Sæcularis

…and to All a Good Night?

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First, some (contestable) definitions. Our habits become conventions when we negotiate and then share them with others, and become custom when they sink deeper to take on a regulative role within the life of our community; these customs have something like a self-perpetuating power, and outlive the contexts that gave them birth and made sense out of them, mutating in the transition from context to context, at least intermittently demanding verification or reaffirmation.

Here, I was originally going to explore, loosely, the curiosities associated with the secularization of Christmas — Christmas as a custom. I am forced to cut this short, however, with no guarantee that I shall be able to return to it soon, as the semester has begun in full swing. Here are the first two of the five sections of the original.

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The Decline of Religious Institutions, The Ascent of Spiritual Marketplace Goods

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There was an article published in 2012 on the religiously unaffiliated, and, at the time, on another now-dead blog, I pulled an excerpt, with a brief comment. It is more deserving of your attention than this post. I offer it here as something of an afterthought to an earlier post on R. Hütter on the loss of the Church as a distinct public, and even a Thanksgiving-Day conversation that I had with one of my cousins, which was about the media of perpetuating cultural distinctives and anchors and what things we hold up as valuable mirrors for self-understanding, whether individually and communally. Continue reading →

Excerpt #15 — Charles T. Mathewes on The Alienness of the Classical World

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We introduced Charles Mathewes in an earlier post.

In one section of his online course on Augustine’s City of God titled “The Classical Worldview” Mathewes notes that

Modern thought offers two ways of imagining the ancient world:  Continue reading →

Excerpt #12 — Charles T. Mathewes on Departed Christendom and Present Modernity

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Charles T. Mathewes (CV here), professor at the University of Virginia, has a course on Augustine of Hippo’s (A.D. 354-430) magisterial City of God. So far it is excellent, and Mathewes is also an excellent lecturer (there is an excellent preview of one of the lecture units of his course on Youtube here). I’ll be offering up at least one more excerpt from this Audible course regarding Gibbon vs. Nietzsche on the classical heritage. For now, however, here is a profitable extract from him on Christendom, and our inheritance from it. (I say profitable because one can use this profitably, even if one were to disagree.) Continue reading →

Meanwhile, in the Aftermath: The Groundwork for Disenchantment in Augustine

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The following is a fairly accurate transcript of a talk I gave at a conference organized by the Pappas Patristics Institute at Hellenic College/Holy Cross in early March of this year (2017). I was flattered that nearly all of the attendees at my session skipped the following session to extend the Q&A time by nearly an hour. I am grateful to my respondent for his helpful feedback, and to those who attended my presentation for their stimulating questions. 

I am still reading through the primary and secondary literature to evaluate responsibly the assertions I made in that talk. Some of my work to dig into the primary and secondary literature shall appear here on Into the Clarities, as four of them are nearing completion (although “approaching completion” is a condition that can, in my excessive caution, fall prey to Zeno’s paradox).

Hurriedly preparing for this conference paper, and especially reading voraciously in the wake of delivering this paper (to weigh its merits), has likely been the primary reason for my relative silence here at Into the Clarities for many months now (and the reason I had to halt work on the second Ullmann post).

During the conference, I frequently went off-page on a tear to clarify points when I’d made marginal notes to myself that I should do so — I had a stack of books by Augustine and Weber and Midgley with me, and read from several excerpts and discussed these relative to the points I was making. Here below, I have made a small attempt at inserting sentences to give at least some stubs for those mini-digressions and clarifications.

Here is something close to the talk I delivered.

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