After reading Ian Drake's review over at the Anamnesis Journal, I've been busy with Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It's the sort of book that I reflexively smirk at, and sometimes it's good to take a walk on the wild side and read a contrary opinion. For …
Continue reading Maybe the World Is Getting Better and Better
Thomas Aquinas, in describing what would eventually become the Roman Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation, said, "The body of Christ is here [in the Sacrament] as if it were just substance, that is, in the way that substance is under its dimensions, and not in any dimensive way" (Summa Theologica, 3:76:3 – Blackfriars Ed.). That's an …
American Thanksgiving (celebrated this coming Thursday, Nov 26) is a civil holiday with vaguely religious roots. Over the decades churches have co-opted it and turned it into a major holy day (for Evangelicals, at least). Now, when Americans treat it like the civil holiday that it actually is, some Christians sputter and get offended as …
I read the article because of the title. "Rohingya see glimmer of hope in Suu Kyi’s election victory." I never heard of Rohingya and was curious why his name popped up in my news feed. Turns out that it was not a person. The Rohingya are a minority group in Myanmar. The article came from …
A timely conversation from the Ideas program on CBC radio. Three philosophers talk about war and whether there is such a thing as a just or moral war in the modern world. It was broadcast on Nov. 12, a couple of days before the Paris attacks and shortly after the Beirut bombings. (It was recorded …
I recently listened to G. Sungaila present a paper at the 3rd International Scientific Conference of the Lithuanian Society for the Study of Religions, entitled, "The Influence of Gnosticism on the Images of Afterlife in Eastern Christianity." (The presentation was recorded on Oct 23, 2015 and can be found on YouTube.) The title is a bit …
Just Another Jim 