Transcendental Meditation

Recognize truth through its attractive, radiant beauty:
the power of the transcendentals.

(For more, and better, read this.)

Truth to Twaddle

In this month's First Things, Fr. Neuhaus writes:

It’s always an encouragement to see a bishop speak truth to twaddle. The National Catholic Council for Hispanic Ministry chose as the theme for its meeting in San Antonio “Paradigmatic Changes in Hispanic Ministry.” The archbishop of that fair city, Jose Gomez, said in his address to the council, “The Scriptures don’t talk much about paradigm change. Instead, the Bible talks about kairos—the time of decision. . . . . The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only real paradigm that matters. The time is fulfilled. The kingdom is at hand. The decision each of us has to make every day is this: Will we repent and believe? Will we continue our daily conversion to Christ? Will we try every day to more and more conform our lives to Christ and to his –teaching?”

We talk a lot about poverty, discrimination, and lack of opportunity for Hispanic people, he said. Those are necessary and urgent concerns. “But we also see many signs of moral and spiritual poverty. We don’t talk about that too much. But we need to start.” There are “darker forces” at work, indicating “something gone wrong in our community.” He then addresses alarming rates of births out of wedlock, abortions, school drop-outs, and defections from the Church. He describes a Bible study for Latinos that the archdiocese is developing. The introduction asks, “Who is Jesus in my life?” and “Who is Jesus for us as a community of disciples?” The text is accompanied by pictures of Jesus as Anglo, black, Chinese, and a Native American –medicine man.

The archbishop says, “I came to the conclusion that it’s hard to picture Jesus. Nobody knows what he looked like. Then I thought: Not one of these pictures even attempted to portray the Jesus we find described in the Gospels. The real Jesus. The Jesus who was a Jew. A son of David and a son of man. The Jesus who at the same time was also the son of God and the man of heaven. The Jesus who took flesh and blood in the womb of Mary and who rose from the tomb by the power of the Holy Spirit. That’s the real Jesus. The Jesus who dwelt among us at a concrete time in history and at a concrete place. A Jesus who is with us today in Word and sacrament. All these other Jesuses are just abstractions. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus asks his disciples: ‘Who do you say I am?’ (Mt 16:15). Notice. That’s a very different question than, ‘Who is Jesus in my life and for my community?’ To ask who Jesus is in my life has the danger of turning the question inside out. –Suddenly we’re not talking about Jesus anymore. We’re talking about ourselves. About our expectations, our grievances, our needs. When you ask the question that way, you end up with a Jesus who looks a lot like you. Or like the people in your community."

Well said.

Defining a Good Pub

A good pub should have . . . a regular and knowing clientele; an absence of ale quaffers, ginsippers, whiskey suppers, or wine-bibbers; a seemly and decorous interior in shades of brown and mahogany, relieved only by the glitter of glass, sawdust and framed enlargements of hurlers, footballers, horses or dogs.

Being and Truth

Get it?

Chesterton for the Day

When a man really tells the truth,
the first truth he tells is that he himself is a liar.

- What's Wrong with the World

Aletheia Sharbel Liu - About Her Name

It's fairly simple really:

Aletheia: (ἀλήθεια) is Greek for "truth" in the sense of the unveiledness and self-revelation of reality to persons. This has somewhat more depth than the Ciceronian Latin veritas in that it speaks more completely to the ultimately personal structure of being. In short, it is truth in the sense of how one gets to the heart of things. It is truth insofar as truth expresses the most profound, dramatic relationship between the cognitive soul and reality. It is truth in the sense of what happens when beauty is unveiled. Christians call this beauty "glory" and its enveiledness is the self-revelation of the ultimate personal reality: God.

Sharbel: A modern link to the ancient anchorite tradition of the early Church Fathers. Perhaps the most telling reason we picked his name for our daughter is his witness to the silent, hidden life of prayer; a testament of devotion. His humility was so great, in fact, that upon his death this is how little was written of him by his superior:

On this day, the 24th of December 1898, Father Sharbel of Bekaa-Kafra, the Hermit, died of a stroke in the mercy of God after receiving the Sacraments of the Church. He was buried in the graveyard of the monastery at 68 years of age when Father Antonios Mishmeshani was the Superior. Because of what he [Sharbel] is going to accomplish after his death, I excuse myself from giving details of his life, especially in regard to the extent to which he kept his vows so that we can say his obedience was angelic and not human.

His works after death - needless to say - have been extraordinary.

Liu: A witness to the importance of family and tradition - Lizz's mother's maiden name (Taiwanese).

Faith, Reason, and the Splendor of Truth

There is something peculiar which serves both as a cause for annoyance, and an occasion for amusement: that the encyclical Veritatis splendor preceded the encyclical Fides et Ratio. The former is no more than an application of the principles laid down in the latter; that is a cause for annoyance. The occasion for amusement is how much the enemies of the Church and God's law were upset by the former and how little they cared about the latter, when clearly the later encyclical provides the justification for everything that was attacked in the earlier.

Go figure.

Relativism

A man simply lacking the ability to see the laws such as the law of (non)contradiction have their roots in the mere meaning of truth, that from these it follows that talk of a subjective truth that is one thing for one man and the opposite for another, must count as the purest nonsense. He will not bow to the ordinary objection that in setting up his theory he is making a claim to be convincing to others, a claim presupposing that very objectivity of truth which his thesis denies. - Edmund Husserl

In other words: whatever the formulation of the thesis denying the possibility of any objective truth or knowledge, it is inevitably self-contradictory, because in one and the same breath it denies that which it necessarily implies.

Christian Contraception

So, why don't Christians contracept? If the picture below is not sufficient to explain, then perhaps this is. Crazy to think this might matter? That perhaps this whole enterprise does not concern you? Well, perhaps truth-claims just call for a response. To ignore them is to ignore one's own conscience.