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Spring is a wonderful time of year. Despite T.S. Eliot’s line that “April is the cruelest month,” spring is a time of renewal, a good time to remind ourselves to open up to new facets of life. One of the best things about spring, to me, is the opening of the baseball season. I am a fervent baseball fan. To me, there is a good deal of metaphysics in baseball. You start out at a place called home, then you go on a little journey like the Prodigal Son, the aim being to return home. The ones who go home...

“The Catholic Church teaches that when we partake of the Eucharist in Holy Communion, we are consuming the actual physical body of Jesus Christ (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1244, 1275, 1375).”

REASON #8: PHILOSOPHY PHILOSOPHY IS A DEEP SUBJECT THAT CAN BE QUITE INTIMIDATING. MODERN PHILOSOPHY IS SO ESOTERIC THAT FEW CAN UNDERSTAND OR RELATE TO IT, BUT CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY IS DIFFERENT. As with so many things, if you go back to the beginning and learn first principles, you can develop a deep and satisfying understanding of a subject that is baffling in its modern form. While philosophy may seem abstract and unrelated to the real world, quite the opposite is true. In fact, we are all philosophers; we all have a view of reality, a worldview, as we say today....

What Could Be More Appropriate on Easter? Jerry Coyne Challenges Francis Collins on Metaphysics Michael Egnor April 5, 2015 3:15 AM | Permalink National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, who is a devout Christian, did an interview recently with National Geographic about his faith and his science. Predictably, Jerry Coyne, an atheist biologist from the University of Chicago, took exception to some of Collins's answers about the compatibility of faith in God and science. Collins: [Question asked of Collins] Are science and religion compatible?I am privileged to be somebody who tries to understand nature using the tools of science....

////////“Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition…. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be bearers of an objective, immortal truth… then there is nothing more relativistic than fascistic attitudes and activity…. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.” Mussolini, Diuturna pp. 374-77, quoted in A Refutation of...

Recently I was watching a YouTube video of Phil Keaggy. For those of you who do not know -- (which is to say, almost everybody) he is a Christian songwriter and guitarist who is a legend among guitarists; there are rumours floating around that Jimi Hendrix once called him "the best guitarist in the world."1 What is interesting is the comment threads which show up on YouTube under many of his videos. Generally one or two Christians will show up, with comments like "This is what Heaven must sound like" or "Praise GOD for Phil Keaggy's gift." Then usually, one...

Everything in the Old Testament history leads up to the crossing of the Jordan, and yet the way the story is told in Joshua 3 and 4 has major inconsistencies and problems. Is there another way to read it? Can the Bible be taken literally?

There is much turbulence in the Iranian government today. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is not happy that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fired Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi last month. He has now given Ahmadinejad an ultimatum to either re-instate Moslehi or resign. A sullen Ahmadinejad caught a bad case of the “blue flu,” and stopped showing up for work. According to the BBC, one of his aides wrote a blog post that said the Iranian president “is in pain, as if a thorn is stuck in his throat… he cannot take it out or swallow in.” Try that one the next time...

Spring is a wonderful time of year. Despite T.S. Eliot’s line that “April is the cruelest month,” spring is a time of renewal, a good time to remind ourselves to open up to new facets of life. One of the best things about spring, to me, is the opening of the baseball season. I am a fervent baseball fan. To me, there is a good deal of metaphysics in baseball. You start out at a place called home, then you go on a little journey like the Prodigal Son, the aim being to return home. The ones who go home...

... this Friday, September 10th, confirmed today by the folks at Healing the Culture, Fr. Spitzer's apostolate. Fr. Spitzer (who has written two books for Ignatius Press) just published a book titled, New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy . He talks about Hawking here: YouTube Video And in an essay, "The curious metaphysics of Dr. Stephen Hawking": Why would a preeminent physicist make the claim that “the universe can come from nothing?” This is precisely what Dr. Stephen Hawking has done in his new book, “The Grand Design,” when he notes, “Because...

Today the John Templeton Foundation announced the winner of the annual Templeton Prize of a colossal £1 million ($1.4 million), snip D'Espagnat boasts an impressive scientific pedigree, having worked with Nobel laureates Louis de Broglie, Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr. De Broglie was his thesis advisor; he served as a research assistant to Fermi; and he worked at CERN when it was still in Copenhagen under the direction of Bohr. snip Third view Unlike classical physics, d'Espagnat explained, quantum mechanics cannot describe the world as it really is, it can merely make predictions for the outcomes of our observations. If...

Consciousness The Metaphysical Nature of Perception by Reginald Firehammer In philosophy, the study of the nature of knowledge is called epistemology. It is the most important branch of philosophy because it answers the most important question of all: what is knowledge? If that question is not answered correctly, all knowledge is in doubt, including all other philosophical knowledge. A better way to put the question, then, since knowledge must be assumed, is what do we know and how do we know it? The meaning of the word knowledge in epistemology is very specific. The words "knowledge" and "know" are used...

Monday, July 30, 2007 The Philosophical Legacy of Dietrich von Hildebrand posted by Shawn Tribe October 12 & 13, 2007 An International Conference Presented by The Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project and The M.A. Philosophy Program at Franciscan University Recent years have seen a renaissance in interest for the thought and personality of Dietrich von Hildebrand. The Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project, established in 2004, exists to encourage and stimulate this renewal, primarily by translating and publishing the writings of von Hildebrand in English, but also through sponsoring regular events to facilitate the wider reception of his many contributions....

Rocky collected money for the Mafia. A typical bagman, he was immersed in the material world of fast cars, quick cash and getting ahead by butting heads. One day, he was shot in the chest and left for dead on the street. He survived, though, and lived to tell of an experience that changed his life. "He described a blissful, typical near-death experience—seeing the light, communicating with a deity and seeing deceased relatives," says Bruce Greyson, a U.Va.-trained psychiatrist who interviewed Rocky after the shooting. "He came back with typical near-death aftereffects. He felt that cooperation and love were the...

Richard M. Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, published in 1948, was among the founding documents of contemporary conservatism. The title phrase has become something of a cliché, and overuse has stripped it of the interesting meaning it once had. Nowadays most people assume that what Weaver was saying was that how we think is bound to affect how we act, and that the intellectual trends that prevail in a society will determine its moral and political character. To be sure, that was part of his meaning, but if that were all he had in mind his message would have been a...

ROME, SEPT. 1, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Cardinal Christoph Schönborn's July 7 editorial in the New York Times entitled "Finding Design in Nature" provoked a flurry of reactions, both supportive and critical. Requests have begun to arrive in Rome for Benedict XVI to make some sort of clarification on the Church's stand regarding evolution. The following text, delivered in 1999 as part of a lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Benedict XVI) and subsequently published in the 2004 book "Truth and Tolerance" (Ignatius), can give some clue as to the Holy Father's thoughts on the question....

I got an extermely interesting book from my wife for Christmas. It's called The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World by Amit Goswami, Ph.D. The book combines quantum science, traditional mathematics, philosophy, psychology, and spirituality in a lively discussion of a scientific, monistic cosmology. A very interesting book for anyone interested in ideas. I recommend it highly.

What can cellular neuroscientists learn about the human brain from studying a marine snail? Much more than one might suspect. "On a cell biological level, the mechanisms of learning and memory are identical, as far as we can tell," said David Glanzman, a UCLA professor of physiological science and neurobiology, whose research has strengthened the view that the human brain and that of a snail named Aplysia are surprisingly similar. "Human brains have many more neurons than the Aplysia's, but it doesn't look like there is any difference on a molecular or synaptic level. "When this animal learns," Glanzman said,...

On Plato, the Early Church, and Modern Science: An Eclectic Meditation By Jean F. Drew God, purposing to make the universe most nearly like the every way perfect and fairest of intelligible beings, created one visible living being, containing within itself all living beings of the same natural order. Thus does Plato (d. 347 B.C.) succinctly describe how all that exists is ultimately a single, living organism. At Timaeus20, he goes on to say: “There exists: first, the unchanging form, uncreated and indestructible, admitting no modification and entering no combination … second, that which bears the same name as the...

From Sunday, July 18 to Friday, July 23, 2004, the 89th International New Thought Alliance (INTA) Congress will be held at Sheraton Premiere Tysons Corner, Vienna, VA. This year's theme is "The Power of One: Coming Together as Love." INTA Congress programs on prosperity, healing and interfaith will include individuals from all New Thought movements coming together for dialogue, support and growth. Highlights include spiritual leaders Mary Tumpkin, Walter Starcke, and best-selling author Iyanla VanZant among many others, along with outstanding local and national musicians and an interfaith service. Highlights include an Interfaith Service on Sunday July 18th and a...