Recommended Posts

The following is an an occasionally updated list of recommended posts from the blog (and a few of my posts from other sites), organized more or less according to the scholastic division of the sciences. Some posts that deal with more than one part of the division are linked more than once.

1 The Trivium

• Charles De Koninck, Jacob Klein, and Socratic Logocentrism

2 The Quadrivium

• Mathematics and the Scientific Revolution
• Terrestrial and Celestial Motion

3 Poetics, Aesthetics, and the Fine Arts

3.1 Literature

• The Only Thing Worth Writing About
• Freedom is Overrated: Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace
• Post-Novelistic Age
• A Commanding Rhythm
• Bl. John Henry Newman’s Apologia as a Spiritual Aeneid
• Der Komet
• ‘Reasoning is worse than scolding’
• Julian Green in Klagenfurt
• Maurice Baring and the Great War
• Martin Mosebach
• George Eliot is to Trollope as Anthony van Dyck is to Rubens
• Jerome K. Jerome and Saint Bernard on Sleep
• War of the Rings (with Matthew Walther at The Lamp)

3.2 Music and Drama

• Nikolaus Harnoncourt
• A Review of Die Taubenwirtin
• The Synod on the Family and the Opera
• Sacred Music and Secular Culture

3.3 Architecture, Painting, and Sculpture

• Industrial vs. Cistercian Austerity: Dominikus Böhm’s Modernism
• French Nationalism, The Karlskirche, the Empire, and the Meaning of Europe
• George Eliot is to Trollope as Anthony van Dyck is to Rubens

3.4 The Beautiful Game

• The Beautiful Game
• Augustinianism and the Beautiful Game

4 History

4.1 The Genealogy of Modernity

• The Papacy Against the False Gospel of Progress
• Pontificate of Hope
• Taylor’s Secular Age
• A Magnificent, a Wonderful Encyclical
• In Defense of a Certain Kind of Story About the Origins of Modernity
• Subjectification and Objectification
• Use Values and Corn Laws, Aristotelian Marxists and High Tories
• Max Weber’s Critique of Marx
• David Graeber on Usury and the Psychology of the Conquistadors
• Henry VII and the End of the Middle Ages
• The Empress Maria Theresia
• Hard Liberalism, Soft Liberalism, and the American Founding (The Josias)

4.2 Sunt Lacrymae Rerum

• Maurice Baring and the Great War
• All Times Are Bad Times
• Lorem ipsum or Quousque tandem?

4.3 In Memoriam

• Alberich Strommer, O.Cist.
• Ronald McArthur
• Marcus Berquist
• Otto von Habsburg
• Nikolaus Harnoncourt
• Stratford Caldecott
• Abbot Christian Feurstein, O.Cist.
• Marie Theresa Waldstein
• Helmut Kohl (First Things)

5 Practical Philosophy

5.1 Ethics

• Thomism, Happiness, and Selfishness
• “The great silliness of highly intelligent and perceptive people”
• ‘Reasoning is worse than scolding’
• Leo Strauss’s Objections to Thomism
• An Education in Desire
• Desire and the Good
• The Good, the Highest Good, and the Common Good (The Josias)
• The Object of the Moral Act (The Josias)
• The Harm Principle
• Freedom and the Philosophy of Nature
• Natures as Words, Contraception as a Lie (Ethika Politika)
• Contrasting Concepts of Freedom (ViQo Circle)

5.2 Domestics

• Nostalgia for a Time that Never Was: Natural Law and Anamnesis
• Is marriage ‘pre-political’?
• On Weddings in Novels
• Against the Overrating of Ordinary Life; or C.S. Lewis’s Bourgeois Mind
• The Mirror of the Benedict Option (Review of Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, The Josias)
• #MeToo in light of Aristotelian Virtue Ethics (Popula)

5.3 Politics

• The Politics of Nostalgia
• Integralism
• Auctoritas, Potestas, and Integralism
• The Integrists in Quebec
• What is the Primary Intrinsic Common Good of Political (or Imperial) Community?
• Empire I: the Philosophical Poet
• Empire II: Herodotus, Aristotle and Jokes
• Empire III: Gustavo Dudamel at the Spanish Riding School; or Virgil and the Horses
• Desire and the Good
• Accountability and Paternalism, Imbalance of Power and Civil Friendship
• The Prince and the State in the Third Millennium
• Tradinista
• Dialogue With a Catholic Leftist
• The American Election and the Virtues and Vices of Liberal Politics (and Politicians)
• French Nationalism, The Karlskirche, the Empire, and the Meaning of Europe
• Secularized Fraternity or Solidarity and the Failure of the European Union
• The Needy Immigrant, Nationalism, Globalism, and the Universal Destination of Goods (The Josias)
• Christianity, Just War, and Just Punishment (The Josias)
• Max Weber’s Critique of Marx

6 Speculative Philosophy

6.1 Philosophy of Nature

• What is Heard About Nature and the Trajectory of Certain Thomists
• The Generation of Substantial Form
• A Magnificent, a Wonderful Encyclical
• Laudato Si’ and Charles De Koninck
• Freedom and the Philosophy of Nature

6.2 Metaphysics

• Charles De Koninck and Slavoj Žižek, Dialectical Materialism and David of Dinant
• The Three Stages of Philosophy in Miniature

7 Sacred Theology

7.1 Sermons

• Don’t Even Try
• You Will Be Honored in the Presence of All
• Easter and Spiritual Freedom
• The Dedication of the Lateran as the Feast of the Church Militant
• The Body as Deep Mud, a Donkey, and the Hinge of Salvation
• Sabbath Breaking
• A First Communion Sermon
• An Easter Sermon for Contemplative Nuns
• For this Man Seeketh not Peace to this People, but Evil
• Paraprosdokian in Funeral Sermons
• Ascendit Deus in Jubilatione
• Sermon for a Wedding on the Feast of the Holy Innocents

 7.2 The Sacred Page

• Learn With What Sorrow She Was Inflamed
• The Two Angels and the Linen Cloths

7.3 Fundamentaltheologie

• The Analogy of the Spiritual Sense of Scripture to Natural Signs
• We Have Seen His Glory: a Response to a Certain Philosophical Rejection of the Christian Faith
• Tarnishing the Splendor of Truth
• Unwritten Tradition
• The Debate on Tradition

7.4 The Mystery of God

• No one has ever seen God
• The Incarnation and the Revelation of the Trinity

7.5 Moral Theology and Spirituality

• The Way of the Cross and Real Apprehension of Sin
• Amoris Lætitia
• Bl. Isaac of Stella vs. St Bernard on the Crusades
• In Sinu Jesu
• Dubia and Initiating Processes
• Michael Casey and Thomas Merton
• Prayer Begins in Pointlessness and Stupidity (Church Life Journal)

7.6 Soteriology, Sacraments, and the Liturgy

• Desire, Deicide, and Atonement: René Girard and St. Thomas Aquinas
• per manus sancti angeli tui
• Politics and the Liturgical Movement
• Solemn Profession of Vows in Heiligenkreuz
• The Threefold Presence
• The Veil of Death
• Liturgy as Court Ritual
• Per Evangelica Dicta
• What it is Like to Celebrate Mass (Popula)

7.7 Ecclesiology and Catholic Social Teaching

• On Legitimate Disagreements with the Successors of the Apostles in Prudential Matters
• A Magnificent, a Wonderful Encyclical
• On Contemporary Critiques of Ultramontanism; With a Comparison of Recent Supreme Pontiffs to Liverpool FC Managers
• Blessed John Henry Newman on “our obligations to the Holy See”
• Catholic Action and Ralliement
• Amoris Lætitia
• The Sillon, Religion, and the State
• Meador, Feil, and Smith on Integralism and Dyarchy
• Tradinista
• Integralism
• The Party Spirit in the Church
• The True Doctrine of the Priesthood of All Believers
• Religious Liberty and Tradition (The Josias)
• Catholic Action and Ralliement (The Josias)
• Integralism and Gelasian Dyarchy (The Josias)
• Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Critique of Integralism (The Josias)
• The City of God: An Introduction (The Josias)