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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Mar 26, 2024 13:13:17 GMT
Has anyone seen Cabrini, which is getting a lot of attention right now?
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Post by annie on Apr 6, 2024 1:09:46 GMT
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Apr 6, 2024 15:35:30 GMT
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Post by Devotus Immaculatae on Apr 6, 2024 19:59:43 GMT
It's very slowly dawning on a few that the Christian culture and society they are fortunate enough to live in and have greatly benefited from, including its charities, schools, institutions, literature, art, hospitals and universities, cannot actually be sustained without Christianity.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 7, 2024 21:47:23 GMT
This is an interesting review of Catherine Nixey's latest book, which basically argues that the dominance of what we know as orthodox Christianity was an accident and that some other religion, or one of the heretical forms of Christianity, might have come out on top. John Gray, who like Nixey is an atheist, points out that while emphasising Christian intolerance Nixey ignores the question of whether Christian teaching on compassion etc might have had something to do with its success (i.e. Nixey emphasises Darwinian accident but not the Darwinian point that the winner is best adapted to the circumstances because she is prejudiced against the possibility that it might have any rational element), nor does she seem to realise just how different a society which has definitively rejected Christianity might be. BTW I have noticed a couple of other recent examples of atheists writing books which use aspects of early church history (e.g. the existence of the apocryphal gospels, the Gnostics etc) which are familiar to anyone who knows the subject, as if they are some great new discovery. www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2024/03/personal-jesus-christianity-heresy
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 6, 2024 17:42:30 GMT
Aldous Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD, which I had often heard about but never read until now. Plot summary here, for your reference. A few points: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World The novel was meant as a critique of the facile optimism of HG Wells in his later utopian works (especially the assumption that universal sexual libertinism would be unproblematic). Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, is actually an interesting example of the proverbial "Grand Inquisitor" in that he genuinely believes he is benevolent. (Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, in contrast, makes it fairly clear that he despises the vulgar many and is somewhat evasive about the possibility that he is sending them all to Hell.) It is fairly common to find students who on first reading BRAVE NEW WORLD see it as somewhere they would like to live. BTW while his surname is derived from Sir Ludwig Mond, founder of Imperial Chemical Industries, I haven't seen it pointed out anywhere that his first name may come from Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, whose modernisation of Turkey involved numerous deliberate breaks with and suppressions of the past. One of the more startling aspects of the novel is that Mustapha Mond thinks there probably is a God but that it is not a good idea to discuss Him, because it can only cause trouble, and that covering up this possibility requires suppressing fundamental scientific research (because it raises awkward questions about why the universe is intelligible, presumably) while continuing to make ritual invocations of "science" and engage in applied research. A great deal of the novel can be read as a critique of the end-result of the utilitarian argument that the purpose of life is the maximisation of pleasure (in this case, passing life in a pleasurable doped-up haze combined with infantile sexuality, even though you die from sheer boredom at sixty) and of the liberal view that discussions of final causes should be avoided because they are insoluble and can only lead to conflict. This does not mean BTW that Huxley was a Christian; in later life he adopted a form of pantheism heavily influenced by Hinduism and neo-Platonism. The inhabitants of the Savage Reservation in New Mexico practice a syncretistic religion combining elements of paganism and Hispanic Christianity - this includes penitential flagellation and a form of human sacrifice which involves handling poisonous snakes, and I suspect this is meant as a hostile comment on the Crucifixion as sacrificial atonement. More later when I have time.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Jul 22, 2024 8:52:55 GMT
I have discovered you can watch Bob Quinn's entire Atlantean series on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhZCcwRoXv4 It's very good television though the self-deprecation is over done. I believe Quinn has a point, but he gets lost in concentrating on ethnicity and also not properly defining terms he uses. "Arab" can mean many things and just as not all Moslems are Arabs, neither are all Arabs Moslem. The whole approach to denomination takes Catholics, Copts and Moslems as they are now and projects this onto early centuries. Through the three-part initial series, he doesn't mention the Vikings, but brings them in with a vengeance in the final retrospective look. He says that Irish music isn't European, but he doesn't define European. I found the Byzantine empire and its significance absent from the commentary. That is a gap. But it does indicate Quinn concentrates on stuff that confirm his ideas. You can say the Indo-European language theory is just a theory and so it is, but it's a very compelling theory. I do think there is something in the Atlantean theory, provided you don't she it as ethnic, but as a people put together by geographical factors. It reminds me of the Eurasian theory current in Russia, which I also believe worthy of further investigation.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 3, 2024 17:31:51 GMT
I remember seeing Atlantean on TV when I was a child. It is certainly true that the sea as artery of communications in early mediaeval times is underappreciated but I recall one of his arguments was that North African influence on Gaelic civilisation was shown by the discovery of an ape's skull at Tara. That struck me at the time as equivalent to saying that Victorian Dublin was African-influenced because of the lions in Dublin Zoo. Do the Berbers get a look-in? Or St Augustine?
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Aug 9, 2024 11:42:42 GMT
The Berbers are mentioned, with an apology for misidentifying them as Arabs. St Augustine isn't.
Quinn sticks to confirmation of his ideas like a dog with a bone. But here's the thing: the original series was a three part outing. He came back with a fourth later. The original inquiry was sparked by a clear similarity between sean nós singing in Connemara and North African music. But when he revisited the subject with the fourth, he went to Kazan in Russia to listen to Tatar music. The similarities were even clearer. But the problem is that Kazan is on the Volga and very far from the sea, so he brings the Vikings in.
The theory of sea routes is a good one, but I think it's convenient for Quinn that the Tatars are Moslem. I think he is looking at a pre-Islamic tradition in both North Africa and Tatarstan, seeing clear similarities with a musical style in Ireland which could possibly be pre-Christian and then talking about an Islamic influence here which is unlikely. There is a certain smugness in the way he dismisses the culture which developed here, which contrasts with the overwrought self-depracation (to be honest, Uriah Heap comes to mind). I think the ape's skull is a case in point, but all sorts of artefacts have been found in iron age and bronze age Ireland precisely because of the trade routes at a time when being an island was an advantage.
I think the problem with Quinn is that he overdoes his thesis.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 14, 2024 22:15:37 GMT
I presume what he has in mind is modal music (a sort of chant) as opposed to tonal music based on scales. The east-west divide in Eurovision voting has been attributed to this (eastern Europe being modal). Here's an example - it's a Turkish celebration/lament for the Ottoman defenders of Canakkale/Gallipoli in 1915: www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4_A02stE54 The refrain means "Alas, my youth!"
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 5, 2024 22:40:42 GMT
An interesting little thought; I was at an event recently where decent, kindly and civilised people celebrated a form of religion which is so tolerant and civilised it winds up disappearing altogether through indifference. I am not being ironic, BTW - they really are decent, kindly and civilised. The first reflection which comes to mind is on Newman's passage on the ideal of the gentleman, whose principal concern is to give no pain even if truth is sacrificed through this avoidance. One of the commonest mistakes about Newman is to assume that this is his own ideal, though if it had been he never would have converted. The second is that this mistaken interpretation of Newman is like reading Kierkegaard's EITHER-OR and assuming that Judge Brack, the narrator of the second part, who celebrates the ethical life expressed in a virtuous marriage in contradistinction to the aesthetic outlook of Johannes the Seducer who tells the first part, is Kierkegaard's own ideal. (I remember when I read EITHER-OR after hearing it said that Judge Brack is a bore and his part much less widely read than THE SEDUCER'S DIARY, just how deeply the judge loves his wife and cares for her happiness, while Johannes is a cynical and cold-blooded groomer.) What Kierkegaard is getting at when he exalts his real ideal - the knight of faith, symbolised by Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac - and attacks Christianity as civil religion as embodied in the Danish State Church of his day, is exactly what Newman is getting at in his discussion of why the ideal of the gentleman is not enough. One final thought is hat Abraham is a perilous model. It is all too easy to imitate Abraham's external actions but not his inner dispositions, and the result can be a version of religion which is so oppressive that it winds up creating a society of Johannes the Seducers by repulsion. Some recent examples may come to mind.
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