The Calvinist International
So let’s talk about effeminacy. This came up as final point of criticism in my Mere Orthodoxy critique of the gay Christianity of Revoice and Spiritual Friendship. Now, I knew that “going there” would upset a lot of people. It’s basically touching the third rail to even say the word “effeminate” today. And yet, it’s […]
Introduction With respect to the relation between nature and grace, the mainstream Christian tradition does not hold that grace obliterates or destroys nature, but rather that it works with it in some sense as its necessary substratum. The most well known formulation of the idea is found in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae I, Q. 1, Art. […]
A core principle of Reformational sacramentology was that the “presence” of the Lord was in the rites themselves as performed rather than (statically) in the elements themselves, and was to be accessed by faith. Or, to put it another way: that Christ was exhibited and offered objectively in the rites, but was appropriated subjectively by […]
Catholic theologians, philosophers and historians of the twentieth century, having fought fiercely to eradicate prejudices against medieval philosophy, adopt the anti-Scholastic rhetoric of the old Protestant histories and project it upon the thinkers of the Baroque age. As a result, they reject the ‘schools’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries–much as Lutheran Aristotelians and later […]
One of the most provocatively titled books I have ever come across from a contemporary ethical philosopher is Sarah Conly’s Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism. The book’s gist is just as punchy: Since Mill’s seminal work On Liberty, philosophers and political theorists have accepted that we should respect the decisions of individual agents when those […]
Several months ago, I wrote a brief post on beauty’s relation to cognition, rather than desire, in Thomas Aquinas. Aesthetics, that is, must have its relation to the rational and the real,1 rather than to some unspecified or underdeveloped sense of longing. Perhaps some confirmation is found in the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Philippians, […]
I. Complementarianism For Real “If gender is just a term in grammar, how can I ever find my way/ When I’m a stranger here myself?” –Kurt Weill, One Touch of Venus What follows is a kind of prolegomena to any future complementarian squabbling, or possibly a groundwork for the metaphysics of tango. It’s very incomplete […]
(Parts 1, 2, and 3) Aquinas, too, holds that unjust laws (that is, laws that do not accord with or derive from the law of nature) do not have the force of law; they are, rather, corruptiones legis–corruptions of the law. In response to objections concerning the seemingly adiaphorous nature of some human legislation, the diversity […]
For many of us it is the beginning of a new school year, and so I thought that readers, and especially college freshmen (if any in fact visit TCI), might appreciate the advice Thomas Aquinas gave to Brother John regarding how best to study and pursue the life of the mind, sometimes called the Epistola exhortatoria […]
Speaking of that John Webster essay: He includes at the end a prayer attributed to Thomas Aquinas and said to have been used before study. In the looking around I’ve done, I can’t find any citations for it except for Pius XI’s Studiorum ducem (1923), where it forms his conclusion. If one looks closely, Pius XI […]