On Experience

From, "Disciples Called to Witness," from the USCCB (2012):

Discipleship is rooted in human experience.  It is through human experience that one enters into a dialogue with modern culture.  The human experience provides the "sensible signs" that help us come to know ourselves, one another, and God.  It is through common human experience that the Word of God is revealed to us.  These sensible signs are not abstract metaphysical signs but the concrete actions of the Holy Spirit.

When did God Breathe a Soul into Humans?

I think that when God created the universe, he made the laws of nature with the future homo sapiens in mind.  I think he made the laws such that the soul evolved in parallel with the human body, and I think we had souls prior to our becoming homo sapiens. Of the soul, I include self-awareness, consciousness, imagination, empathy, love, the ability to think in the abstract, to use symbols in communication, plus a sense of the transcendent and a desire for the infinite.

The Seven Story Mountain, by Thomas Merton

Of course, it is a wonderful conversion story. However, there was nothing in it for me, nothing I could take as an insight, advice, etc. This contrasts one hundred and eighty degrees with his other writings. Merton's writings that grabbed me were his essays on social issues and comments on the same in his journals. Admittedly, some of it is dated today, about social justice issues that were current back then or are settled now. Overall, I found Merton to be somewhat optimistic about humankind and society, in hindsight, more optimist than what was called for. But to be fair, I think his optimism is typical/expected from a person of his intelligence and talent, from the time period in which he was educated and lived. And I suspect the optimism is what society and the church needed at the time. When I was in my twenties, I read every book of Merton's that I could find in bookstores. He had an enormous influence on my thinking/spirituality/attitudes, for which I am grateful.

I see Thomas Merton and Jack Kerouac as contemporary soul brothers of a sort but ones who chose radically different lifestyles from each other. (with Kerouac failing in his spiritual journey). Merton and Kerouac attended Columbia U. and shared certain professors, most especially, the legendary English professor Mark Van Doren, mentioned in Seven Story Mountain. One quirky reason the I read/liked Seven Story Mountain is that Merton (and Kerouac) were contemporaries of my father. Without going into details, the beliefs and attitudes of my father, my uncles, and all of their friends--working-class guys from the neighborhoods of NYC who served in WWII--were all that I knew when I was growing up. As a young adolescent/adult, the discovery of people of my father's generation who thought so radically different from them was radically mind-opening.

Christianity--Quotes from the Book, Caesar and Christ (1944), by Will Durant, from the Series, The Story of Civilization

Casesar hoped to reform men by changing institutions and laws; Christ wished to remake institutions, and lesson laws, by changing men.  - p. 562

All in all, no more attractive religion has ever been presented to mankind.  It offered itself without restriction to all individuals, classes, and nations; it was not limited to one people, like Judaism, nor to the freemen of one state, like the official cults of Greece and Rome.  By making all men heirs of Christ's victory over death, Christianity announced the basic equality of men, and made transiently trivial all differences of earthly degree. To the miserable, maimed, bereaved, disheartened, and humiliated, it brought the new virtue of compassion, and an ennobling dignity; it gave them the inspiring figure, story and ethic of Christ; it brightened their lives with the hope of the coming of the Kingdom, and of endless happiness beyond the grave. To even the greatest sinners it promised forgiveness, and their full acceptance into the community of the saved. To minds harassed with the onsoluble problems of origin and destiny, evil and suffering, it brought a system of divinely revealed doctrine in which the simplest soul could find mental rest.  To men and women imprisoned in the prose of poverty and toil it brought the poetry of the sacraments and the Mass, a ritual that made every major event of life a vital scene in the moving drama of God and man. Into the moral vacuum of a dying paganism, into the coldness of Stoicism and the corruption of Epicureanism, into a world of sick brutality, cruelty, oppression, and sexual chaos, into a pacified empire that seemed to no longer need the masculine virtues or the gods of war, it brought a new morality of brotherhood, kindliness, decency, and peace.  -p. 602

Luigi Giussani and Formalism vs Authenticity

The text of Jason Blakely's remarks on March 12, 2019, during the Life of Luigi Giussani book tour:

From Formalism to Authenticity   

Steven Pinker's Rules for Writing

I cribbed this from 

https://boingboing.net/2019/03/27/here-are-cognitive-scientist-s.html?fbclid=IwAR0fgIY6DwYT2Xq0auF6V2YMnD9pG8LPNiwCGJjf5n_sN3cjhevn76EzlXQ

In January on Twitter, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now, shared 13 tips for writing:

1. Reverse-engineer what you read. If it feels like good writing, what makes it good? If it’s awful, why?
2. Prose is a window onto the world. Let your readers see what you are seeing by using visual, concrete language.
3. Don’t go meta. Minimize concepts about concepts, like “approach, assumption, concept, condition, context, framework, issue, level, model, perspective, process, range, role, strategy, tendency,” and “variable.”
4. Let verbs be verbs. “Appear,” not “make an appearance.”
5. Beware of the Curse of Knowledge: when you know something, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like not to know it. Minimize acronyms & technical terms. Use “for example” liberally. Show a draft around, & prepare to learn that what’s obvious to you may not be obvious to anyone else.
6. Omit needless words (Will Strunk was right about this).
7. Avoid clichés like the plague (thanks, William Safire).
8. Old information at the beginning of the sentence, new information at the end.
9. Save the heaviest for last: a complex phrase should go at the end of the sentence.
10. Prose must cohere: readers must know how each sentence is related to the preceding one. If it’s not obvious, use “that is, for example, in general, on the other hand, nevertheless, as a result, because, nonetheless,” or “despite.”
11. Revise several times with the single goal of improving the prose.
12. Read it aloud.
13. Find the best word, which is not always the fanciest word. Consult a dictionary with usage notes, and a thesaurus.

Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton

I never finished this--it was written two years ago--but here it is.   I have no idea where I was going with the last sentence.


Prior to reading Orthodoxy the first time, my expectation was that it would be a grand apologetics for Catholicism and Christianity, and I was greatly disappointed.  But near the end of that first reading, however, I had read somewhere that G.K. Chesterton had never intended to write an all-encompassing apologetics but rather to simply explain why Catholicism appealed to him. That is, it was his personal witness to the faith and to the truth. After that first reading, I accept and respect that.

Reading the text was like sailing to a far-off corner of the world and then going on an extended journey through an unfamiliar jungle--it was vast and strange.  The first reading was just an immersion.  The logic overwhelmed and drowned me.  For sure, his criticisms of evolution are obsolete.  He criticizes evolution from a philosophical viewpoint, and he seems to conflate science and philosophy.  When I finished, I knew that I would have to read the book again to understand it.

In the chapter, "Maniacs," Chesterton destroys the idea that people who are absolutely sure of themselves carry authority, are necessarily credible, or are otherwise to be trusted.   His analogy of the lunatic reminds me Luigi Giussani's statement that logic can be configured to prove anything.   He mentions religious thinkers who, in an effort to deal with the issue of sin, decided that the concept should be eliminated altogether.  That reminds me of the quote from Reinhold Neibuhr, often by Giussani that, "Nothing is so incredible as the answer to a question that is not asked."

The chapter afterwards is "The Suicide of Thought,"  but I think he already proved that in the previous chapter.