2 Comments

Reta
December 7th, 2012 | 11:45 pm

Gee, I’m sorry you closed the comments regarding the Muslims off…….hope you don’t mind if I take the liberty of posting one anyhow….

How can the Mohammadan Muslims be called ‘schismatic’………in order to be in schism from a religion wouldn’t you have to first have been a belonger to it? Mohammad came along pretty late in the game and was more like Joseph Smith the way I understand it….in that he founded a ‘new’ religion from pieces and bits taken from the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Although he revered much of what he read in the scriptures, he didn’t take to it so much that he would embrace it in very many of its aspects.

Recently I read a book review in Commentary magazine about how Father Abraham was the father of Jews, Christians and Muslims. I thought that was a stretch because there would have been something about that written in the OT ………yes, we could stretch that connection somehow, but it would have to be really stretching.

As the Holy Father commented in his Regensburg address, we welcome dialog with the Muslims and I’m sure it could be worked out that we can have raprochement of some sort but it would need to be of the kind we have with the Sihks or the Animists or any other faith that didn’t actually derive from scriptural connects. We are all God’s people, after all, but to try to stitch together our beginnings to Father Abraham would take some doing, in my opinion.

Bret Lythgoe
December 8th, 2012 | 8:58 am

The versitility of Aquinas never ceases to amaze me. Thomism can be viewed in a traditional way, or subtly synthesized with Kant’s views (i.e., “Transcendental Thomism”), or with “Analytical Thomism”, perhaps best exercised by the brilliant philosopher John Haldane. The way that Thomism has not only lived, but thrived in the rather harsh intellectual environment that it’s been filtered through, is incredible. Not bad for a thirteenth century friar, who had no electricity, computer, printing, really, nothing, except for his enormously capacious and wonderful mind.