Author: Kleiner

It is All Saints Day today, and I’ve been reading Ratzinger/Benedict this week and came upon this interesting remark about apologetics:

“The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced, and the art which has grown in her womb. Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendor of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of believers than by the clever excuses which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so frequent in the Church’s human history.” —  
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), from The Ratzinger Report

We run back into the same old issue – teleology, teleology, teleology (both art and saints disclose what we might be, what we ought to strive for).  I think Ratzinger might be right, these telic significations are most powerfully met and felt in art and in the encounter with morally and spiritually excellent people (saints).

Here is an interesting review of a book by David Lebedoff called The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War.  The thesis of the book is that Orwell and Waugh are in many important ways the same, despite having totally disparate views on religion and the afterlife.  Looks interesting.

Here is an interesting bit of “political philosophy in literature” – an article on the good and its relation to political power.  He uses the Lord of the Rings as his starting point, but students in the Republic course will see shades of Plato (the only ones that should rule are the ones that don’t want to rule).

Dan shared this interview with me, and I thought it worth sharing on the blog. For those in the Plato class, it discusses many issues we have been discussing in our class – literature and tradition, the relation to the Absolute, and of course the question of language and meaning (deconstruction, etc).

A student, more savvy than I with computers, somehow cooked this up: Click here.  Like all radicals (and if you want to be a social radical these days, you should be a devout Catholic), I will take my refuge in the safety of the academy.