Religious toleration: In the eyes of the beholder?

The period of “convivencia” in medieval Spain is often looked to as, if not a perfect model, at least an example of how different cultural and religious traditions can co-exist.   An example, in a word, of how potentially conflicting communities can “tolerate” each other. But what does “toleration” mean? Evan Haefeli, a history professor at Columbia University, argues that though […]

Beatus Vir- A sampling of Mozarabic chant

The term “Mozarabic” refers to Christians living under Arabic rule in medieval Spain, and identifies the Old Spanish rite (also called Visigothic), which remained in use there. Mozarabic chant, then, is the liturgical plainchant of the Mozarabic rite of the Western church in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal). The rite and chant was replaced by Muslim and Christian conquest […]

As desire is never ended

And inasmuch as desire is never ended, it is never satisfied in this life, but the more the soul loves the less she seems to herself to love. Thus is holy desire, which is founded in love, exercised, and with this desire the eye weeps. But when the soul is separated from the body and has reached Me, her End, […]

Oh! blessed obedience!

Oh! blessed obedience! you voyage without fatigue, and reach without danger the port of salvation, you are conformed to My only-begotten Son, the Word, you board the ship of the holy cross, forcing yourself to endure, so as not to transgress the obedience of the Word, nor abandon His doctrine, of which you make a table when you eat the […]

Of the glory of the Blessed

And they have a special participation with those whom they closely loved with particular affection in the world, with which affection they grew in grace, increasing virtue, and the one was the occasion to the other of manifesting the glory and praise of My name, in themselves and in their neighbor; and, in the life everlasting, they have not lost […]

On Metaphysics and Ethics

“Metaphysics is a necessary prerequisite of ethics. This truth is masked sometimes, since man, who carries within him the same realities – soul, freedom, the call of destiny – which metaphysics has to study and to know, and who thus lives the life of metaphysics before his mind has grasped its principles, man, I say, can afford the luxury of […]

On Matter and Truth

Evil and error are of themselves versatile, not having roots in being. And the moment approaches perhaps when men, having put all their hope in matter and having been dreadfully deceived, will cry out for the truth. Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism

The Transcendentals

Truth, goodness, and beauty are so fully transcendental properties of being that they can be grasped only in and through one another. In their communion, they furnish proof of the inexhaustible depth and overflowing richness of being. Finally, they show that in the end everything is comprehensible and unveiled only because it is grounded in an ultimate mystery, whose mysteriousness […]

The Tunisian Option

From Oasis Magazine: The creation of a moderate “European” Islam is an idea that is rapidly gaining ground following the events in Paris. The aim of such a project would be to counter the fascination that the bloodthirsty and radical version of Islam propagated by the Islamic State – and by al-Qaeda before it – exercises over the minds of […]