This is a book about how poetry can save you. More specifically, it is a book about how poetic rhythm can reset the harmony of your body and soul. In his powerful and original reading of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Stephen Blackwood uncovers a sustained musical therapy during which the imprisoned poet moves from baffled despair at the world’s injustice to contemplative joy over providential order.
Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities by james turner princeton, 576 pages, $35 She appeared to him in the darkest of times. In the early part of the sixth century, the sun had set on the western Roman Empire. Its greatest intellectual, a highborn official named Boethius—among . . . . Continue Reading »
In Obergefell v. Hodges, Justice Kennedy has penned a decision of historic hubris and stupidity—as both Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Scalia argue in their dissents. The basis of the decision is a claim to special enlightenment (we shall not say “revelation”) about the meaning and . . . . Continue Reading »
At the March for Life this past January, I saw a teenage girl holding a sign that read, “She could be the next Beyoncé!” the “she” referring, of course, to the baby inside the womb. Her sign reminded me of the quirky movie, Juno, in which the protagonist, a young teenager, decides not to . . . . Continue Reading »
How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem by rod dreher regan, 320 pages, $29.95 In 2011, Rod Dreher returns to his hometown in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, after years living elsewhere in pursuit of a (highly successful) journalistic . . . . Continue Reading »
Solomon Ibn Gabirol (1021–1058) was the first Jewish philosopher in Spain, but medieval Christians knew him only by his Latinized name, Avicebron, and they assumed that he was either a Christian or a Muslim. Most scholastics also thought he was a deeply misguided thinker. Gabirol was identified with the doctrine of universal hylomorphism—the idea that everything God creates is composed of form and matter—and treated as a precursor of the nominalist emphasis on the absolute freedom (and thus inscrutability) of God’s will. Some of his poetry remains in liturgical use in Judaism to this day, but his philosophy was all but forgotten. Even experts in medieval theology typically treat him as little more than a footnote to scholastic debates about how angels can be individuated without being embodied. Continue Reading »
In a recent issue of First Things (“Vinculum Magnum Entis,” April), David Hart recounts (or, perhaps, constructs) a conversation with a paleo-traditional Thomist over the salvific status of animals. His interlocutor defends “a particularly colorless construal of the beatific vision” which has the consequence of preventing any pesky animals from passing through the Pearly Gates. Continue Reading »
While Dr. Alice von Hildebrand is best known for promoting the work of her late husband, Dietrich—the eminent anti-Nazi philosopher who barely escaped death under Hitler—her personal story, as revealed in a new autobiography, Memoirs of a Happy Failure, is very powerful in itself. Continue Reading »
We are all disciples of Aristotle. Whether we realize it or not, whenever we are talking about the Good we are working with ideas that are Aristotelian in origin. We speak of good food and good company, good behavior and good outcomes. These modes of the Good share a basic assumption: The good is . . . . Continue Reading »
The new translation of Erich Przywara’s Analogia Entis is a theological landmark that should go a long way toward clarifying the centuries-long debate about the relationship between analogy and metaphysics. Far from being a rhetorical trope or a philosophical tool, analogy for Przywara is the style of thought that best corresponds to the way in which being makes itself known. Not only is analogy, for Przywara, built into every level of Catholic theology. It is the glue that holds those levels together. The analogy of being is nothing more than the philosophical form that the Roman Catholic Church takes as it embodies God’s presence in the world. Continue Reading »
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