The Virtual Abbey

On Vacation.

On a boat. The Enchantment of the Seas, on a Western Caribbean cruise.

Key West and Cozumel.

I'll keep you posted.

Posted by The Abbot at 3:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An excellent post on higher education from Stephen H. Webb:

The central dogma of higher education goes by many names, but its basic thrust is as easy to grasp as it is hard to miss. Whether it is called multiculturalism, social constructionism, or left-leaning liberalism, the bottom line is that higher education in America these days promotes cultural relativism. Colleges do not advertise this fact for obvious reasons, but look closely at what they say in their promotional literature. Colleges talk about broadening your perspective, expanding your horizons, and offering you new experiences, but they do not talk about teaching you how to make moral judgments, how to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly, and how to seek the truth. That is because secular liberal-arts colleges and public universities do not believe you should make moral judgments, contemplate the beautiful, or acknowledge universal truths. And they don’t believe these things because they do not believe there is something called human nature.

The college you have chosen to attend is no worse, and probably a little bit better, than most colleges when it comes to multiculturalism, but it is always wise to be prepared when you go to school. What you most need to know is that the “higher” in higher education no longer refers to the high culture of the greatest works of Western civilization. In fact, higher education has been trying to dismantle this culture for decades. Higher education today is all about lowering the great books and great ideas of the past to the same basic level. Rather than ask you to climb the great heights of the classics, professors these days will ask you to tear them down. Rather than ask you to test your intellectual strength by pitting yourself against the greatest thinkers of the past, professors will teach you the intellectual equivalent of etiquette and manners. You will learn how to talk without embarrassing yourself in polite, educated company. You will learn what to say, not how to think.

I have been peering into Aquinas's Summa Theologica lately because of a paper I am writing. One thing that strikes me about it is that Aquinas is a) consummately fair to his opponents, and b) assumes a level of philosophical skill and knowledge in his readers that is considerable. In other words, Aquinas makes two assumptions that virtually no college professor does today: first, that his opponents are reasonable, even when they are wrong; and second, that his opponents and students are knowledgeable. Today, the modern university assumes the opposite of both propositions: it assumes its adversaries are criminals, and it assumes no degree of literacy in its students. Why study Aristotle (a dead white male)? In the medieval university, knowledge of Plato and Aristotle was an assumption; one can hardly follow Aquinas's arguments without a good knowledge of the works of his philosophical predecessors. Aquinas took Plato and Aristotle very seriously. He took the writings of St. Augustine and the church fathers very seriously. Why? Because he troubled himself to become educated before he wrote. He assumed that some of the past was valuable.

It has been apparent to me for some time that we live in a barbarous age. The universities are partly to blame for this, because they start with no core philosophical beliefs or assumptions. If it is, intellectually, equally valid to read in a library or to burn the library down, is it any wonder that the libraries are, in a sense, being burned down? Everyone likes a bonfire.

Actually, though, the universities are more subtle than that. They are carefully burying the intellectual heritage of the past under mounds of debris and silt, the writings of lesser men and women obscuring the writings of the great.

Posted by The Abbot at 8:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Domenico Bettinelli linked this, and I have to admit, it's pretty cool.

It is interesting to me in another context, too. I've been reading Robert Hugh Benson's Come Rack, Come Rope about the Elizabethan persecution of Catholics. One of the minor characters in it is a cabinetmaker who specializes in making secret bolt-holes and passages in houses to hide priests and sacred vessels in.

Not that I think it will come to that. Not in my lifetime, anyway.

I do think we will see a renewed effort to drive Catholics from the public square, though. I am particularly concerned about three areas where the Catholic church does good works: hospitals, orphanages, and schools. On the subject of hospitals, the church faces pressure in some states to provide abortion services, abortifacients, or referrals to abortion providers, none of which are ethically permissible for Catholics. On adoption agencies/orphanages, the church faces pressure to give children over to gay couples, which is a lifestyle of which the church does not approve. On schools, the church faces pressure to "not discriminate" against teachers who neither believe nor practice lifestyles in accordance with Catholic teaching. It would not surprise me to see, in all three areas, the church driven out of the public square, in my lifetime.

I don't think the religion will be formally outlawed for some time -- hopefully, never. But it might be time to consider those bolt holes and secret hiding places, just in case.

Plus, they're just way cool.

Posted by The Abbot at 7:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the television shows I watch regularly is the SciFi channel's Ghost Hunters.

The premise of the show is simple. Two friends, Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson, work as Roto-Rooter plumbers by day. At night, they investigate the paranormal.

The show is interesting on a lot of levels. First, Jason and Grant are regular guys from Rhode Island. They approach ghost hunting with the same straightforward simplicity that they do plumbing. You think your house is haunted? They come in with a bunch of gear, stay in the house for a night, and see what they can find out.

They look for a rational explanation where it can be found. Not surprisingly, a lot of houses simply have issues with their plumbing and with their electrical systems. If you feel spooked or paranoid in certain places in your house, it may be as simple as a poorly grounded electrical outlet throwing off large amounts of electromagnetic energy. Knocking on the walls, ceiling, or floors is sometimes the result of loose pipes.

What is unusual, though, is what they cannot explain or debunk. They occasionally catch on film an object moving by itself, or on their voice recorders what sounds like voices from another world. They occasionally find cold spots in rooms that come and go, or weird spikes in electromagnetic energy that have no obvious explanation.

They offer theories about these things, based on their experiences. There is a basic metaphysical or supernatural framework they have worked out for explaining these things. Cold spots are sometimes believed to be from spirits taking energy from the air to manifest themselves. They offer a similar theory for equipment whose fully charged batteries suddenly run low. EMF, or electro-magnetic field disturbances are sometimes caused by spirits. And voices that sound on tape are spirits attempting to communicate. Some haunts are "residual," where a ghost repeats the same action over and over again. Some haunts are "intelligent" and appear to interact with people. While Grant and Jason accept all of these things as working theories, they are always ready to believe that places with "activity" usually have a physical explanation.

The show is also amusing because of the characters themselves. Grant and Jason have a team, which is known as The Atlantic Paranormal Scoiety, or TAPS. This team is composed of technical guys who set up, run, and monitor the equipment, and investigators, who try to interact with the ghosts. The personalities of the team and their occasional infighting or personal issues provide a set of subplots for the show when the ghosts aren't cooperating.

But my question is, what is it these guys are catching? Clearly there are phenomena that occur, and that they seem to be able to capture. If we live in a purely materialistic world, these things undoubtedly have physical explanations. It may be natural for there to be traveling cold spots and wide EMF fluctuations within a house. There may be all manner of background noises too sensitive for the human ear that travel across a vast distance due to anomalies in weather and terrain. There may be ground vibrations from nearby roads or underground seismic activity that can cause a door to open and close itself, or an object to move across a table. It could all be a profoundly cynical act of fakery, done to provide interesting television, though it doesn't seem that way.

I know as a Catholic I believe in the immortality of the human soul, and the realm of the angelic and demonic. Catholic theology, while as far as I can tell not explicitly ruling out ghosts, doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for them either -- one dies, receives one's individual judgment, and joins the realm of the blessed, spends some time in purgatory, or is sent to hell. One of three possible places for a human soul after death. But could souls in purgatory be allowed to send messages to Earth? Could a demon force a condemned soul to accompany it on its travels making trouble on the Earth? Could ghosts be a simple trap set up by the demonic to lure people away from the church into the false beliefs of spiritualism or as a means of tempting souls to open themselves up to the influence of the demonic?

I have occasionally lived in places that were, well, odd. The house I grew up in seemed to have a certain character that manifested itself in the occasional odd noise or sense of a presence in various rooms. All of my siblings had experienced the house's "soul" or peculiarity in different ways. I once, while reading the rather unusual book by C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, had, at the very moment he was discussing the phenomenon of loud knocking in a cabinet, a china cabinet next to me produce two very loud knocks, which was a very disturbing thing.

I also had a strange experience when I began to recommit myself to my religion. I had purchased a crucifix for my second floor study, and the moment I took it out of the box, all the fuses on the second floor of my house blew and the lights went out -- needless to say, the next three words out of my mouth were "Sancta Michael Archangele . . . " I occasionally feel things in prayer that suggest the angelic or demonic are close at hand; a few times I have felt what I describe as "interference" in my prayers, where when I pray the words, I hear a kind of "crosstalk" as if someone is praying against me, which feels a little like when you are trying to hear a radio station and there is another station too close to its frequency that breaks in and muddles the sound. Occasionally, in praying for others who have serious problems, I feel an overwhelming sense of despair, as if someone is trying strongly to suggest that my prayers for that person are of no use.

I have no rational explanation for any of these things, unless it is a simple diagnosis of mental illness. I do not believe I am alone in these expereinces, and neither do I believe that I am in any way a "sensitive," as the New Age term has it. If anything, I would describe myself as an "insensitive."

But outside the context of religion, and assuming the mantle of science, I wonder precisely what is it that the Ghost Hunters are encountering? I've read a fair amount of skepticism about the show, but I don't see anyone in the scientific community trying, in a systematic way, to account for the phenomena as purely natural occurrences, or demonstrating that the equipment they are using is faulty, or that the ghost hunters are frauds. Science, it seems to me, is all too dismissive of the paranormal. The scientific response seems to be 'It isn't ghosts, whatever it is," but that is hardly an answer to the question, "Well, then, what is it?" The tentative explanations of the ghost hunters and their conceptual framework for understanding what they are experiencing are not scientific theories, but they seem like a reasonable starting hypothesis given that science refuses to engage them on the merits.

At any rate, it's an entertainnig show.

Posted by The Abbot at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have no proof of Denmark's existence.

I have never been to Denmark. I have never even met anyone from Denmark; though if I did they might not convince me that they were not a Swede pulling my leg.

I have read about Denmark's existence, to be sure. But I know it from both non-fiction and fictional works, so its existence in the World Book encyclopedia (the 1955 edition of which I read quite a bit of when I was a child) is counterbalanced by its being also setting for Shakesepeare's play: Hamlet: Prince of Denmark. Hamlet's Denmark might be based upon an actual Denmark, but the play is rather short on facts; the play could just as easily be based in Germany, unless gloominess is a characteristic Danish trait. Shakespeare did not base his account on World Book; but World Book's details of the place might be a colorful embellishment on a place invented by Shakespeare.

But I know of Denmark being accounted for in works which pre-date Shakespeare; the Danes were said to be fierce occupiers of Britain; the Danelaw is the place which was given to them when the Danegeld proved insufficient to keep them at bay. So Shakespeare may not have been the inventor of the fiction that is Denmark; it may be a carefully contrived conceit of historians from antiquity. It certainly seems so.

Of course you might show me things -- coins, stamps, souvenirs, and so forth. I would simply sigh and show you my collection of Galleons, Sickles and Knuts, and ask you if you've been to Hogwart's.

In exasperation, you would buy me a ticket. Go there, you would say. Go to Travelocity and book yourself a flight, and you could be there in the morning.

But alas, I shrug. I have no passport. And why should I book a plane that will certainly go to no such place, but merely to the place where those citizens who persist in the Denmark delusion are confined?

At this point, you may begin to lose your patience with me.

And you would be quite right to do so. I accept the existence of Denmark. I accept it because I have read about it, and do not believe that there is any motivation for authors who write about it to lie about it. In other words, I accept its existence based on the testimony of others.

I have no particular love of Denmark. I have no particular aversion to Denmark. If you show me pictures from your recent trip to Denmark, I will look at them patiently, ask you how the food and weather were, ask if you saw the city of Copenhagen, and so forth. You might tell me of the stangeness of the place or its relative familiarity; if you told me it was like Germany, I would have some idea of what you meant. If you told me they had strange dietary practices or the people were unusually rude, I would certainly weigh that against other testimony I have received. In my own experience, people have often told me that the French people are rude; I have traveled in France a few times and have not found that to be the case.

The Danes may well be beasts, or they may well be the exemplars of Christian charity. I can say that in my day to day existence, it matters very little to me.

Suppose you came to me and told me that you wanted to live there. That you had heard stories of the place from another friend who had told you how Denmark was better that any place on Earth; and having come to believe this, you were saving up your retirement money to eventually move there. You would dine on Danish delicacies such as Rullepølse and Ribbensteg and would spend your remaining days singing Danish songs and dancing Danish dances as the sun set in the background.

I might express a degree of surprise, and I might even think you somewhat eccentric, but would generally wish you well. I doubt I would try to talk you out of it. I certainly wouldn't argue with you, or tell you that the Danes are a filthy, backward people whom the Germans should have exterminated years ago -- even in jest. I would expect that you might take offense at this.

Now having said that . . . .

I have heard of a country called Heaven. I have read sufficient testimony of its existence to believe in it. I am working diligently to prepare myself to live there. I am acquainting myself with its peculiar customs, and trying to eliminate things in myself that might give offense to its denizens once I reach there. There are a number of vehicles that are said to go there, but I've done some due diligence and believe in the travel agent who is based in Rome; he's the one my family has used in the past and he has given me the most material to consider.

if I pester you with tales of heaven, I ask that you forgive me. It's just that what i hear of the place makes me want to share it. Maybe I'm looking for company on the journey, for I do not want my days there to be spent entirely in the company of strangers.

Tolerate me as an eccentric if you must. Humor me if you will. For if my journey seems Quixotic, it may be yet that I may be convinced of my error.

And If I'm wrong, we're headed to the same place anyway, so what difference does it make?

Posted by The Abbot at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my theology class, I had an assignment on how the church views the operation of grace and sin in Section Three of the Catechism.

I was very much taken with the description of the virtues. I think the examination of the virtues is a good way to examine oneself.

In looking at myself, I find that I am most deficient in the theological virtue of charity, and most deficient in the cardinal virtue of temperance.

So I am praying for both of these things; that the Holy Spirit fill me with both.

Posted by The Abbot at 7:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a conversation this weekend with a number of friends this weekend who do not yet believe in Christ. They do not necessarily deny him, they simply do not embrace him. I tried a different tack and two new arguments, neither of which are probably new, but both of which were new to me.

1. An argument from antiquity. I argued that if there were a God, and he had revealed himself to mankind, he would probably do so from an early time on. This got no objections. So I argued that if one were to look for God, one would look for him in the oldest religions. Again, no objections. I then said that a religion that contained the truth would likely survive from ancient times to this day, for an all-powerful God could certainly nurture his religion. Skepticism, but no real objections. I then said that to me, the choice would be either Buddhism or Judaism (I did not consider Hinduism, because I believe pantheistic religions to be inherently incoherent). About the nature of the universe, I said that Buddhism and Judaism believe essentially contradictory positions. Buddhism believes there is no God, that the universe essentially revolves around primordial nothingess, to which it is seeking to return. Judaism believes there is a loving God at the heart of it all. So I said that this seemed to me in accord with the universe, because my experience of the universe has been that it is benign. So then I said the central proposition of whether one believes in Judaism per se or the religion that grew out of it, Christianity, is the question of whether God has sent a Messiah. I said that I read the Old Testament, particularly the book of Isaiah, and I see a messiah in it, who is personified by the new testament accounts of Christ. In Christianity, I hold to the oldest path, so among Christian religions, I am a Catholic.

2. The argument from free will. I said to my friends that there is a problem with God making himself too manifest in the world (in response to a point I often face, which is that God, if he exists, ought to make himself more manifest). I said that if there was a place you could go and see God face to face (say, a building or church), what would happen? They said there would be a line out the door of people waiting to see Him. I agreed. I said that also, so many people would walk away utterly convinced of God's existence that such a thing would destroy free will. Instead, I suggested, God places enough evidence in the world of His existence that he forces us to make a choice. There will never be and can never be a scientific proof for God, because such a proof would destroy our right to choose Him freely or not. Faith, then, for me, always begin with a choice. One examines such evidence as there is, and decides. I have looked at the claims of Christianity and am impressed with it. I believe that in the heart of the Catholic sacraments is God himself, hidden under a veil, but present enough to be seen if one chooses to see Him.

Good arguments? Bad arguments? Let me know what you think.

Posted by The Abbot at 7:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)