Posts in Religion
In defence of those terrible Middle Ages

Here’s a video from the past. It’s a talk I gave at the Augustine College Summer Seminar in June 2019 so I’m tardy making it available. And it’s about the Middle Ages which were, far too many people think, necessarily awful because they were long ago and old is bad and new is good. In fact there are a great many modern horrors that would have appalled people in the Middle Ages and one of them is widespread ignorance about the period.

Sorry to take so long to get around to editing and posting it. Life got in the way.

Wish I'd said that - Jan. 4, 2020

“That's what's important, to feel useful in this old world, to hit a lick against what's wrong, or to say a word for what's right even though you get walloped for saying that word. Now I may sound like a Bible beater yelling up a revival at a river crossing camp meeting, but that don't change the truth none. There's right and there's wrong. You got to do one or the other. You do the one and you're living. You do the other and you may be walking around, but you're dead as a beaver hat.”

Davy Crockett (John Wayne) in The Alamo (according to en.wikiquote.org)

Wish I'd said that - December 29, 2019

“Pascal’s favourite philosopher, St. Augustine, put it this way in the most famous Christian line outside Scripture: ‘Thou hast made us for Thyself, and (therefore) our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee’ (Confessions I, i, 2). A shark cannot stop swimming and hunting and eating. It is a perpetual motion machine. If its proper food is not available, it will eat anything, even empty metal containers. St. Thomas says: ‘Man cannot live without joy. That is why it is necessary that a man deprived of spiritual joys goes over into carnal pleasures.’”

Peter Kreeft Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées Edited, Outlined & Explained