe the former.

Because of my usual inattentiveness in the political scene, I’ve recently obligated myself to do a little homework for the upcoming election. I chose to take a focus on Mr. Obama this morning.

Obama is taking his campaign to very popular levels, and the American public seems to like what it sees. My primary concern is with the aesthetic surface which seems to blind our insight into the deeper issues which carry serious ethical consequences. While reading a couple of articles on Obama’s strategies linked from the CNN site this morning, some frightening key words struck me while reading thes predominantly optimistic portrayals of Obama’s political and economic goals. Within a democratic context, I often feel a slight shudder as I come across words like “unity” “equality” “federal” “fairness” “practicality” etc. And there is nothing wrong with these little words given in other settings, environments, and contexts. However, when you hear them from a democrat, it tends to carry naïve shades of socialism. My fear is too much ethical regulation placed in the hands of a few short-sighted politicians. Obama has a strong affection for the lower class, underprivileged minorities, and, refreshingly, the elderly. His affections are in the right place, but he reminds me too much of Jane Austen’s character, Harriet; he does not always see past these immediate affectionate pulls or at least the bigger landscape they could point him to. The problem might lie in his claim to have an economic plan aimed at “what works” rather than “ideology” (a common polarization within our society). I think Obama might be thinking too much like a politician and less like an ethicist on this matter. With more federal regulations, tax breaks for lower income workers, and more federally moderated trade, it’s not only a slap in the face to our founding fathers, it’s a slap in the face to human freedom. Now I’m not one to equate liberty with license, but when CEO’s and other upper class individuals are treated like pawns to boost a more favored class of people, human individuals are no longer treated like human individuals and more like manipulated objects for a few economic strategists. Obama does hit some soft spots with me, but he doesn’t seem to be saying anything new or foreign… a little too much centralized control if you ask me.

And so the race begins...

2008-06-03T20:22:00.000-07:00

Obama wins the democratic nomination.

Beginning the Summer with Scott Hahn

2008-06-03T19:56:00.000-07:00

Scott Hahn has grabbed my heart with this one just like he did with Rome Sweet Home. A Father Who Keeps His Promises is a book for every American Catholic lay person to read. Perhaps the most important reason is that contemporary Catholics are starved from covenantal theology and most couldn't tell you the first thing about what a covenant is in the first place. But if Scott softened you up with the above book, he'll certainly help you connect that ripened sentiment with solid theology in this one.

Hahn's not afraid to dig back into some healthy Reformed Protestant resources as he surveys the whole redemptive narrative in the Old and New Testament. He also has a way of marrying these Reformed references with pure Catholic doctrine, and he has a knack for stretching the hasty Protestant stopping points to the proper Catholic ends, primarily hitting on the synthesis of the physical and the spiritual and the need for a physically revealed heavenly Church.

It's a great way to ground my summer as I begin to take some flights into abstract philosophy.

Catholic unity beyond the veil of American fellowship

2008-05-25T22:05:00.000-07:00

May the Lord bless those who have lost themselves to gain a stronger unity for the rest of us...

Within the past couple of weeks my mom and I have developed a closer bond than we have had in the recent past, at least within the past few years. She attended Mass with me at St. Joseph, a parish that offers a more contemporary environment for contemporary suburbanites such as ourselves. As much as I grumble and complain about contemporary structures in celebrations of the Mass, I’ve learned that the Mass is simply the Mass, and whatever song or liturgical form present in that particular celebration, Christ is still present, no matter how much we subconsciously attempt to chase the aesthetic depth of the celebration out. I suppose that’s a different topic for a different time, but it takes a turn into larger considerations, such as unity and substance, which are a more relevant concern for me here.

There is a legitimate irritation my mom shares with a good portion of the rest of my Protestant friends, and that’s the Catholic Church’s exclusion of non-Catholics from partaking in the Eucharist. It’s an age-old concern, and that is no exaggeration. It literally extends to the first age of the Church.

I don’t remember his name, but there was a priest on EWTN the other day who shared his homily concerning the Corpus Christi (i.e. Body of Christ), a celebration within our liturgical calendar this week. The crux of his message concerning the divergence between Protestants and Catholics on this issue is a matter of approach. I suppose there has been too much ink spilled and too many arguments unleashed without any consideration of these primary differences in perspectives. It’s time we give closer attention to the manner in which we speak of Communion; it’s precisely here where the mix up and confusions begin. From the confusions arise misunderstandings, and misunderstandings on both sides are bound to foster a state of consistent conflict between Catholics and non-Catholics. The difference is in perspective of “unity”, that is, what “unity” entails for Catholics and non-Catholics, and what the Eucharist communicates within that context.

To be quite honest, my belief is that American Catholics should be more careful in the way they speak of Communion. Catholics in the States are so concerned with a superficial “getting-along” rather than pursuing true ecumenical dialogue, that we are too scared to call our Communion holy, and most often we don’t even speak of the Eucharist when talking about Communion. And why? Because too many Catholics are told that being “orthodox Catholic” is out-of-date, and to be in with the crowd, it’s time to start talkin’ like a good ol’ American Protestant. Instead of talking about hierarchy, the Papacy, the “Eucharist”, Purgatory, and all those other fancy orthodox terms, it’s time we start dumbing things down to reach people. Unfortunately, with watering down the terminology, we assume that it is nothing more and nothing worse than simply making the terms more friendly. What we often forget is that when we compromise the terminology, we compromise the true reality the terminology designates, and we consequently lose an accurate perception of that reality. Words are like the entry way to a room, and you can’t access the room without having a door to get there. Too much of our conventional speech locks the door to that room. It’s the same reason why the Tower of Babel was a great misfortune in human history. Dialogue is built on clarity, and clarity needs specificity. Or else we get nowhere. We just build competing towers of grandeur within our own isolated cities.

It is because of this very unfortunate phenomenon that Catholics have lost their integrity before the Protestant community, and the Protestant community is understandably left with the assumption that Catholics really do believe in Communion the same way they do; so why aren’t they letting them in? Good question, if communion’s just about spiritual fellowship, and primarily about spiritual unity, then why ARE we excluding Protestants from Our Lord’s Table. Our EWTN priest put it this way, “Protestants see communion as a MEANS to unity, while Eastern Orthodox Christians and the Catholic Church see Communion as the FRUIT of an already complete unity.” It’s our belief that this unity within the Body of Christ, the Body of Christ being a phrase St. Paul specifically uses to designate a PHYSICAL unity among believers, is a complete and accurate sign of this true unity, and that spiritual unity is simply not enough, or better yet, is not true unity because it lacks a primary element of our Redemptive narrative, the physical realm, Christ in the Flesh. St. Augustine made it clear when he said that “schismatics” (or dissenters) are not with us in true and genuine “love, although they agree in essential matters”, because they are not in union with the Church “descended from St. Peter.” Now whether or not one believes in the Petrine Succession is beside the point, as much as St. Augustine defended this Succession. The point is that Catholics have always believed the true Church to be as much a physical reality as it is a spiritual one; you can’t have the truly spiritual without the truly physical, and vice versa. We say that for the same reason that you can’t have Christ without his full physical and divine nature. That was the purpose in defending the Church doctrine against the old Nestorian heresy. You have Christ as fully human and fully divine or you don’t have Him at all. That is why we must “chew” (in Our Lord’s words) on His Flesh and drink of His Blood or we are eating and drinking “condemnation” on ourselves (in the words of St. Paul). Holy Communion for Catholics is just that, “Holy”. As beautiful and joyous of a revelatory festival it is at the Lord’s Table, it’s not time for fun, food, and fellowship. It’s time for deep reflective and contemplative unity with the Holy Trinity by partaking of the Beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ together with the full, complete, and physical community of the Christian Faithful, being one “as He and the Father are one” (following the prayer for His Church during the Agony in the Garden).

Anyway, just a thought from the Catholic side of the fence...

2008-04-28T09:08:00.000-07:00

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/04/24/beck.oil.prices/index.html

Beck's a refreshing voice every now and then; his thoughts on economic policies are a bit rash but frank. Perhaps that's what we need right now. Too many politicians are concerned with the petty finger pointing.

Although our environmental concerns should be a chief focus, it seems we can not make the small steps toward environmental improvement without first stabilizing the resources which pave the way for that improvement.

Wright and a respect for the human person

2008-04-27T19:57:00.000-07:00

Reverend Wright voiced another cry in front of a room of ten thousand at an annual NAACP conference today. The tension right now in this country between black and white Americans most often subsists behind the curtains; it's in the silence of our gestures, in our misunderstandings, and our hands covering our mouths after a slightly politically incorrect statement about the other race, and particularly black Americans. I am not as concerned right now with the issues confronted or the controversial and racial words potentially spoken by Rev. Wright, but what I can not ignore are my sympathies for this man and the pain I sense in the one voice he represents.

The white man's ear in this country is not quite attuned to the rhythm of the black man's songs, and I believe this ufamiliarity with African American culture is and has damaged a much needed conversation between blacks and whites. Wright's statements may have been offensive, and as much as he defends them as "descriptive" rather than "divisive", I am not entirely sold. But that is beside the point. Two scores and a century is not a long time for a culture to heal from a heritage marked by suffering through dehumanization. And the black poets of the early 20th century had it right when they identified the African-American culture with a mask it was forced to wear in order to hide its tears, being excluded from the fellowship of the rest of mankind. And two scores and a century wasn't a definitive point; African Americans have struggled for social recognition for a much longer time after their emancipation. There voice has been stifled, and their status as human beings has gradually been bought at the expense of their own tears and blood.

The media's obsession with Wright right now might open the door for more dialogue between blacks and whites. In order for the dialogue to continue, however, a posture to listen, as much as it is often tongue-in-cheek, has to be adopted by white Americans. Our responsibility is not to point to African American failures in voicing themselves ethically and soberly. Dialogue always demands an identification of the origin and end, and to arrive at an understanding of why the African American fist was raised and why it is still up in the air demands a sensitivity to be willing to understand, however much it fails in articulation.

The forms of expression are often offensive, loud, and obtrusive, but the form can not obviate our attention to the substantive issues at hand. Human identity survives through its cultural and social recognition, and it is one of our greatest duties to ensure the recognition of this identity. Whether or not we believe this "suffering" is self inflicted or a way of placing the responsibility on white Americans, it does not detract from the fact that black Americans are and have been hurting, regardless of where they place the blame. Even if their words are presently offensive, their words can not be divorced or castrated from where those words find their origin, the human tongue. And that is where our sympathy must begin, a respect for the dignity of human beings and human expression, and a willingness to see that dignity preserved. You can't separate the "drum from the drummer", and the drumming will not always be perfect. If we want a better tune, we have to attend the suffering human voice.

2008-04-27T13:05:00.000-07:00

It's the 6th Sunday of the Easter season, and I am three weeks away from finally graduating with my B.A. in philosophy. The philosophy papers are keeping my mind off of graduation day, but hopefully the final products are rewarding.

It is looking like I'll be an uncle of three by autumn. Bryce will be four this August, and Laura just announced the expected arrival of another one in November. Rachael (my oldest sister) is also pregnant with her first, and I believe Rachael's ticket is for September. My plans are to stay with my mom this next year, and I will begin applying for graduate schools in the summer. Mom has been a tremendous help in reducing any unneeded stress through my ups and downs, so that's partially why I stay here. She and Joe are still dating, and Joe's quite the gentleman. Hopefully he'll stick around. My dad has not been doing well; thoughts and prayers would be appreciated. I hope to soon see him climb out of the struggles he's been dealing with. The divorce still seems to have a fresh effect on him. It is sometimes frustrating to notice a lack of healing progress in his emotional state, but I am sure the endured pain will foster development in his character. It hurts to sense bitterness in loved ones, and it's hard to maintain loving relationships with them when selfishness clouds our perception of them as dignified people. "Human dignity" was the echo I continued to hear in the air when Pope Benedict was in town; the tough part is channeling those echoes into practice.

Since my Confirmation in May, my religious focuses have primarily been on in-house ministries. I'm hoping to be an RCIA instructor next fall and also help with our youth group and Jr. High catechism courses. Father Benedict and the Holy See seem to be taking a turn toward more grounded education for Catholics in the States, so hopefully we will find a well-spring of desperately needed spiritual and intellectual growth in the Church in America. For this reason, it has been difficult for me to consider leaving for graduate school. I may take a more domestic focus and remain here to help at St. Peter (my parish). Many of the members of this church are intellectually and religiously mature, but many others could use a nudge or two.

Well, that's the vision I have scoped out for now. The love of Christ, His Church, His Mother, and those around me will have to keep me sane as the scenery changes.

Gilson and the Return to Holistic Philosophy

2008-02-22T09:15:00.000-08:00

Etienne Gilson has restored the dignity of medieval thought for a world of philosophers numbed by the noise of directionless philosophy. For a good portion of the past couple of years, I have struggled with and even despaired over the disconnection between my philosophical and religious sympathies. I have never truly been too definitive about the relationship between these two as of recent, and my intellectual attractions have taken divergent paths in many cases.

It is remarkable how philosophers can write off another viewpoint and steal our sympathies with no more than a few strokes of a pen. If we are not attentive enough, we can surrender our ideas for the mere attraction of another at the drop of a hat. It is also seemingly fitting that such a phenomenon occurs when a targeted philosopher is no longer alive and able to apply his system in the form of a defense against a certain critique. Within a few sentences Plato has dropped from his great heights and replaced by the empirical achievements of Aristotle.

In reflecting on the past achievements of philosophical theory, I am awed by the variety of contesting views which still have not, by any means, achieved conclusive victory today. We are still bickering, and sometimes managing to debate directly and intelligibly, over the same epistemological and ontological confusions. Scientists and theologians are both competing against each other to rob philosophy for themselves. Materialists emerge, pass away, and resurrect once more. Metaphysicians take their stand before another scientist arrives and accuses them of building “castles in thin air”, and we are back to the closed system of the Pre-Socratics. Materialism has its reign once more. When we forget history or grow numb to reflection, we are vulnerable to yet another destructive path. To look back at philosophical history, it’s an endless and tiresome cycle.

For this reason, I like to stick to the origins of thought (including myth) and remain faithful to the heritage which blooms from these thoughts. I don’t like getting caught up in the mess of forgetful, unreflective, and aimless deconstructions. They don’t often succeed at providing mankind with any ethical development or air to breathe after they’ve rushed in and out and completed their work. This is my concern with much skepticism. Of course, there is an ounce of skepticism which is fundamentally useful as there is an ounce of every philosophical method which is fundamentally useful. It’s when a useful method takes on the form of a school of thought that it destroys its own original and proper function. When the skeptic and the logician step outside their respective context and take on an “ism” for themselves, they achieve nothing more than biting their own tail.

What I appreciate about Thomas Aquinas was his endeavor to gather and synthesize all the great thoughts which survived up to his time. Nothing good and useful for the intellect was left out of his philosophy. All the distinct branches of academic thought are gathered and organized into their respective positions. He had an eye for everything and a mind that rejected nothing. He never intended to be a skeptic, an Aristotelian, a metaphysician, a “this” or a “that”, but a gatherer and a philosopher. He did not have the pretentiousness to pose as anything more than a man of common sense, and for that reason he was disposed to everything availably true.

The greatest struggle we have today is returning to this stability, and every thinker tries a hand at “making sense” of the world. This is nothing less than a backward motion, because you can’t begin by trying to “make sense”. You can only be sensible. The world becomes absurd when we try to “make” it. We can not make it into anything it’s not, and it is this attitude we must avoid when beginning to philosophize. The world of sense requires sensible people who do not clog any pathways of intuition. It’s the people who seek this or that route and surrender all the others at the expense of that one passage who grasp only a portion of the world and mistake that portion for the totality of the whole thing. They’re bound to whirl themselves into confusion.

Too many theologians, physicists, and poets begin as theologians, physicists, or poets, and forget to first be men, as Hume put it. This is why mass amounts of people have suffered at the hands of irresponsible thinkers. Hegel began and left us with nothing but absurdity. Sartre directed the off-tune choir of complainers. The positivists gave us nothing but deduction about nothing. Now, we are left to the whims of a few physicists who have understandably and unwittingly projected materialist theory as fact. They have kicked out every leg of the thinking chair except one and have told us that we must learn to balance ourselves on that one leg alone. Philosophy can’t be done this way.

Wittgenstein and Clarity

2008-01-08T10:31:00.000-08:00

Ludwig Wittgenstein opens his book, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus with the words: "The world is everything that is the case." Wittgenstein's epistemological attitude is unsettling at times, because he often seems to reduce all of reality into a heap of logical syllogisms. I am not far in this book to make too many judgments, and I have read and heard statements about Wittgenstein that seem largely up for controversy. Hence, I will steer clear from making too many critical statements as to the structure of the system he uses in this book.

I can say I admire Wittgenstein for his criticism of ambiguous speech and the detriment this brings to philosophical discourse, however. For Wittgenstein, most, if not all, of the confusion in philosophy is due to statements which do not clearly paint a relatable picture of reality, and that is due to the syntactical equipment we use in explaining reality. Our grammatical structure, in other words, should translate the experience we receive in perception of an object as honestly and clearly as possible. We can, in this sense, see, experience, and sense the world in logical syllogisms, because logic makes the world relatable and, more appropriately, intelligible.

Many brands of subjectivist thinking have seeped through our daily decisions in inspiring us to make decisions based on the idea that the world is only intelligible in relation to our autonomous projection of it. We can project whatever we want on the world to make it our own personal work of art without any necessary regard for social norms. In other words, we've lost the rules. In the West, the understanding of a "personal goal" seems to be commonly accepted as a goal strictly associated with the individual making it, and the goal itself should be subject to the individual's boundless desires and dreams. Thus, "personal" becomes identical with "individual", and "individual" is fundamentally defined outside the boundaries or regulations of any society or context.

Clarity is a problem not only reserved for grammatical discussions for English students. Failure to be clear fosters a nest of disasters waiting to happen to just about every average Joe. One of the reasons why philosophers stress the need for being precise in our logic and the language we use within those logical systems is often because they foresee an ethical dilemma on the horizon (which I'll try to explain). And why do philosophers get into a tizzy about all these petty little abstract ideas that seem to have no relevance to everyday life? Because the ideas we are working with are linked to a chain of other ideas which, if not handled with the utmost delicacy and clarity, can have a domino effect on everyone else's daily decisions (e.g. fast food, how to spend money, where to enjoy family time). In an intermediate, nevertheless, essential way, philosophers have entire societies and individual lives in their hands. And that is not an overly dramatic statement to make. We think within rational terms, and philosophers, logic being their chief science, are concerned with being clear, precise, and, in the end, thinking rightly about the world. Precision in logic and language (which we use to translate logic) can contribute tremendously to our understanding of ourselves and our relations to others. Confusing language and sloppy logic fosters misunderstanding, misunderstanding often fosters aggravation, and aggravation fosters violence. Perhaps a stronger focus on clarity in language, mapping out contexts in which we can relate to each other intelligibly, is a good we can gather from many logical reductionists.