Mary Douglas highlighted the analogies between body and social body in her work on Levitical defilements. Protecting the integrity and wholness of the individual body symbolized the aspirations of Israelite society for a whole and well-protected social body, without intrusions from outside or . . . . Continue Reading »
Mary Douglas writes in Leviticus As Literature that the word translated as “swarming” or “creeping” should instead be translated as “teeming,” with its connotations of fertility. Israel is to avoid teeming things, Douglas argues, because Israel is to make a . . . . Continue Reading »
Nazirites were separated to Yahweh’s service and devoted to His holy war. Priests too were “separated” ( nazir , Leviticus 22:2). But Israel as a whole was a nation of devoted warriors. That is the whole rationale for the laws of cleanliness, that the sons of Israel . . . . Continue Reading »
Von Balthasar says that the “ethos of the theology in Bonaventure is . . . quite different from the ethos in Thomas Aquinas, whose philosophical point of view tries to reflect the order of the world as rigorously and clearly as possible. In Bonaventure, there is something defeated from . . . . Continue Reading »
According to Pickstock, Augustine’s musical ontology is not a mere subordination of space to time, or a univocal “Dionysian flow”: “just as important as the priority of time, for Augustine, is the insistence on articulation into distinct musical units or phrases, the . . . . Continue Reading »
Nothing comes from nothing. That seems obvious, and Christians have traditionally had some difficulty explaining why creatio ex nihilo is a defensible violation of that basic principle. According to Catherine Pickstock, Augustine viewed creation ex nihilo as the most rational position. . . . . Continue Reading »
In responding to Milbank’s analysis of Augustine on the secular, RA Markus ( Christianity And the Secular (Blessed Pope John XXIII Lecture Series in Theology and Culture) ) borrows MJ Hollerich’s summary of Milbank that there is no “neutral public sphere in which people can act . . . . Continue Reading »
Jean-Marie Schaeffer ( Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger (New French Thought Series) has a blast pointing out the contradictions in Kant’s aesthetics. Most of them arise from Kant’s insistence that the judgment of taste is founded on “the form of a . . . . Continue Reading »
Can effects double as causes? Kant, still working with some form of final causality, thinks so: There are cases when “the thing that for the moment is designated effect deserves none the less, if we take the series regressively, to be called the cause of the thing of which it was said to be . . . . Continue Reading »
Evidence that Hamann had Kant right: In explaining taste as a common sense, he notes that this common sense of beauty can be arrived at by a process of stripping off whatever belongs to our perception and prejudice. That is, we put “ourselves in the position of every one else, as a result of . . . . Continue Reading »
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