De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

Fr Andrew Pinsent, Fr Kevin Hale and Fr Basil Pearson concelebrate Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes & St Joseph, Leigh-on-Sea. A couple of weeks ago my 14 year old son came along to Saturday Mass without much argument (which I considered to be a bit of a result). The sacristy bell rang and Fr. Andrew Pinsent processed out with Fr. Kevin, Fr. Con and Fr. Basil to concelebrate. It turned out it was his aunty's 50th wedding anniversary and the Mass was being offered for them. My Son, John, our fourth child, has a complex presentation of Autism which makes him all the more special to us, but he is different and has difficulty communicating. He can appear abrupt, even rude, and tends to be very direct. I explained to John that as well as a priest, Fr Andrew was a prominent particle physicist who worked in the Large Hadron Collider project at Cern. John was sceptical about this saying "scientists don't believe in God dad", so, after Mass, Fr Andrew came up to say hello...

In January 2009 the British Humanist Association paid for an advertisement to be carried on the side of London buses as above. Perhaps the biggest consequence of this action is that it seems to have been the catalyst for the former Chief Rabbi, Dr. Jonathan Sacks to write an extraordinary book: The Great Partnership . It is for this reason that I will be eternally grateful to them. Sacks seems to have been incensed by the poor logic of the statement "because it raised the greatest of all existential choices: How shall we live our lives? By probability? Or by possibility?" (p. 267). Lord Sacks was Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from September 1991 until this year. He was educated at Cambridge where he obtained first class honours in philosophy. He went on to gain a PH.D in 1981 and rabbinic ordination from Jews' College and Yeshiva Etz Chaim. He also holds 14 honorary degrees including a Doctor of Divinity conferred by the Archbi...

I have long held a fascination with Islam; the people, the culture, the Kaba, the texts. This has led to a lot of reading. Reading Al Qur'an , commentaries, histories and polemics. Trying to understand the complicated interplay of Islamic culture and philosophy. What Islam preserved and gave us; Averoes, the Alhambra, Avicenna, Aristotle even. What it represented to us in the West; wresting the Holy Land away from us in the Muslim conquests of the Levant (632–661), Al-Andalas and the Caliphate of Cordoba (711), the fall of the Byzantine Empire (1471),  Reconquista in 1492,  the Great Seige of Malta (1565),   the Battle of Lepanto (1571). Does that seem like a lot of war? Today, Islam is still deeply controversial throughout the world. Islamic countries are restless. The Arab spring seems to be disintegrating into anarchic violence. In this country, on the 22nd May, we had the horrific incident where a British Soldier was knocked down in the street, in broad dayli...

Monday, January 28, 2013 St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) By universal consent, Thomas Aquinas is the pre-eminent spokesman of the Catholic tradition of reason and of divine revelation. He is one of the great teachers of the medieval Catholic Church, honoured with the titles Doctor of the Church and Angelic Doctor.  At five he was given to the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino in his parents’ hopes that he would choose that way of life and eventually became abbot. In 1239 he was sent to Naples to complete his studies. It was here that he was first attracted to Aristotle’s philosophy.  By 1243, Thomas abandoned his family’s plans for him and joined the Dominicans, much to his mother’s dismay. On her order, Thomas was captured by his brother and kept at home for over a year. Once free, he went to Paris and then to Cologne, where he finished his studies with Albert the Great. He held two professorships at Paris, lived at the court of Pope Urban IV, dir...

Happy New Year to you all! A great blogging start to the year I have to say. Credit where credit is due; @PartTimePilgrim drew my attention to these great posts yesterday morning. So good, I felt I had to share some sort of conspectus with my own readers. First off, you must read this post by CCFather. It is concise, yet contains all the main historical, social and philosophical developmental points of the argument. CCFather correctly identifies that what is missing in broader society is any real concept of what marriage really is. We must address this fundamental point before we can begin to be heard on issues like same sex marriage. It is extremely valuable that he has placed the currently position squarely in its correct temporal context, i.e. that it is not first step 'on a path that we shouldn't take, but rather because..[it constitutes] a further step on a path we have already gone too far along'. @PartTimePilgrim suggests the penultimate paragraph of Be...