That's So Second Millennium

Post Christian: The Golden Mean

I have now lived quite a long time with my particular cluster of habits of thought. I am capable of following pretty extended lines of reasoning and layerings of figurative language, but I also at some point have to have a pretty literal and explicit place to rest my figurative head, especially when it comes to my beliefs and attitudes about myself and how to live in the world.

I take things to extremes. I think I take things literally that few other people do. Take, for example, how strictly I adhered to the implicit mandate, "Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life." Better get right down to making myself miserable, then! I mean, my efforts to make myself miserable were pretty pathetic and heavily punctuated by outbursts of addictive behavior (mostly seeking the intellectual high of strategy games or relentless shallow reading), but the habit of thought was clear and persistent.

I have had to literally spell out what I think about this line from the Gospels for myself. I think I have to take this as hyperbole aimed to shock people out of a self-satisfied mindset of primarily looking out for their own pleasure or security. I think I have to take the literal approach that I take care of myself because when I'm functional, I can do Jesus' work and help other people. I have a lot of experimental evidence that trying to hate myself "enough" or make myself miserable "enough" makes me pretty worthless to other human beings, and I don't think I can square that with the rest of the New Testament or any of my own experience of prayer.

Of course, I bring this up in this context because I think human cultures also take things to extremes. In particular, we overreact and bend the bow too far in the opposite direction. Once we identify an abuse, we collectively decide to throw away everything that seems even tangentially related. Often we become focused on something very tangential and counterproductive.

The Reformation came, and something of the sort was inevitable, because of the hypocrisy of wealthy clergy, welded into the political establishment, and often flagrantly dismissive of their promises of celibacy. Yet the Reformation did not focus on repairing these breaches, but instead gave up on humanity entirely and went after ludicrous ideas like sola scriptura and sola fides.

The Enlightenment came, and something of the sort was needed, because intellectual culture had become fixated on theology and philosophy of a kind that had gone stale. The practice of criticism, and seeking an answer within the material order for natural phenomena whenever they could be found, is absolutely of benefit to humanity. Yet it went too far, and arrogantly decided that religion was bad in all ways and at all times, completely losing sight of the fact that the faith that formed the culture in which it grew was already a critical faith and had originally spread because it actually changed people's lives. Not only that, but the Enlightenment rapidly became enamored of its own preliminary findings... and all findings from the critical method of science are to some degree preliminary. It has been a century since the people actually doing science had to reluctantly accept that Newton's laws don't tell the whole story, overturning the sense of complete certainty those laws had engendered. Philosophers of science have seen the point, and agonize, justly, to this day over whether science "proves" anything... but you wouldn't know that from listening to the contemporary self-anointed heirs to the Enlightenment.

There is a place in the middle, an Aristotelian mean at which to come to rest, but I guess that bores us.

The Post Christian meditations address the larger question, "Why do people believe science and the Catholic, Christian faith are mutually contradictory?" by considering the background reasons why people in the modern West desire to punish the faith of their ancestors and deny it credibility, apart from any cogent reasons to reject its actual dogmas and teachings.

Episode 046 - Daniel Hinshaw and the frontier between medicine and faith

I started off this part of the interview by asking Daniel about his own journey through life and faith. His early love was history, despite having a father who was also a doctor and an academic. His interests only turned to medicine after a time in Peru and exposure to brutal poverty, and then like many of us, he drifted into an academic career. Later in life he has been able to return to that original motivation.

Daniel and his wife were brought up in the Seventh Day Adventist faith, and still greatly respects the grounding in charitable work and the Bible he received then. Eventually he and his wife got the Newman bug and had to go deep into history and join one of the apostolic churches; they joined an Eastern Orthodox church.

In that context, Daniel laments the drift of the modern hospice movement away from Christian spiritual roots and into a secular, palliative mindset, and the broader question of what is missing from the often uttered or thought statement, "if it's legal, it must be moral."

"We confuse technological prowess with being deeper and more thoughtful."

An interesting consequence of our medical progress is that we now face a future where, for the first time, across the world, most people will die of conditions derived from aging rather than contagious diseases, accidents, childbirth, etc.

We discuss a bit the golden mean to be found, steering clear of euthanasia on the one hand, and of resorting to excessive means to stay alive in the face of a fatal illness.

Post Christian: "Selfism"

I am filing this under "Post Christian," but in a way, it would make more sense as "Post... Everything, Really."

I just listened to the latest Word on Fire podcast with Bishop R. Barron (http://wordonfireshow.com/episode165/) in which Brandon Vogt basically reads to him the entire opinion piece by David Brooks with the corny subtitle "The Gospel of St. You."

I was pretty troubled by the episode. I might try to sum my troubles up by noting that I did not hear the word "grace" or any reference to the concept in the entire interview. The interview and article sounded to me like an airy condemnation of people struggling to make their way through the postmodern world, with all of the transcendent hopes humanity has ever held finally demolished and left in smoking ashes by the baby boomers.

The thing about it is, and this is the whole point of what I'm trying to say in these Post Christian entries, that there was a lot wrong with the world in 1960, or 1900, or 1700, or 1500. The cultural thermonuclear holocaust of constant revolution that we continue to put ourselves through is an overreaction and a misreaction, but it's a misreaction to real problems.

Take the first point Brooks implicitly makes in his sarcastic tirade. We should aspire to be like great human beings of the past--out of the vast panoply of human excellence, he plucks Abraham Lincoln and Mother Teresa. But instead, Brooks claims, we reject "external standards of moral excellence, [because] they often make you feel judged. These people [promoting these standards] make you feel sad because you may not live up to this standard."

The problem is that if you have a gram of self-knowledge, and no sense of connection to God, you know very well that you can't live up to such standards. You have at least two options in that scenario. Option A is to reject the standard as irrelevant to your life under some true or false rationalization. An honest "I can't possibly live up to that, because I couldn't live without X comforts and Y attitudes and Z structures supporting my false sense of self" is rare, so false rationalizations abound, but in this case they support a pretty legitimate concern. I'd recommend Option A over Option B, limping along, trying to pretend that you're trying to live up to the standard and hating yourself every day for failing, having tried Option B for at least 17 years.

The whole point of Christianity, and why it's still Good News for people in the third millennium after Jesus of Nazareth, is that it opens up Option C: tap into the power of Someone capable of making you capable of living up to high moral standards, and willing to forgive you and pick you back up when you sin or make mistakes or experience pain.

The Post Christian meditations address the larger question, "Why do people believe science and the Catholic, Christian faith are mutually contradictory?" by considering the background reasons why people in the modern West desire to punish the faith of their ancestors and deny it credibility, apart from any cogent reasons to reject its actual dogmas and teachings.

CNAG: Self-Love

One of the most fraught issues in our "post-Christian" society is the complex of questions around the issue of how to regard oneself in a moral sense. I find myself thinking my way into a morass of terminology trying to make that more clear, so instead let me just cut to the specific dilemma I want to face today.

A great deal of your typical self-help literature and culture in modern America encourages you to love yourself. Jen Sincero ends every single chapter in You Are a Badass with the section header "Love Yourself" followed by some hopefully pithy reflection related to the chapter content.

The theologic/philosophic tradition I am heir to often defines love as "to will the good of another." Self-love can then be taken as almost a self-contradiction. If not, of course, it simply means to will my own good, and Christian thought can exhibit something of a split personality about this.

"Self-love" is very commonly used in Christian writings as a synonym for "selfishness." I'm not aware of much of anyone, aside from fictional characters meant to embody negative tropes, liable to use the word "selfish" in any but a negative context. We nearly all agree there is some such thing as "selfishness," and I think it is commonly understood to revolve around choosing good things, real or apparent, for ourselves at an undue cost to other people. What "undue cost" is then becomes an all-important thing to discern, along with whether a good we will for ourselves is real or not.

On the other hand, as much as Christianity depends on love of neighbor, there is an irreducible individualistic element in it. We will receive an individual reward or punishment for our own actions (loc. cit.!). We cannot save one another, although interestingly enough, St. Peter exhorts us to save ourselves. St. Paul even comments in passing, as if it were an obvious thing and in no contrast to either Christianity or plain common sense, that no one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it.

Ultimately, I think we all have to accept that self-love is a very critical term to understand in a properly nuanced way. The Big Red Book of the Twelve Step program called Adult Children of Alcoholics has an entire chapter on Self Love, which contains some important attempts to clarify these issues:

"We cannot address the issue of self-love without examining some of the confusion surrounding this important spiritual principle. On one side, there are those who argue that self-love always leads to the slippery slope of narcissism. In this line of thinking, self-love is cast as self-absorption. These critics usually cannot define self-love because they are too absorbed in saying what it is not. They liken self-love to Narcissus, the character of Greek mythology who “fell in love” with his own image. Transfixed by the pool, gazing at himself, Narcissus dies emotionally and physically due to his inability to connect with another person or God. This is not self-love. Narcissism and self-love often get linked together, but these two concepts could not be more different. One is self-absorption while the other is self-awareness. The person who practices true self-love cannot be narcissistic. The practicing narcissist can never know self-love.

"There are some sincere, religious folks who think that self-love diminishes the authority of God. They believe it elevates the human side of the person while lowering the Almighty. These well-meaning folks stand ready to correct any talk of self-love or self-worth. They fear that selfishness or unclean motives can rule the person and society. This attitude is akin to defining self-love wrongly as narcissism...

"We also have seen thoughtful people who confuse self-love and self-esteem. This confusion represents a segment of the self-esteem movement that seems to place too much emphasis on affirmations and positive self-talk while attempting to neutralize anything negative in a person’s life. Under this model of self-esteem, the person experiencing failure or challenge is encouraged to minimize any uncomfortable feelings associated with an event. This is all noble and kind, but a key element of building true self-esteem is left out in some cases...  Self-love as we understand it does not eliminate pain or the need to try harder in some circumstances."

Ultimately, in my own life, I rely on the results of my own inadvertent experimentation on myself. Very young, I internalized the idea that hating myself, focusing on how hateful my actions (which I could not separate from myself) were to God, was the way to self-discipline and virtue. As I later saw it summed up in a therapist's handout sheet, I thought I could "horsewhip myself into compliance." I failed, or at any rate, I stalled out at a very low plateau. No one would ever confuse the me of the past with Don Bosco or Mother Theresa. Of course, sadly, they still couldn't, but I have come a long way, and I have done so by means of the Second Step of the Twelve Steps, which is stated and later augmented in Ch. 5 of Alcoholics Anonymous: "Came to believe that a Higher Power could restore me to sanity... God could and would if He were sought." God only does this because He "wills the good of another"--that is, me, and it just fails to make sense to me that I should hate myself when God loves me.

More on this next week, when we tackle the word "deserve."

CNAG is the Catholic-New Age Glossary... not backed by Webster's or any other authority. These meditations are here on That's So Second Millennium because they are an attempt to find maximum harmony between different strands of psychology and spirituality as they are being explored and lived out in Western culture today. It flows from a respect for people's reasons for doing what they do and thinking what they think.

Post Christian: Intellectual Triumphalism

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a massive change in economics and intellectual culture, centered on Europe, but rapidly affecting the entire world.

A significant part of that massive change was the fact that it was centered on Europe, a point that I thought was well made by Donald Herreld in his Great Courses lectures on economic history. At no time in prior world history had Europe come to stand in such a position of dominance. By the end of the period, the European states--fractured and warring states, in no way unified in their goals--were unquestionably the military and scientific rulers of the planet. It had never been that way before. In prior centuries, India, China, the Muslim states, or pre-Muslim Persia and Egypt had been peers or obvious superiors to any European state, even unified Rome.

The effects of this on Christian thought should not be understated. In the early centuries, Christian thinkers were continuously occupied with apologetics, the laying out of arguments for the intellectual credibility of Christianity as opposed to the other philosophical traditions at large in the Mediterranean and wider world. Even after Constantine, pagan thought gave ground only slowly. Persian thought remained non-Christian, and Persia remained a political and intellectual rival to Rome, all the way up to the Muslim explosion of the seventh century.

In the medieval era, Christians were in constant tension with Muslims, intellectually as well as politically and in the most basic tenets of faith in God. Thomas Aquinas was hardly alone in dedicating considerable time to his Contra Gentiles, a set of arguments for an intellectual outlook fully consistent with orthodox, catholic Christianity as opposed to the intellectual traditions forged from ancient philosophy within the culture of the early centuries of Islam.

Yet by the thirteenth century, things were already changing. The Crusades marked the beginning of the military counterattack by Christendom against Muslim states, as uneven as that would be. Although the Turks remained dangerous foes into the seventeenth century, and came close in the sixteenth to wreaking tremendous havoc in the Mediterranean, they were no longer serious intellectual rivals of Italians, Spaniards, and Northern Europeans.

Precisely because there were no longer perceived to be serious intellectual rivals to European, Christian thinkers, I would propose that various ridiculous ideas reached the height of fashionability, and have left distorted schools of Christian thought in their wake down to the present. They did not start in the sixteenth or even fifteenth century, nor did they completely rule the scene even in that period, but they flourished and bore the largest share of their bad fruit then. I mean ideas like:

• The Christian scriptures are to be taken as literally [read: simplistically] as possible.
• God's will is entirely "sovereign" [read: arbitrary] and people are chosen for salvation or damnation essentially at random.
• Human beings are entirely corrupt and hateful...
  • ...except for a very few people who actually respond to God's grace, or
  • ...entirely, and "salvation" is just a matter of God choosing to ignore this fact for certain people.
  • In any case, everyone outside the Christian Church is definitely a moral zero.
• God is basically interested in the public statement of adherence to some doctrine of salvation through Jesus of Nazareth and not in human beings choosing to do good for one another.

I am certainly a Roman Catholic, and I look with horror back at many of the doctrines of the first Protestants, but it is most assuredly true that many Catholics at the time followed them or even led them down these very paths. I think that other Catholics felt driven to express themselves in similar language or else risk losing their audience.

In the centuries since, members of these same Christian societies began to be so scandalized by these ideas that they rebelled against Christianity--really, the distorted version of it where these ideas are so prominent, but in their minds, that was all Christianity was.

The Post Christian meditations address the larger question, "Why do people believe science and the Catholic, Christian faith are mutually contradictory?" by considering the background reasons why people in the modern West desire to punish the faith of their ancestors and deny it credibility, apart from any cogent reasons to reject its actual dogmas and teachings.

CNAG: Happiness

Cheating a bit today, since this issue goes far beyond the realm of merely New Age concepts into the way the words "happy" and "happiness" have mutated in definition over the centuries. It's not unlike the situation with the word "substance." There is all the difference in the world between Thomas Aquinas' definition of "substantio" or the "subst-" in "transubstantiation" and the idea of a "chemical substance." Likewise, Boethius' or Augustine's "felix" apparently is an almost complete stranger to the modern definition of "happy" as, most notably, a fairly shallow positive emotion.

The classical philosophical definition of happy does not even make the cut in Webster's nine-subpart definition listed above. For Plato, Aristotle, and centuries of philosophers down to the present, the words cognate to "felix" or "happy" were used to describe a human being living in the best way possible, with all the virtuous habits and use of reason necessary for that to happen.

So far was happiness from being one particular emotion, it was possible to debate whether you could know whether a man was truly happy until after he was dead, and all his choices had been made and their consequences tallied up.

I stumbled across a podcast by a local priest recently in which he gave a sweeping overview of Western history's idea of God or the gods and God's will. Interestingly, he titled it "On Happiness." In it, he comments that the classical and high medieval sense was that God's will was simply for human beings to reach this optimal state of happiness, and God's laws were means to that end. Bishop Barron likes to quote one of the ante-Nicene Fathers, Ignatius of Antioch perhaps, as saying, "The glory of God is man fully alive." This gave way, Fr. Hollowell comments, to the nominalist late medieval and early modern idea that God is so "free" that He cannot possibly have been somehow constrained to give us laws that were merely good for us; they had to be given for some inscrutable reason of divine randomness, confused with freedom.

So very many of us remaining religious folk, as Fr. Hollowell notes (quite insightfully, I think), are just going through the motions and doing this and abstaining from that just because "those are the rules," with little if any meaningful sense of why those rules actually benefit us. It's a major bridge to cross for many of us to return to that state of innocent and childlike trust that God means the best for us, despite all the pain that we go through: the pain that comes and finds us no matter what we do, and the pain we incur turning aside from things that are against the rules... or that, eventually, we really have come to learn are bad for us.

Many things are on the other side of that bridge. There is not an end to suffering, but there is a sense that both the suffering and everything else has a purpose, and that sense of purpose leads to more frequent experience of the feelings of joy, contentment... possibly even happiness.

CNAG is the Catholic-New Age Glossary... not backed by Webster's or any other authority. These meditations are here on That's So Second Millennium because they are an attempt to find maximum harmony between different strands of psychology and spirituality as they are being explored and lived out in Western culture today. It flows from a respect for people's reasons for doing what they do and thinking what they think.

Post Christian: Legends

It came as something of a shock, when I was writing that first post in this series, to see that idea slide into place: I shoved so much stuff, over so many years, that I knew was fiction into my cortex that it crowded out faith. I think the elements were present in disparate parts of my awareness for a long time. They may even have gotten together and made out one evening, a long time ago. I couldn't say for sure.

I picked up the Lord of the Rings when I was eleven, as I traditionally estimate. It was before we moved out of the old house, for I can remember sitting in a chair before those thick brown drapes over those nine foot windows some summer evening and reading. I had seen the books on the shelves for years, and had worked up to them. I must have read the Swiss Family Robinson six times. Still, the Lord of the Rings was three books that size... a major investment of time.

Over the years I probably read the Lord of the Rings fifteen times; the last time was probably almost twenty years ago. I hardly need to read them again. I've watched the movies, and I could sit with you and explain every detail that was changed between the books and the films and its significance to the arcs of the characters involved. I read the Silmarillion three or four times; the Unfinished Tales, some of them another ten to twenty times, some less.

I was obsessed. I had to know every detail, watch the progress of Tolkien's whole subcreation from beginning to the end, where it tried to merge into the real world... an interesting trick.

I think Tolkien is at the near end of a bridge back into the former age. Go back further, and the exercise of storytelling clearly "starts" to follow a different set of norms from those of today. Today, every writer and reader knows they are making something up. In the past, it seemed oddly necessary to at least keep up the appearance of speaking of the real world, that one's tales really happened long ago. I wonder how often classical writers ever believed they were writing fiction at all.

The other side of that sense is that ancient and medieval and early modern writers chose only to write things that they at least thought could really have happened. Vergil did not sit down to use his prodigious skill on a fictional tale; he pulled out a strand of putative Roman history to spin into his tapestry. Even the writer of Judith, who seems pretty clearly to have had no actual historical event to serve as the core of his story, has nevertheless woven several recognizable real world elements (Nebuchadnezzar, Babylon, the geography of Judea) into his morality play.

This whole complex of ideas cannot help but be the subject of hundreds and thousands of doctoral dissertations at this point. I only mention it to place my own experience in perspective. No one in the centuries before Christ, or most of the centuries after, spent time filling his or her head with tales obviously spun out of whole cloth about galaxies long, long ago and far, far away. Now we live in cultures where tens of percent of the population do, I prominently among them. I have even brewed up my own such tales away in secret where almost no one has yet seen them.

What will come of it all?

The Post Christian meditations address the larger question, "Why do people believe science and the Catholic, Christian faith are mutually contradictory?" by considering the background reasons why people in the modern West desire to punish the faith of their ancestors and deny it credibility, apart from any cogent reasons to reject its actual dogmas and teachings.

Post Christian: State and Religion

The "Post Christian" series will continue the line of thought that I started in "Why Do Westerners Really Think Science and Faith Are Opposed?" To sum up my hunches from that post in a few lines, I would say that this perceived opposition derives partly from misguided attempts at intellectual piety in the late medieval and early modern period whose aftereffects are still with us today. However, I really think it is more a displaced form of punishment of the Church for the sins of its clergy and its ostensible allies in secular political power, in the present and in the past, for being such massive hypocrites and living in such obvious contrast with the example and teaching of Jesus Christ and his apostles, their early followers, and those who still answer that call today.

 

I noted in my first post that it was surprising that the Constantinian experiment of making Christianity a state religion lasted as long as it did. That's true from the perspective of the New Testament and the early Church. It could hardly be more obvious, from the canonical books of the N.T., that the movement Jesus of Nazareth started was never intended to be allied with a state. Jesus in the Gospel of John deliberately dodges secular kingship. When Pilate confronts him about being the Messiah and therefore claiming kingship, Jesus comments that his kingdom is not here, in this life. Luke and Paul pick up most particularly on this Jesus' concern for the poor and his habit of hanging about with them rather than the movers and shakers of political life, and they recommend this behavior as an example to those who follow him.

 

Of course, the very word "secular" comes from the Latin "saeculum" and we inherit it from Catholic thought, distinguishing the "saeculum" or this age from the more important concerns of eternity. The union of Church and state was always precarious, even in its arguable golden and silver ages of the fourth century and the high medieval period. The question is why this union was attempted at all.

 

The answer, it seems to me, is an enormously strong human tendency toward seeing service to the gods and service to the community or state as merely two sides of the same smooth round inseparable concept. Seen from this perspective, it was inevitable that if Christianity gathered enough of a following, states would grow up where the experiment of bridging the unbridgeable chasm would be tried.

 

I tend to assume everyone has read the same things I have. Perhaps it's that dash of Asperger's syndrome I have long wondered about... In any case, let me draw out a few parallels just for the sake of reminders about how differently ancient societies worked:

 

Homer's Iliad and Odyssey shaped the ancient Hellenistic and Roman imagination in pervasive ways. In the Iliad, of course, the gods are all completely preoccupied with the political struggle unfolding on the shore of Asia Minor, intervening in messy and violent ways on behalf of their clients. Human and divine affairs are sewn together very tightly.

 

In ancient Rome, among the many elected offices that successful men of means pursued on the cursus honorum were any number of niche priesthoods. As a contemporary Catholic this sounds quite bizarre, but perhaps my Protestant brethren do not find it quite so odd. In any case, these priests were clearly part of the political establishment and had their bureaucratic functions, and conversely the praetors and consuls and censors had their own priestly functions.

 

A casual read of some of the Chinese classics, such as the writings of Confucius, Mencius, and even Lao Tzu, makes it clear that the Chinese mind was formed by thinkers who expended considerable effort seeking understanding of how best to govern. Spiritual affairs and the matters of the gods are all subjected toward that end in Confucianism, and even the more inward and mystical Taoism had no shortage of adages to guide the statesman. (It is no wonder that Chinese governments down to this very day seem to have no idea what a religious movement not rigidly controlled by state bureaucrats could even be, aside from a rebellion.)

 

I could go on endlessly, of course. Politics so easily dominates the human mind that if something is excluded from political process, as religion has been in the West, it inevitably leaves the awareness of many people. By the same token, if something begins to loom large in public consciousness, it begins to be debated in the halls of power whether it needs or wants to be or not.

 

Such, broadly speaking, has been the fate of Christianity.

 

The Post Christian meditations address the larger question, "Why do people believe science and the Catholic, Christian faith are mutually contradictory?" by considering the background reasons why people in the modern West desire to punish the faith of their ancestors and deny it credibility, apart from any cogent reasons to reject its actual dogmas and teachings.

Louis Braille, Catholic scholar

Louis Braille
4 Jan 1809 - 6 Jan 1852

Louis Braille was blinded in one eye in a childhood accident. Blindness in his other eye quickly followed. He was fortunate to live in the village of Coupvray, only about 40 km from Paris, and so was eventually able, about age 10, to attend a school there for the blind.

A curious note: the school was founded by Valentin Hauy. That combination of name and era sets off the memory bell for me, as a mineralogist. It turns out that Valentin Hauy, the philanthropist and political activist, was the brother of Rene Just Hauy, one of the real founders of mineralogy. (As in so many things, Nicolaus Steno was a century ahead of his time in proposing the law of constant interfacial angles. It was not until the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth century that chemistry and geology caught up to this insight and began to make further progress.)

V. Hauy had devised a way to help blind people read by means of creating raised letters whose outlines could be felt, but it was a difficult system. Braille, who was a brilliant student and put to work as a teacher already at 15, learned a new system from Charles Barbier, which had the disadvantage of being a syllabary rather than an alphabet. However, it had the advantage of relying on easily distinguished (and written, with simple equipment) raised dots rather than whole letters. Braille assembled his own system. He tightened up Barbier's 12 dots to bundles of 6, and made the system an alphabet. It was first introduced to the world in 1829, when Braille was only 20. The system only took off slowly, and was widely accepted around the world only after Braille's untimely death.

Louis Braille suffered from bleeding from the late 1830s on. He relinquished most of his teaching duties by 1840, but retained a lifelong passion for music right up until his death. He was a frequent organist at parishes in Paris. In early December 1851, he began hemorrhaging, and a series of further hemorrhages led to his death the following month. He had been 43 for two days.
I cannot help but be amazed by the life of someone like Braille, who suffered such a debilitating injury at a time when his society was just barely beginning to provide some sort of help, hope, and future for the blind. He jumped on his chance with both feet and made the absolute most of it.

Louis, you gave light to your fellows, despite the darkness you yourself had to endure. It's hard to believe that you left this life on the feast of Epiphany, when we remember the Light coming into the world, entirely by coincidence. Pray for me. I long for a share of the spirit that animated you.

http://www.snof.org/encyclopedie/louis-braille-et-lalphabet-braille

Episode 042 - TSSM in 2019, part 2

What sense can we make of the ancient and medieval idea that "the soul is the form of the body" in the light of contemporary neuroscience and psychology?

Highlight this idea's differences from Platonic and Cartesian dualism.

History of psychology as a discipline. Psychology has not evolved (a) master paradigm(s) that compel the bulk of the field to adhere to them the way that plate tectonics did for geology, Newtonian classical physics and then quantum and relativity did for physics, etc.

Peace of Soul (Fulton Sheen) remark that psychology has been furtively recycling Christian ideas and passing them off as new for a long time

Examining the convergence points of the advice for living from the Bible and Tradition, modern psychology, and the contemporary self-help / New Age-y movement that continues to spread and adapt through large sectors of modern culture.

Self-esteem, humility...

Confidence, faith, negative tapes...

Twelve Step spirituality (Richard Rohr and the intense overlap between 12 Step and Catholic spirituality)

Even many of us who are explicitly Christian have internalized a kind of Lutheran / Jansenist belief that we are so terrible that, in essence, God made a mistake in going to all this effort to save us, because we're not worth it. This is one of a number of areas in contemporary Catholic and Christian culture where we have let our understanding of Scripture and Tradition get very warped and imbalanced.

Issues surrounding how the Christian and scientific understanding of universal history could fit together.

What will "the end of the world" look like? Will it be the end of the whole universe or not? Will there be human colonies on other planets, orbiting other stars? How would the Apocalypse play out then?

 

You can find That's So Second Millennium at all of these places:

 

tssm.podbean.com

paggeology.net/blog

@infamousDrG on Twitter

That's So Second Millennium page on Facebook

 

giesting -at- alumni.nd.edu is Paul's email address

 

Please be in touch with your feedback, ideas for new episodes, and conversation of any kind!