There is a common trap when finding certain ideals beautiful and inspiring: romanticizing them, and in that romanticization, self-mythologizing in the fantasy of one living up to that ideal. This is brought to my mind by the Colombian president's response to caving to Trump's economic pressure within roughly 30 minutes.
President Petro speaks in grand poetic language of being the oppressed Colombian revolutionary fighting against the imperial powers of Trump's America, but it rings hollow in li…
I read somewhere that Maurice Merleau-Ponty said that, for mediocre people, sex is the closest thing they have to encounter the mystery and exhilaration of being.
You rightfully point out the legalistic, black-and-white consent-based sexual ethic that predators and sexual autists exploit and gamify. The Gaimans, predators, and sexual auti…
There is a phenomenological critique of Aquinas that argues his analogia entis conceptualizes God within metaphysical principles, despite acknowledging God's transcendence beyond those analogical categories, but still thereby risks the reduction of God to an idol. However, as a parallel, Jean-Luc Marion himself operates within the phenomenological method and still defines God with phenomenological concepts, namely, God as gift and agape who explodes our categories and reveals himself to us as s…
When an artist creates a work of Beauty, his creation testifies to his sincere belief and faith and authenticity. It is a kind of work that cannot be lied about due to the sheer beauty of the finished work and the soul and love poured into it. Contrast this with the preacher of Christendom, who speaks of things and produces words and ideas that are betrayed by the very fact that he has not only not lived them, but doesn’t dare to.
Perhaps, too, the artist has not lived out fully what his creati…
The will has no causal force of its own. Its movement is caused by what the intellect perceives as good, whether actual or apparent. The will is always and only a response to what the intellect perceives as good, so the will does not independently generate its own movement. As St. Thomas says, the will cannot desire anything unless it is presented to it under the aspect of good.
Consider St. Augustine’s understanding of sin as disordered love. The will moves because it loves what the intellect p…
I’ve been highly critical of Peterson, but this article has persuaded me to ease up on some of my criticisms. This is partly because it reminded me that Peterson, in many ways, prepared the way for my own reversion to the Christian faith. When he first entered the public scene, I was captivated by what he had to say as it pointed beyond …
There’s a type of transparent spirit—in the sense that one's outwardness matches her inwardness—but in a negative sense. Namely, the outwardness matches the shallowness of her inwardness. Everything is about the superficial, about the immediateness of everything. He or she is an immediate man, caring only about pure appearance and aesthetic. And it is so severe in its degree that the outward manifestation of her shallowness lays bare the petrification of her inwardness. So perhaps it is not rig…
Reading Kierkegaard, I’ve come to understand more profoundly my experience of boredom in high school math. It was so torturously boring, and it was never clear to me how these cold, lifeless abstractions were relevant to what it means to live my life. No amount of pandering humor from suburban moms could sanitize the soulless presentation of sterile abstractions. Societally useful? Sure. But to my life and what it means to live? Irrelevant.
That’s why the only gift public K-12 education gave me—…
Faith, whether inchoate or otherwise, tempers and orients the will by grace to will to truth for truth’s own sake (an act of humility and love) over the will to power for the will’s own sake. Consider the ambitions of Peter Abelard and the irony of Heloise rejecting the initial marriage proposal for misplaced love—an idol—for the sake of Abelard’s worldly ambitions.