I have some bugs to work out, but I will be uploading a few pictures from Trinity Fest 2006, just finished this last week. God was good, the experience was wonderful. This is a photo of St. Brigid’s Feast on Monday night, with 760 in attendance. People came from as far away as England and Iraq. …
How Adam Ate the First Orange
“[C]ontemporary research reveals that music possesses universal characteristics that mark it as a similar behavior present in all human societies. For example, the principle of ‘octave equivalence’—the treatment of two pitches, one with a frequency twice that of the other, as the same pitch sounding at different octaves—is ‘present in all the world’s music systems,’ …
Tell Us What You Really Think, John
“[T]hose concerning whom I am about to speak insinuate themselves in the name of the gospel so tha by indirect whispers they may alienate whomever they can from Christ. Those people in fact consist partly of hungry vagabonds who, unless you fill their bellies, will bury you under wagonloads of calumnies, partly of worthless and …
Facing the Threat
“Never did men run to quench fire in a city, lest all should be destroyed, with more diligence, than men ought to bestir themselves to quench this in the church. Never did mariners use more speed to stop a leak in a ship, lest all should be drowned, than ministers especially, and all Christian men, …
Police Forces of Modernity
One more comment on Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? The problem with “robust and confessional dogmatism” in a postmodern world is this. There are only a limited number of options here, and all of them but one are variations of what Leithart identifies as “Christianity.” As he uses the word in his book Against Christianity, Christianity …
In Praise of Leithart
In my first pass on James K.A. Smith’s Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?, I recognized that he did not want to give way to the full-throttled relativism of postmodernism. He said some promising things early in the book, but, as I mentioned, by the end it was clear that his approach was not going to cut …
Catching a Blunder
My thanks to Prosthesis, who caught a significant blunder in my review of Smith’s book on postmodernism below. I quoted Smith summarizing Foucault, and then interacted with that as though it were Smith himself. Mea maxima blunda, and I have corrected the problem. My apologies to all my readers, and particular apologies to Smith for …
Come On Baby, Light My Fire
“Nietzsche, in contrast, recommended a music that inflames the passions, and he seeks to use such music with a view to overwhelming or silencing reason . . . In sum, for Nietzsche, when we experience the Apollonian we behold images, but when we experience the Dionysian—that is, when we experience music—we feel forces” [Carson Holloway, …
Even Looked Upon As Lawful
“And that fellow is certainly well aware that he is lying shamelessly; but because men like that have made up their minds to attack us in any way they can, they think that they have the right to blab about us anything that can stir up ill will against us. And, of course, when they …
Talking Yourself Into It
“Hence we see, that the longer one pleads for a thing, he becomes more confident therein, because his own pleading secretly prevails more with himself, than reasons proposed by any others to the contrary can” (Durham, p. 255).