One thing (of many) that my son (and our webmaster) Tom and I share is an admiration for the paintings of Mark Rothko.
Philosophy
Photo by Paul Brady (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Photo by Chunli Ju on Unsplash
Can’t find your keys? Pray to Saint Anthony
Some years ago, the excellent Catholic magazine Commonweal published an essay of mine that examined (and dismissed) the evidence for the efficacy of petitionary prayer.
Photo by Mark de Jong on Unsplash
Celebrating the ineffable
The scientific atheists (Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, for example) and the scientific theists (Francis Collins and Owen Gingerich, for example) hammer away at each other.
Stonehill College campus • Photo by Jennifer Macaulay (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Mission
This week’s Musing is not addressed to the usual visitors to this site, but to friends and colleagues who are concerned about the mission and identity of Catholic institutions of higher education.
V838 Monocerotis • NASA/STScI
The here and now
I had occasion the other day to take down from the shelf of the college library a tattered copy of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. I found there the inconspicuous marks I made in the margins 40 years ago (and failed to erase), when I first read the book.
Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash
The Ultimate X
Spry little x, with its feet planted firmly on the ground and its arms uplifted in surprise, is our emissary to the unknown.
Photo by Vinicius "amnx" Amano on Unsplash
Occam’s razor
In the introduction to my book Skeptics and True Believers, I defined two frames of mind.
“Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas, Doctor Angelicus” by Andrea di Bonaiuto (1366)
The Angelic Doctor
A half-century ago, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, Thomas Aquinas ruled the roost.
Detail from "Great Piece of Turf" by Albrecht Dürer (1503)
When God is gone, everything is holy
In a blog posting a week or so ago, I stated that the central contribution of 20th-century science was the shattering of absolutes. There is a corollary: The importance of everything.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
On prayer
The earliest prayer I can remember is “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”