My enthusiasms

We usually go through phases when we are especially enamored of one writer or another. My big phase, of course, was de Lubac back in the late '90s. Before that there as Merton. Before that, Tolkien (which never died). 

Here is a list of current writers and thinkers that I especially pay attention to these days:

Anthony Esolen    literature

Joseph Pearce    literature

Fr. Robert Spitzer    philosophy and science

O. Carter Snead    law

J. Budziszewski    political science

Helen Alvaré    law

Bishop Robert Barron    prelate

George Weigel    I don't even know

Archbishop Charles Chaput    prelate

Mac Horton    literature, politics, and cultural critique mostly, but also a lot of television, which I don't watch

Msgr. Charles Pope    pastor

My attraction has something to do with depth, thoroughness, clarity, solidity of thought, and groundedness in tradition. It is not even that I agree with everything that they say. Note that only one of them is a theologian. Interesting. 

As I remember others, I will add them in a separate post. 

Two world views

I've recently run across two articulations of the two world views that vie for supremacy in our culture. The first was a short video by O. Carter Snead called "Carter Snead Explains the Secular Vs. Catholic View of the Human Person." Snead is a law professor at Notre Dame and the director of the De Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. He talks about the modern idea of creating your own reality vs. the giveness of reality in the traditional view and our natural dependence on each other for flourishing. That hardly does what he says justice, so you'd do better to look yourself.

The second is an interview with science fiction writer, John C. Wright. In explaining why he converted to Catholicism, he talks about the two world views--the rich, fertile one that flows from Catholicism, and the sterile, bland one that flows from Gnosticism.

When pressed, Wright added, “Of the two competing worldviews vying for the souls of modern man, one is the orthodox Catholic scheme, which proposes certain mysteries about the Trinity and the Incarnation nearly impossible to imagine or believe, but, in the light of those mysteries, explains man, the cosmos and his place in it — whence he comes and whither he goes. All art, science, learning, law and literature spring from these traditional roots.” 

By contrast, Wright claims “the default worldview of the modern age is a degenerate form of Gnosticism, which takes some elements of the Christian worldview, such as compassion for the poor or the brotherhood of man, and then proceeds to cut and paste them awkwardly into a Darwinian or Hegelian background, before simmering the whole in Freud and Nietzsche until it is half-baked. The modern version goes by a variety of names subject to change every decade or so; names selected precisely because they mean the opposite of what they really mean.” 

 He summed this up as follows: “Neither ancient nor modern variations of this line of thought in Original Sin think that man’s evils spring from man, but instead from the world’s law and the world’s maker, so the world is false and must be destroyed.”

To me, this is it. This is the Great Divide. And I am totally committed to the Catholic version and all its consequences. This puts me in a distinctively marginal position, even among many Catholics!