St. Justin Martyr

On Leonard Cohen (1934-2016)

I was at a so-called “rock mass” in Kansas City back in 1967, with a local group playing Jefferson Airplane songs and everyone dancing in the aisles. It was there

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Surprised by the Obvious

We are accustomed to being surprised by the unobvious, that which no one would ever have expected. Good philosophy, however, begins with a wonder that consists, essentially, in being surprised

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Is Jesus Nice?

The sanitized, presweetened ‘Jesus’ we see smiling wanly at us from many a pious painting is, in fact, a recent production. It’s as modern as the Marlboro Man, although the

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Future Fiction

Ernst Bloch famously said that most of what goes on in our mind is pointed to the future – hopes, dreams, expectations, anticipations, projects and outlooks. Aristotelian teleology, which modern

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This Side of Glory

The birth of Christianity is irreducibly, unmistakably and – among religions of the world – uniquely centered around an event. It is, first and foremost, not about a teaching to be learned,

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About Travel – I

I was impressed to learn that the author of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – which I read as a boy and which inspired me to run away

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Smart and wicked

You can be very smart and very wicked, but you cannot be wise without being good. Being smart means you have a mercurial mind – possibly a very high IQ

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Wonder

Our English word ‘wonder’ translates the Greek verb thaumazein (usually rendered in Latin as admirari, although English ‘admiring’ only gets a part of the meaning). Both Plato (Theat. 155d) and Aristotle (Met. I.2,

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Another List of Loves

C.S. Lewis penned an insightful book entitled The Four Loves, offering a clear taxonomy of love according to its varieties as family affection, erotic love, friendship, and charity (love of and for

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Edith and Elizabeth

Among the common slurs one often hears against the Catholic Church are that 1) it represses women, and 2) the Church’s favorite philosopher/theologian, Thomas Aquinas, is hopelessly out of fashion.

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Why I Walk (a lot)

Versão portuguesa Being peripatetic (or philosophically ambulatory) is, for my money, a conditio sine qua non for courting wisdom. Moving your body properly is both cause and effect of moving

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Christian Debris

Since I was hired over two decades ago to teach Medieval Philosophy at a secular, Brazilian university, I have had time and resources to plunge deeply into the medieval world.

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