I've been reading through "The Life of the Mind: On the Joys and Travails of Thinking" Fr James V. Schall S.J., and I have found it to be nearly as delightful as his "On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs." One thing which I drew from The Life of the Mind is a sense of paradox in the process of education. It is good to have good teachers--but then the purpose of a teacher is to make the student not need the teacher. The purpose of the mind is to come to know and contemplate truth--but by its natural powers of reason it cannot discover the highest truths without the aide of revelation. Learning truth is good--but some truths can be learned too early. Such are among the paradoxes which Prof. Schall presents throughout this book.

The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes,
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee
-From G.K. Chesterton's poem, "Lepanto"

Mark Shea arguably saved the most important book of his Marian trilogy for the end. In his first two volumes of Mary, Mother of the Son, Mr Mark Shea has made the case that Catholic piety and teaching towards Mary come not from pagan sources, but rather from sacred Tradition, and that the particular Marian Dogmas are not just about Mary, but about Christ, His Church, and the destiny of mankind. Now, in the conclusion to his apologetics trilogy, he gives us "Miracles, Devotion, and Motherhood." Whereas the previous two volumes were concerned with defending the Catholic teachings and piety surrounding our Lady, the third volume is more dedicated to the practice and meaning of those devotions in the life of the Church.

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In the first volume of Mary, Mother of the Son, Mr Mark Shea addressed the sources from which the Church developed her teachings concerning Our Lady (or anything else, for that matter). Now, in the second volume, titled First Guardian of the Faith, he now sets his sights on four of the 5 Marian dogmas* of the Church: Theotokos (God-bearer), Mary's Perpetual Virginity, her Immaculate Conception, and her Assumption (Body and Soul) into heaven at the end of her life. Here, he gives a cogent defense of these dogmas by explaining how the doctrines have developed, examining some scriptures which hint at these dogma, and by rebutting Protestant readings of select verses which seem to counter these dogma.

Concerning these alleged proof-texts, Mr Shea states at the outset that
Marian dogmas are not derived from Scripture. They are, rather, reflected there. That is, they're what you get when you read Scripture through the lens of the apostolic Tradition as preserved by the Spirit-guided Body of Christ in union with the bishops and pope in succession from the apostles. In short, they have the same descent as the canon of Scripture itself, the doctrine of the Trinity, the rejection of polygamy, and the teaching that human life is sacred from the moment of conception. To reject such teaching, it's not sufficient to show that it's not absolutely in Scripture alone, since none of the teachings I just mentioned earlier are, either. Rather, one must show that Scripture clearly and unequivocally contradicts it. And, as we shall show, not only is there no place where Scripture clearly and unequivocally contradicts Catholic Marian teaching, there are actually many places where the Bible bears surprising witness to it.

The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap,/His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary were the world,/But here is all aright.)
The Christ-child lay on Mary's breast/His hair was like a star.
(O stern and cunning are the kings,/But here the true hearts are.)
The Christ-child lay on Mary's heart,/His hair was like a fire.
(O weary, weary is the world,/But here the world's desire.)
The Christ-child stood on Mary's knee,/His hair was like a crown,
And all the flowers looked up at Him,/And all the stars looked down
A Christmas Poem by G.K. Chesterton

One of the (relatively recent) bones of contention which Protestants have against the Church is her teachings concerning Our Lady. Whether it's over the particular dogmas of the Church concerning Mary (there are five, most modern Evangelical Protestants challenge four of these), the sources for the Church's teachings, or the place of Our Lady in popular Catholic devotion, challenges arise from both curious Protestants and more militant ones. In his Mary, Mother of the Son trilogy, Mr Mark Shea addresses these various challenges.

"The image [of Minerva] did not preserve the men; the men were preserving the image" (page 8 in the Penguin Classics edition).

False gods need to be propped up artificially by men. But what of the real God, the God of the Blessed Trinity? We have seen His churches, monasteries, chapels, shrines (and, in the Old Testament, temples)--all of His sanctuaries--despoiled by barbarians, both foreign and domestic, or even left to decay from neglect. Why, then, do we claim that He is different from these other gods, represented here by Minerva? Why, for example, do we not buy the "one god fewer" argument put forth by such atheists as Sam Harris or Stephen F Roberts?

I have long been a fan of science fiction stories, though my reading of said stories was curtailed somewhat by my time in college. It is therefore with some pleasure that I was able to pick up one of the classics of science fiction form the last century and read it. I came across Mr Walter M Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz by reading from the blog of Mr John C Wright--himself an accomplished writer in the genre--who mentioned it as a favorite of Professor Peter Kreeft’s. Having grown up in a generation which is at time deliberately isolated from the past--sometimes by itself, sometimes by the so-called adults of our childhood, who had by-and-large consciously rebelled against tradition, authority, history, and reality--I had never heard of this book.

I picked it up expecting something extraordinary, amazing, awe-inspiring, thought-provoking, and entertaining. I was not disappointed. There are several criteria for which I look when reading a science fiction novel. First and foremost, it is a novel, and thus should contain a good and compelling story. Second, because it is a work of science fiction, there should be a sense of wonder; this also applies to fantasy stories. For science fiction, the wonder is in what a future or alternative world might hold, with the development of technology and the discoveries of new sciences; for fantasy stories, it is the wonder of a different world altogether, whether in the enchantment of the forgotten past or the magic of a different reality. Finally, the book should reveal to us something about ourselves, the world, or the ultimate truth which underlies our existence.

It is a mistake commonly made today that the end of marriage is personal gratification, personal happiness. This mistake is not made merely along political nor even necessarily religious lines. Both the liberal who wishes to expand the meaning of marriage so that it includes two men, two women, or all four and the conservative who believes that marriage ought to be limited solely to the satisfaction of an otherwise sinful sexual urge are guilty in some way of treating marriage as a thing made for an individual’s pleasure. In the former case, marriage exists solely as a means to expand hedonism into a way of life so that pleasure and self-indulgence may be raised to a higher level of social approval. In the latter case, marriage serves no purpose save to limit hedonism for the salvation of each individual’s soul, or for the protection of civilizations.

In the Church today, the answer to this question of marriage is largely found in the Theology of the Body, as taught first and foremost by Pope John Paul the Great. The late pope and his followers taught a view of sexuality in which the marital act becomes an image of divine love. Marriage provides the context for sex, whose end is unitive: that is primarily procreative and secondarily the strengthening of intimacy between spouses. This teaching on sex and marriage has been a great boon to the Church, as it shows among other things that the Church’s reveres rather than rejects sex, holding it to be so holy that to engage in it outside of the bounds of marriage is more akin to blasphemy than to idolatry. That is to say, the Church under the leadership of Pope John Paul II rescued sex not only from the adulterers and fornicators, but also from the prudes and the Gnostics.

In seeing the immense contributions of Pope John Paull II with his Theology of the Body, it is often easy to overlook other writers and thinkers in the Church. As Christopher West noted in the introduction to his The Good News about Sex and Marriage: Answers to Your Honest Questions about Catholic Teaching, “John Paul’s contributions to the Church’s teachings on sex and marriage are so vast that over two-thirds of what the Catholic Church has ever said on the subject has come from his pontificate.” The late pope is not, however, the only great or even popular thinker within the Church to write on the subjects of sex and marriage—far from it, as much of his own writings were drawn and synthesized from the great mystic saints and holy philosophers of the Church: Thomas Aquinas, John of the Cross, and even Augustine.

It's been up for a while now, but I only recently found the site where the ISI book reviews get published. Here, then, is the link to my review of Professor J Budziszewski's "The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction." The book itself was well-written; Budziszewski is fast becoming one of my favorite writers and speakers, and is also one of the most welcoming professors I've met. Here is an excerpt of the review:

“When people cease to believe in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

So wrote the ever-witty writer G.K. Chesterton, the apostle of common-sense and prophet of the century to come. As men turn increasingly away from belief in a supernatural God, they are increasingly places their trust in the natural sciences, and particularly in physics. Physics is, after all, the basis for most of the other natural sciences, for it is the laws of physics which govern the motions and even formations of the stars in the cosmos and the rate of reaction amongst molecules; and in turn these may govern biology and geology, and the atmospheric and oceanic sciences. Indeed, physics is the most exact of the sciences, perhaps because it is the most exactly mathematical; as such, it has no limits amongst the things with material, quantifiable properties.