I guess we all have our regrets.

One of the prime movers of the oral contraceptive pill has condemned it because, well, it led fewer human beings. How about that?

Choirs of angels.

The beloved Richard John Neuhaus died this morning. I am so very, very sad--not for him, but for us. As a friend said, "It is a brilliant sadness."

May choirs of angels welcome him on the far side of the Jordan. He will be greatly missed this side.

South.

Well, I'm donning my pearls and my little black dress and heading South today with the family. It's a blizzard up here in the Great White North, but I hear it's all sunshine in Georgia.

Catch you down there, contemplating!

Truth and the academy.

Via Wine Dark Sea, I found "Thomism and the Archaeology of Ideas" on a lovely website, The Canterbury Tales (Wow, that was a lot of links...).

Taylor basically summarizes the distinction between doing theology (or philosophy) in order to arrive at truth and simply doing a historical survey of when and where ideas appeared. This distinction is fascinating and is, in large part, why I left the Academy: so many careers and conversations are wholly devoted to the historical particulars that few people get around to asking, "But is it true?" Or they think that question is wholly facetious, a non-question. I wanted to do philosophy so that I could learn to die (ergo, learn to live) well.

That being said, I don't think the distinction finds a simple expression in real academicians. A teacher who longs to know "Is it true?" will also concern herself with the historical situation in which an idea arose--we are historical creatures, after all. And even the history buffs in the philosophy department sometimes make judgments about an idea's truth (in my grad program, most of them had no problem concluding that Thomism was untrue).

The Judeo-Christian tradition gave us the idea of progress in history, and that includes the history of ideas (although many philosophers then had a heyday with progress and made it into a god). So, once again, I'm falling on the "both-and" side of the debate. Because we are finite creatures, our forays into history--a biography of Thomas--can become, from our point of view, an infinitely inexhaustible project. A whole lifetime can be spent on tiny minutiae and historical trivia. We have to know when to stop and ask the bigger questions sometimes. Both-and.

We need historical research and the question "Is it true?" The important point is that our thirst for truth should guide our history; we should do history in order to learn truth. What we must not do is make history and contingency our only truth: all is changing, all is contingent, we can never know, on and on and on...

Home by another way.

Happy feast of the Epiphany. This one's for Maica.

The Wise Men

Step softly, under snow or rain,
To find the place where me can pray,
The way is all so very plain
The we may lose the way.

Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore,
On tortured puzzles from our youth,
We know all labrynthine lore,
We are the three Wise Men of yore,
And we know all things but the truth.

We have gone round and round the hill,
And lost the wood among the trees,
And learnt long names for every ill,
And served mad gods, naming still
The Furies and Eumenides.

The gods of violence take the veil
Of visions and philosophy,
The Serpent that brought all men bale,
He bites his own accursed tail,
And calls himself Eternity.

Go humbly... it has hailed and snowed...
With voices low and lanterns lit,
So very simple is the road,
That we may stray from it.

The world grows terrible and white,
And blinding white the breaking day;
We walk bewildered in the light,
For something is too large for sight,
And something much to plain to say.

THe Child that was ere worlds begun --
(... We need but walk a little way ...
We need but see a latch undone...)
The Child that played with moon and sun
Is playing with a little hay.

The house from which the heavens are fed,
The strange old house that is our own,
Where tricks of words are never said,
And Mercy is as plain as bread,
And Honour is as hard as stone.

Go humbly; humble are the skies,
And low and large and fierce the Star,
So very near the Manger lies
That we may travel far.

Hark! Laughter like a lion wakes
To roar to the resounding plain,
And the whole heaven shouts and shakes
For God himself is born again
And we are little children walking
Through the snow and rain.

~GK Chesterton

Thanks to MAGNIFICAT.

Night gives way to day.

Beloved Richard John Neuhaus gave us a wonderful article this month: "The Pro-Life Movement as the Politics of the 1960's."

It's a good, level-headed reflection on the irony that it is now the pro-choice contingent that enjoys the status of status quo and its attendant intellectual atrophy and refusal to engage in "meaningful dialogue." Neuhaus knows what he's talking about: he himself was active in the civil rights movement of the 1960's; he can recognize the striking similarities (and some differences) between the struggle for racial equality and for the rights of the unborn.

I wonder especially about his analysis of the two cultures here at war:

"Well yes, the abortion battle is over abortion and whether the unborn child counts as a human person, but where one comes out on that question is, I believe, powerfully influenced by a host of other beliefs and attitudes aptly summarized in the pro-life language of a culture of death versus a culture of life. There are two cultures, one focused on rights and laws and the other on rights and wrongs; one focused on maximizing individual self-expression and the other on reinforcing community and responsibility."

When he puts it that way, I find myself re-calibrating just how we ought to be defending our own "rights"--the right to homeschool, cultivate our land, practice our faith, wear religious emblems, etc. Any battle against injustice cannot just be a matter of "get the government out of my business." That maxim is true ot a certain extent, but we need to cultivate a more nuanced understanding of "my" rights and "my" business; we can't fall on the side of the culture war that focuses on "rights and laws ... maximizing self-expression." The push in any fight, in other words, needs to be for an understanding that our freedom is for a certain purpose: the good of every human being with whom we live. Or else we end up on the wrong side of the culture war. We need a healthier libertarianism, or our light dims; just as so many proponents of civil rights--who fought for a great good--have fallen into an apathetic shrug over abortion rights. Day became night.

I love Neuhaus's final perspective: "[A]ll of us would do well to ponder the wisdom in the observation that there are no permanently lost causes because there are no permanently won causes." That is his conclusion, and what precedes it is worth a read.

Mary, Mother of God

Ecce completa sunt, quae praedicta sunt ab Angelo Virgini Mariae.

Today we begin the New Year contemplating the profound humility of the seat of Wisdom, Mary, Mother of God. May your day be filled with light and joy!

And I can't resist: Upturned Earth has a thought-provoking post on the role of naivete in moral/political reasoning. It's very appropriate for this time of year, when children are so much on our minds.