Archive for July, 2007

Abp. Sheen on the Church’s detractors

From Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s foreword to Radio Replies Vol. 1, page ix [source]:
There are not a hundred people in America who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions of people who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church — which is, of course, quite a different thing.

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Against materialism

From a lecture on God’s Existence by Boston College Prof. Peter Kreeft:
The thing that is the most carefully designed thing in the universe is the human brain. We haven’t yet made a computer that’s quite that efficient. Now, the brain is very much like a computer. If you were riding in an airplane, and the [...]

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In praise of ritual

From Thomas Howard’s If Your Mind Wanders at Mass…, pages 9-15:
It is an oddity about us mortals that when we come to the most profound experiences of our lives we become aware of the pale inadequacy of our own ability to respond with anything like an appropriately weighty response and find that we have to [...]

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Formal pronouns

From page xxiv of “Shakespeare: An Overview”, by Sylvan Barnet of Tufts University, in Signet Classics’ 1998 edition of The Merchant of Venice:
In Middle English, thou, thy, and thee were used among familiars and in speaking to children and inferiors; ye, your, and you were used in speaking to superiors (servants to masters, nobles to [...]

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Math, music, and reductionism

From the second lecture of Prof. Robert Greenberg’s How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Ed., available from The Teaching Company:
Were the ancient Greeks indulging in that hoary old myth and saying that music was math, that math was music? No, that’s not what they were saying. They were saying that the relationships [...]

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