Author: Thomas Fleming

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Christ Is Risen

Anything I might have to say on this most blessed day of the year would be at best superfluous.  I do, however,  want to draw attention to the beautiful collect in the Old Mass.  Many of these prayers are capable of inspiring a good deal of reflection, if we pause a moment to consider them: Deus qui hodierna die per Unigenitum tuum, aeternitatis nobis aditum, devincta morte reserasti,  vota nostra, quae praeveniendo aspiras, etiam adjuvando prosequere.  Per eundem Dominum etc.  This is  Englished in various ways, but this version, drawn from the Father Lasance Missal, puts the gist of it...

3

The Autodidact on Aristotle, Part II

Aristotle and Plato Although it is fair to describe Aristotle as the most important Platonist of all time, he parted company with his teacher on many important points.  This is a difficult topic, complicated both by Plato’s dialectical methods that sometimes make it hard to know what his position was and by his changing positions.  Plato’s first attempt to find a divine and enduring basis for our ever-changing realities is his theory of ideas or forms, which he either later or alternatively reconceived more in terms of number.  Aristotle fully acknowledges the truth of Plato’s insight into the problem—that for...

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The Tower of Skulls On the House

The day before the Easter we celebrate in the West, my thoughts go out to Christians in the East who once endured the horror of Islamic rule.  I wrote this piece in September 2001, and it was published  n December.   “You’ve never been to Nish?!”  My friend was incredulous.  How can someone who has traveled, it sometimes seems, every inch of Montenegro, Bosnia, and Kosovo, not have found the time to go to Nish?  The lady is far from being a local chauvinist, but when I first met her and asked (as I had been taught by a Belgrader) if...

10

Muslims Must Go

Here is Hillary Clinton’s response to the terrorist attacks on Brussels: “Calling for 12 million immigrants to be rounded up and deported.  Demanding we turn away refugees because of their religion, and proposing a ban on all Muslims entering the United States…America should be better than this, and I believe it’s our responsibility as citizens to say so…If you see bigotry, oppose it. If you see violence, condemn it. If you see a bully, stand up to him.” Ms Clinton actually made her remarks at an AIPAC meeting where she spent most of her time attacking the Republican front-runner, but...

2

The Autodidact on Aristotle

The one figure who defines modern thought is Aristotle, not of course because modern thinkers have followed him, but because since Galileo and Descartes and Bacon, scientists and philosophers have defined themselves by their opposition to Aristotle.  That is my first introductory point, as obvious as it is true.  Let me add a second point, no less true but more controversial: In all that is most important, Aristotle is more often right than wrong, and consistently right on those points where he has been most attacked. Life Aristotle was born in 384, an Ionian Greek in Stagira in Chalcidice. His...

6

The Religion of Sodom, Conclusion

In Genoa I spent several hours talking with the philosopher Pier Luigi Zampetti.  In his book His book La Sfida Del Duemila (1988), Zampetti blames our spiritual malaise as well as environmental catastrophe on modern consumerism.      Materialism has become the dominant philosophy both in the West and in the East…. Capitalism, as we know, is the economic system of the entire contemporary world.  East and West are worlds bound by capitalistic systems, even if of different types.  But, how is man considered in these systems?  Can he express himself, his free and responsible choices; in other words is...

5

The Religion of Sodom, Part I

This is the revised first part of an essay I published in 2000 in a magazine I used to edit. I cannot remember a time when I was not what would be called an environmentalist.  I spent much of my childhood walking on an earth unconstricted by concrete streets and unburdened by the weight of buildings.  I was never happier than when I was out fishing with my father or picking berries with my sister, or helping friends with their traps.  Until we moved near Charleston, I had never seen a city that did not deface the landscape, and to...

17

Ransom Notes: Who Asked You?

Although nobody asked for my opinion on these bits of news, I have a few things to say. First.  Finally, the head of a major Christian denomination with a grain of sense!  The bleeding-heart-liberal Archbishop of Canterbury has informed the world that it is not racist to oppose mass migration. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-35781613.  While calling upon England to do more than it is doing to help so-called Syrian so-called refugees, he said that it was “outrageous” to describe fears about the migrant crisis as racism.  Archbishop Welby is as leftwing as most English and North American bishops and ministers of the Anglican communion, but unlike too many...

7

The Left’s Jihad Against the South, Conclusion On the House

This multi-cultural hatred of the West was, of course, anticipated in the Communist Manifesto; indeed, it can be traced back through the Enlightenment all the way to Michel de Montaigne in his “Essay on the Cannibals.”  However, Western self-hatred reached a new level of coherence in France after WW I.  When Paul Claudel, Catholic poet, patriot, and diplomat, spoke of preserving the religious and cultural traditions of the West, a coalition of Communists and surrealists denounced him for defending a civilization which the surrealists derided as inferior to all the cultures of the world, high and low.  If the classical...

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The Left’s Jihad Against the South, Part III

The History of the Revolution in Three Easy Lessons Lesson One: The revolution began during the Renaissance.  The very name “Renaissance” (or Renascence) suggests that mankind had gone through a long dark age, beginning roughly with the triumph of Christianity in the Age of Constantine.  The early proponents of this movement—classical humanists such as Petrarch and Boccaccio—had honorable goals: They wanted to restore classical Latin, recover ancient manuscripts that lay buried in monastic libraries, and acquire a knowledge of Greek. Like every other movement, however, the Renascence rapidly acquired other objectives;  some of them worthy, such as the civic humanist’s...