Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 1387

For those interested in the *real* engagement of the West with Chinese Philosophy...

May I suggest that Christ the Eternal Tao and not Kung Fu, Bulletproof Monk, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Batman Begins is the place to start.

A reader writes...

"Msgr. Pope disagrees with you."


Sorry. Still not buying. If we are going to listen to all the crap about separation of Church and state everytime some kid wants to have a Bible study in a broom closet, then the Feds don't suddenly get to appoint themselves Theological Arbiters when they have a mind to boss Catholics around. If the bishops are doing a crappy job, that's their problem. Nothing is helped by letting Caesar start meddling in such matters. The law works by precedent. Let this stand and the next thing you know, he will be approving the content of homilies and weeding out "homophobic hate speech" or declaring anti-abortion commentary to be unacceptable political speech.

Miriam Marston writes

Hello Mark,
I pray this finds you well!
The last few days, I've been trying to get the word out into the Catholic blogosphere about a new album I released a few months ago - your name came up in a conversation with a student the other day, and I thought you might be a good person to pass it along to, especially since the album title is from a chapter title from Chesterton's "Manalive" -- "The Luggage of an Optimist".

Most of the music may be found here (I would like to get my own website up and running, but still figuring all that out) and may be purchased on I-tunes, Amazon, etc or here.

I live and work in the Boston area (working for the Theological Institute for the New Evangelization, a branch of the seminary) and do the music-thing in my spare time. I was featured on a Catholic radio station based out of Portland, Oregon, and have been able to perform here and there around Boston.

Anyways, if there's any chance you could check it out at some point, and if you feel okay with spreading the word to your blog followers, I would be most grateful!!

Any word on the status of the Manalive movie?

Thanks and God bless,
Miriam

Anybody writing Chesterton-based music rocks in my book. I'm going to forward your note to Dale Ahlquist at the American Chesterton Society. Although he is a whiny and starchy critic of my laptop's vast array of fine tunefulness who complained continually as I stooped down from my Olympian heights and tried to broaden his tastes when I stayed with him in Minnesota a week or so ago, I feel confident that he will be interested in your work.

Re: Manalive. The sound edit proceeds apace and Dale feels confident that the film will be released sometime before I die a natural death. Beyond that, nothing to report except that Dale (who has seen a rough cut) said it's very funny (which is the most critical part of making a comedy) and the bit I've seen (a nine minute scene of which this is a very brief precis):



...did not make my flesh crawl (an otherwise constant phenomenon whenever I see myself on screen). The Chesterton '09 conference gave it enthusiastic thumbs up, so I'm hopeful that it will be reasonably well-received, but then I'm just a dumb actor and can't see the wood for the trees.

Anyway, I'm inspired that somebody would record an album based, not merely on Chesterton, but on the marvelous Innocent Smith. You go, girl!

Peter Kreeft

is so sensible.

The Death Penalty

Magisterium vs. Left and Right is on discussion over at Inside Catholic.

We discuss two schools of dissent from Magisterial teaching re: the death penalty and where they blunder. Not surprisingly, given the demographic, one school predominates in the complaints that follow, explaining why the Magisterium is not merely imprudent but heretical and they are right. Good times.

I'm chatting with somebody...

...about apologetics over at the Register today.

Hey Western Washington!

Dear Friends of the Seattle G. K. Chesterton Society,

We invite you to join us next Thursday evening for our third gathering of this season at the Catholic Newman Center of the University of Washington, located at 4502 20th Avenue NE, Seattle, WA 98105.

Thursday, January 20, 2011, at 7:30 PM, UW Newman Center

Graham Greene: Catholic Literary Modernist
Rev. Dr. Mark Bosco, S. J.
Loyola University Chicago

It is something of a cliché that the so-called modern age witnessed the death of God, religion, or both. Modernist writers, among those most aware of their own "modernity," have done much eulogizing of faith. The success of this Modernist "project" is, of course, complicated by the persistence of religion. Moreover, the modern period produced writers the likes of T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene, to name only a few. I would like to suggest ways in which we can understand Greene as a representative "Catholic Modernist" who re-imagines Catholicism through modernist aesthetics, modernist sensibilities. In particular, I would like to develop the historical trajectory of this Catholic literary revival as a kind of Catholic literary modernism, and see in Greene's work, especially, how this is embodied.

Mark Bosco, S.J., holds a joint appointment as associate professor in English and Theology at Loyola University Chicago, and serves as its director of the Catholic Studies Program. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of Catholic theology, aesthetics, and literature. His book publications include Graham Greene's Catholic Imagination (Oxford UP 2005), and two edited volumes, Academic Novels as Satire: Critical Studies of an Emerging Genre (Edwin Mellen, 2007) and Finding God in All Things: Celebrating Bernard Lonergan, John Courtney Murray, and Karl Rahner (Fordham UP, 2007). He has published in such journals as The Southern Review, The Flannery O'Connor Review, and LOGOS: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture.

Please see our full Events Calendar for more details pertaining to meetings. Parking at the Newman Center is extremely limited. It is recommended that commuters park in the nearby "N5" lot on the University campus, accessible via the north gate at NE 45th St and Memorial Way. The fee for evening parking in the University lots is $5.00. Campus maps showing the exact location of the N5 lot are available here.

We look forward to seeing you Thursday evening!

Yours faithfully,

The Seattle G. K. Chesterton Society

Be there! Aloha!

A philosopher friend writes...

There's a Russian Orthodox monk who wrote a book called something like "Christ the eternal Tao" which basically argues that the tao/dao or "way" is equivalent to the greek logos concept, and was recognised intuitively by some of the great chinese sages.

Trouble is that 99% of westerners who are interested in Chinese philosophy are drawn to it for the appearance of amoral mystery. Basically old drug-damaged hippies I suspect.

Giving such people a Christian interpretation of these philosophies would be like telling the average western boomer-age 'buddhist' that much of buddhist practice and teaching can be 'easily' understood within the context of Thomistic metaphysics.

Yet, as a priest once pointed out to me, only the elite could ever hope to comprehend or approach the heights of chinese philosophy. Without revelation, it takes distillation upon distillation to produce even the faintest essence of reliigous truth. Besides, thanks to revelation we know that such knowledge can't really help us or save us...that was a big realisation for me one day - that pelagian intellectual efforts, even in theological and ethical fields, cannot bring me one step closer to the light.

Chinese philosophy, for western dilettantes, is to actual thinking as Kong's Skull Island is to actual geography. It's far off and exotic and the less we actually know about the facts of it, the better, because that would spoil the romance.

That's why the Dalai Lama is always such a shock and disappointment to Western dilettantes when he opens his mouth about things like gay marriage and various other other western lefty trendinesses. Westerners who are "into spirituality n'stuff" think the East is the land where everybody is Keith (d'oh!) David Carradine, offering delphic utterances while a flute plays in the background and the shamed Western boob forsakes his crude bourgeois values and learns Wisdom, Batman Martial Arts, and awesome tantric bedroom moves. It's the blank area off the edge of the map where fools can project their consequence-free daydreams under the cryptic smile of a Buddha semi-deity who won't harsh their mellow.

In reality, Chinese philosophy, at its best, leads where all the best pagan human philosophy leads: to earthly frustration and then, if understood rightly under the influence of grace, ultimately to Christ.

God bless Aussies!

A friend of mine sends along this note from a friend of his in Brisbane:

"The last three weeks as the crisis has moved from place to place around the state has numbed everyone, I think. Today, the Brisbane newspaper devoted its front page to photographs of those who had died in the disaster - and I found myself crying as I looked at the faces of children and grand parents and ordinary men and women. It's heart breaking. They have now released the names of those who are still missing, hoping that somehow they have been accommodated somewhere and haven't made contact with family. This is a vain hope really but only yesterday one man who had been swept away in flood waters was found alive eighty-six kilometres from where he disappeared.

"The decency and transparent goodness of those who have volunteered to help is inspiring. Even though the news coverage has been very sobering, it's good to read newspaper stories that make you proud to be a human being instead of ashamed of it. Some of the stories are lovely: a helicopter pilot rescues a bride from one side of the flooded river so she can be married on Saturday. A young teenager who only knew five songs on his guitar busks in the streets - and raises a thousand dollars for flood victims. People are wonderfully kind and generous. There's something in the Australian character that is at its best in trouble.

God bless you,"

This seems so emblematic of the Aussie national character. Good, good people Down Under. May God our Father see you through this suffering through Jesus Christ and may Mother Mary and St. Mary MacKillop pray for you.

Reader Tim Jones, the Old World Swine, writes

I wanted to let you and your readers know that not only do I have a cool new source for high-quality reproductions of my artwork (which I've been needing), but I have also just added a gallery of Religious Art that will include some cool Catholic devotional images, and stuff.

I'm working through Fine Art America, a website that offers scads of art reproductions at your fingertips.

My page can be found by linking here.

Thanks a heap!

Check thou it out! He's really good!