The Gnosis of St Thérèse de Lisieux

The Gnosis of St Thérèse de Lisieux
For October 1 2008
Summary: One can view St Thérèse de Lisieux as a gnostic — and, in a manner of speaking, an ‘alchemist’. A true alchemist seeks not gold, but happiness, and love is the key to true happiness.
Today the Roman Catholic Church is privileged to commemorate the [...]

St Columbanus

Reading From the Rule of St Columbanus
Perpetual light in the temple of the eternal High Priest
How happy, how lucky are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes! How blessed it is to be wakeful and watching for God, who created all things, who fills them with being and exceeds all of [...]

Patristic Psychology

The ancients were far better psychologists than we give them credit for. It is a supreme folly of modern men to think we are vastly intellectually superior to the ancients. True, we are technologically more sophisticated, but there is no evidence that we are fundamentally better and deeper thinkers than they.
Indeed, there is good reason [...]

Why Catholicism for Europe: Reason 2

2. Philosophical and psychological depth
Today many people equate Christianity with simple-mindedness. Another group — fundamentalists — naively insist on a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible.
The truth is that Christianity encompasses an extremely sophisticated system of religious, philosophical, and psychological thought. This system, though based on ideas present in Scripture, required several [...]

10 Reasons Why Europeans Should Rediscover Their Catholicism

Today many people in Europe and the United States have rejected or view with little interest their own Christian traditions.  Since people naturally seek deeper meaning in life, this leads many to turn instead to Eastern religions — to Buddhism and the religions of India, for example — for spiritual answers.
There is certainly nothing wrong [...]

Christian Satyagraha

What is Satyagraha?:  Satyagraha and Christianity
Mohandas Gandhi called his philosophy of social change by peaceful means satyagraha. The word is derived from the Indian words satya (truth) and graha (from the same Indo-European root word from which comes our ‘grasp’, ‘grab’, and ‘grip’).
Satyagraha is more than a philosophical system; it is a metaphysical [...]

Notes: On the unity of world religious culture

I recently ran across the following quote from 20th-century Christian author, C. S. Lewis in his book, The Abolition of Man. These remarks preface an assemblage of quotes that relate to what Lewis termed Natural Law, which he more or less equated with ancient Chinese term, the Tao:
The idea of collecting independent testimonies presupposes [...]

Countering Political Evil

At the Watchblog Third Party Website, Joel S. Hirschhorn wrote an good article titled The Evolution of Evil. He identifies as an essential problem the current two-party system. To quote Joel:
Most corrupt and legally sanctioned forms of tyranny hide in plain sight as democracies with free elections….  Nothing conceals tyranny better than elections. [...]

Politics: Inner and Outer

A fairly little-known fact is that Plato’s Republic, a work often taught in government and political science classes, is really about psychology. If you read the Republic closely, you see that Plato (through the character of Socrates) introduces the ideal State as a metaphor for the human soul. The idea is to, using [...]