“The two great natural goods of marriage – the turning of the great wheel of the generations, and the union of a man and woman who cooperate in turning it – cannot be separated without damage to each of them. To suppress either one for the sake of happiness is to poison the very roots of joy.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” May 8, 2023 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/things-i-had-to-learn]
“Previous civilizations have degenerated. Previous ages have marched into the dark not knowing that they were marching into the dark. But in any previous time, were artists, scholars, and thinkers so eager to explain that degeneration was really progress?”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” April 17, 2023 [https://undergroundthomist.org/antipasto]
“Every man carries with him the standard by which we judge him, even if he always falls short of it. That is one of the things in which all men are equal; and it is a sort of implicit image of man, which the mystics called the image of God.”
G.K. Chesterton in Columbia May 1925, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)
“The observation that it is difficult to portray a really good person in fiction is nothing new. But why do our contemporary novelists find it so difficult even to portray a person we wouldn’t mind meeting? Even when they try? There are exceptions. Not many. The appalling thought occurs to me that maybe they like their characters.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” April 17, 2023 [https://undergroundthomist.org/antipasto ]
“SIGNING CONTRACTS WITH DEMONIC FORCES has every characteristic of the dream of the satanist. So why would it be taken as a topic for artistic and religious inspiration? A casual glace to the academic and artistic institutions throughout the world gives evidence that the world has taken seriously the call to give their souls, or at least their art, to the Devil.”
Patrick Gill “How the Devil Loses a Deal” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)
In my latest National Post column I warn my posterity, and yours, why artificial intelligence is far and away the most dangerous and urgent problem they face.
“Here’s another one, in some ways summing it up, when we find in the first letter of John this very peculiar claim that God is love. I’ve said to you many times before, I think, that every religion, every philosophy of religion, would talk about the love that God has, that love is an attribute of God, that God loves some, or he loves as a typical activity or whatever. But there is no religion or philosophy that makes the truly strange claim that God is love, except Christianity.”
Bishop Robert Barron in an otherwise excellent sermon “To the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit - Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermon” posted June 3, 2023 [https://youtu.be/Ey2A8bvUk8Y?t=212] but for once I think he is wrong; I never heard that love is an attribute of God from the Aztecs, or even the ancient Greeks
“The proponents of the so called ‘new natural law theory,’ or ‘basic goods theory,’ say that we shouldn’t speak of the natural purposes of things. For example, we shouldn’t say that the natural purpose that anchors the sexual powers is procreation, because this ‘instrumentalizes’ and ‘depersonalizes’ us – it makes us tools for making babies. This is absurd. One might as well say that it depersonalizes us to say that the natural purpose of the intellectual powers is deliberating and knowing the truth.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” April 17, 2023 [https://undergroundthomist.org/antipasto]