Peter Sean Bradley

Politics Matter — What to do when the mob comes for you.

No Apologies: How to Find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Outrage — Lessons for the Silenced Majority by Katherine Brodsky

So, this week, Americans learned something that should have ignited a political firestorm when Facebook CEO admitted — four years too late — that he was intimidated by the Democrat Party and its assets in the federal government to censor Americans and suppress news.

Also, this week, the CEO of Telegram was arrested by France for insufficiently silencing speech on his messaging network.[1]

This month, Britons learned that they could be arrested and jailed for speech that the government deems ‘incitement,” even if that speech incites nothing.

Last week, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. endorsed BadorangemannextcomingofHitler because he recognized that the Democrat Pary is the party assaulting civil liberties.

“How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate who has never done an interview or a debate during the entire election cycle? We know the answers. They did it by weaponizing government agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy,” Kennedy said. “They did it by silencing the opposition and by disenfranchising American voters. What most alarms me isn’t how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates. What alarms me is the resort to censorship and media control and the weaponization of federal agencies.”

This is not a good time for free speech and the threats are largely coming from the Left.[2]

The most insidious thing about the new censorship is that it is a totalitarian suppression of speech aimed at not just the great, but the small as well. A person can get instant fame by saying something innocuous that is interpreted as outside the lines by someone with the result being a hate mob outside the digital doors of the scapegoat.

The great have the money to deal with their problems. The small are crushed, fired, lose their business, get excommunicated from their communities, and suffer similar losses that tear at their self-worth and self-identity.

Katherine Brodsky has written a self-help book for the small. She offers sixteen case studies of people who were canceled. From these case studies, she gleans insights into the cancellation phenomenon and devises some strategies for dealing with the mob.

One of the things I noticed is that all of the examples are former leftists/liberals who walked into a minefield. Many expected they would be given a pass because they served the movement. They have all come out wiser and more attuned to and understanding non-leftists' thinking.

Growth is good, but I find it interesting that in this book, as in so many other aspects of society, something is not real until it happens to a leftwinger. Brandon Eich, who was fired from Mozilla for giving a small amount of money against a gay marriage initiative in California, is not one of the persons featured in this book. Neither are the many conservative teachers who have been hunted down and fired by leftwing academic institutions. It seems that they don’t count, which is a sad commentary that underscores the hegemony of the left and why we are in the present situation. Monopoly is not a healthy condition.

The first case study is an example of the insane, high-strung society we live in. Maria Tusken set up an online knitting community. When one member said she was traveling to India and it felt like she was going to Mars, an SJW mob took over the site to vilify her. When Maria Tusken called for tolerance and calm, the mob turned its attention to her and managed to get her to resign from the knitting association she founded. Tusken suffered the nightmare of ostracism from her community. She received no public support from her friends, although some gave her private reassurances of support. Many of her friends had businesses dependent on staying in the good graces of the knitting community.

This cowardice is a constant in these stories and is also a historic feature of leftism. Old Bolsheviks who had withstood the Tsar’s secret police crumbled when they stood alone against Stalin. One feature of memoirs of people who left the Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s is the fear of losing their community. Such people would twist their private opinions to accommodate the most recent party line.

Kat Rosenfeld is a writer. She opposed an effort to cancel a writer whose book was deemed racist with a simple tweet questioning creative professionals banning a book. The mob turned on her. Rosenfeld makes this comment about the personality type involved in cancel mobs:

Rosenfield believes that these sorts of pile-ons tend to attract a certain personality type — a personality disorder, even. Narcissists are particularly drawn toward using a form of gaslighting called DARVO, which stands for deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. In essence, the actual perpetrator will accuse the person they’ve victimized of doing the bad thing to them — thereby turning themselves into the victim. “It was basically like that. Something bad has happened to you, and you speak out about it, and you become the offender by speaking out about it.”

In a grotesque inversion of reality, they continue to be “powerless,” and anything they might do to you is fully justified because you are the “powerful.”

No Apologies p. 54.

Rosenfeld explains the idea of powerless bullies as follows:

There’s an interesting phenomenon in play whereby a group of people can gain quite a bit of power, as well as social and cultural capital, by claiming not to have any, Rosenfield explains. As she was witnessing in real time, it can be a rather effective strategy. People were saying that others had to listen to them and do what they demanded because they were “powerless.” It’s a cynical move, but in many cases, they truly believe themselves to be powerless — to be victims.

No Apologies, p. 52.

Daryl Davis is an African-American man who has a record of converting racists to pluralism. He finds that free speech is better than allowing bigotry to fester in silence:

“So you know, if you’re driving down the street in your car, and your car starts making some kind of weird noise under the hood … you’re not a mechanic, what do you do? You drive to the auto repair place and say: ‘Hey, can you look at my car? It’s making some weird noise.’ So the mechanic comes out and says, ‘Start your car.’ You start the car, and the noise isn’t there, of course. So he says, ‘Well, let me drive it around the block.’ He gets in the driver’s seat and drives around, no noise. He tells you: ‘Well, listen, I can’t fix what I can’t hear.’ So with racism in this country, it’s hard to fix when it’s hidden under the carpet behind the door, locked in the closet.”

No Apologies, p. 70.

This raises the question: Why did the Left lose confidence in its ability to win arguments?

Steven Elliott’s career was destroyed by an anonymous claim on the “Shitty Media Men List” that he was a rapist. His friends abandoned him. He thought his support of the Left would protect him:

Elliott was deeply political then, especially concerned with prison reform and sex worker rights — having been a sex worker himself. He raised a lot of funds for progressive candidates. “I really did my part,” he states. But none of that meant anything once his name appeared on the Shitty Media Men list. “None of the things I had done for these people and for this side of the spectrum [mattered], you know? When people came after me, nobody cared.”

No Apologies, p. 78.

Elliott came out of his experience with a new-found respect for due process and the “Blackstone Ratio”:

He cites Blackstone’s ratio, which was famously echoed by Benjamin Franklin: “It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than one innocent Person should suffer.” It’s one of the foundational ideas of this country, notes Elliott. “And you either subscribe to that or you don’t.”

No Apologies, p. 81.

On and on, it goes through the sixteen.

The book teaches us things we always knew: free speech is vital, innocence should be presumed, we should not jump to conclusions, and narcissists are either heroes or victims but never villains.

Ultimately, Brodsky advises that you should never apologize when the mob comes for you. You don’t know these people in the mob. You have no reason to respect them. They aren’t entitled to your apology. Worse, your apology will give them the incentive to continue their cruel game:

The solution is clear: stay true to yourself in the face of unreasonable people and demands, but don’t do so in a way that ends the chance of any further discussion or reconciliation. We need more conversations and less closing the door on them. In our increasingly polarized world, dissenting voices need to be heard and listened to, so it is more important than ever that we act in a careful and thoughtful manner that unifies rather than in a righteous and radical manner that divides. Model the behavior and attitudes you’d like to see. This includes always considering whether you might be wrong — no matter the situation or debate. That’s not a sign of weakness; that’s a sign of strength. But when you’re not wrong, don’t let fear silence you into submission. Always bear this in mind: when you’ve committed no wrongdoing, no one holds the authority to demand an apology from you, nor should you feel obliged to offer one. Stay firm, stay true. When your conscience is clear, don’t be coerced or surrender your voice. Set it free.

And never apologize for this.

No Apologies, pp. 220–221.

Good advice

Footnotes:

[1] Let’s not forget that this is the same month an EU bureaucrat threatened Elon Musk with arrest if he allowed too much free speech on X. The free speech in question was an interview with Donald Trump, who is favored to win the presidency. Unelected bureaucrats are interfering with American elections in a way that Putin would never dream of, but since it is directed against Badorangeman the elites are not concerned.

[2] I have been distinguishing between “the Left” and “liberals” for a few years now. Liberals believe in free speech and due process; leftists don’t. I was heartened recently when Alan Dershowitz made the same distinction.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jVO48snhE6Y

Cowl by Neal Asher

Time travel has been a distinct subgenre of science fiction since H.G. Wells’ The Time Traveler. Wells’ book did not explore the fascinating paradoxes that can arise from time travel. It would take years for writers to begin to explore the possibilities of time travel for killing grandparents or stepping on a butterfly in the age of dinosaurs and changing the present. The best example of the subgenre of “time travel as a puzzle” is Robert Heinlein’s “All you Zombies” in which all the characters are the same person. [1]

A variant approach to time travel is to use time travel as a setting. H.G. Wells’ classic story falls into that category, being more of a morality play about class structure in 19th-century Britain. Another book of this kind is Robert Silverberg’s Hawksbill Station, which features the exile of political prisoners to the pre-Cambrian.

Neal Asher’s Cowl is very much the latter kind of story. The story begins in the near future when a British prostitute named Polly gets involved in a dodgy deal gone wrong. The MacGuffin of the deal is high-tech equipment from the future. The deal is interrupted by an amoral government agent named Tack. It turns out that the tech is a time travel device that hijacks people to the past.

To the deep past.

The device attaches itself to Polly. Because Tack is in proximity at the time of activation, she and he are dragged back into the past. The pair make a couple of smaller time jumps, but Tack gets lost along the way. Polly’s jumps get longer and longer, eventually taking her through the age of dinosaurs to the barren world of the pre-Cambrian.

Tack gets hijacked by a living time traveler heading in the same direction as Polly. Through this hijacker, Tack learns about the future. He finds out that he has been hijacked into a time war involving unleashing vast power against a superhuman mutant named Cowl.

Neal Asher is not concerned with paradoxes. Nuclear bombs going off in the Jurassic do not affect the future. Asher gives some handwaving explanations about probability slopes, but it is mostly bafflegab. The time travel element is purely for the setting. It is cool to see our separated heroes make their way to the essentially lifeless pre-Cambrian by fighting their way through huge mammals and huge dinosaurs. Never mind that the oxygen levels were too low for humans to operate at various eons.

Cowl is an action-adventure with time travel providing different settings. The writing is crisp, the ideas are engaging, and I came to like the characters.[2] Initially, I could not decipher the structure of future society, but eventually, I did and came to enjoy the conflict between one group of posthumans and another.

This may be your book if you are interested in an action-adventure time travel story without paradox.

Footnote:

[1] “The Sound of Thunder” and “All You Zombies” got a movie treatment. Both treatments departed from their respective storylines, although the “All You Zombies” treatment — Predestination — had more of the feel of the novella.

[2] Polly starts as a drug-addicted slut, but she cleans up her act thanks to a bit of artificial intelligence implanted in her as part of her involvement in the deal gone wrong. Tack goes from an amoral, programmed machine to a human with free will and a sense of right and wrong.

240810 Apologia: A Memoir by Aidan Nichols



This book will have limited appeal to those outside of a narrow category, namely those Catholics who are wondering where their church is heading. Yet, I found the story that Aidan Nichols tells about his life to be generally interesting as a window into the life of obedient, non-radical Catholics since 1960.

Aidan Nichols was born in 1948 to an Anglican family. After a visit to an Orthodox church where he was moved by the sublime beauty of more liturgical churches, he entered the Catholic Church as a teenager, over the vehement objections of family and the threat that there would be an interruption of his conditional baptism by the police. Nichols had decided to enter a religious life. Eventually, he selected the Dominicans – the Order of Preachers (“OP”) – as fitting his interest in liturgy and scholarship.

Nichols' life thereafter consisted of teaching and writing. His bibliography is extensive and well-received.

Most of the book follows Nichols' life as a world-travelling educator and writer. The memoir drops names like a rainstorm. As a student, Nichols knew Herbert McCabe, Kallistos Ware, Yves Congar, and Richard John Neuhas. These are important names to those who read theology, but may be unknow to the public.

Nichols provides several revealing anecdotes abut some these figures. He says that Herbert McCabe – a leading Thomistic thinker of the last 50 years – combined Irish Nationalism with Marxism. Apparently, this combination was quite common and explains the Marxist orientation of the provisional IRA. Nichols shares an anecdote about the foundation of Communio Review as a counterweight to the Marxist/Leftist Concilio Review. Yves Congar never jumped from Concilio to Communio because Concilio would be so much worse without him.

Toward the end of the book, Nichols moves into the papacy of Pope Francis. It is fair to say that he is very concerned about the direction the Catholic Church is being taken under Francis. Nichols signed the statements objecting to the 2016 Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia and the 2019 Abu Dhabi Declaration made between the Roman pontiff and the Grand Iman of the Al-Azhar. Nichols views both as undercutting the clawing back of Catholic theology from the “relativistic fog” that had penetrated Catholic thinking. Nichols extols “richness” and “clarity.” Richness is found in the multiple strains of thinking that fund Catholic thinking, including, in his experience, Anglican and Orthodox thinking. “Clarity” means consistency in thought, not only across geography but across time. His thinking has led him to the understanding that the meaning of the expression “The Roman See is judged by no one” is that Rome is the final appeal in canonical matters but does not refer to doctrinal matter.

Nichols was also concerned about the Pachamama affair where an Earth Mother goddess idol was introduced into a South American papal ceremony. Nichols reasonably points out that this affair was exploited by South American Protestants to undermine the Catholic Church. The affair was a scandal and dispirited the faithful and encouraged anti-Catholics.

In short, Nichols became a critic of the papacy. This was a surprising development for him since he was best known for his book on the theology of Benedict XVI.

The Catholic hierarchy has been strangely unable to control priests and bishops who advocate the normalization same-sex ceremonies, Marxism, or feminism, but against Catholics who advocate, well, Catholicism, the Church is quite effective. Nichols has been made to withdraw from teaching assignments and official positions in the Dominican Order. When he decided to join the Norbertine monastery in Orange County, the local bishop issued a prohibition preventing Nichols from teaching anyone within the local diocese. The express concern was that Nichols might become a lightning rod for opponents of Francis.

Concerning the Norbertine Order, Nichols provides interesting background information on the 11th Century St. Norbert, who founded the Order of Premonstratensian. He also provides information on the order, which has had ps and down, and eventually founded a monastery in California when refugees from Communist Hungary escaped Hungary and left for more congenial environments.

Nichols is an educated, erudite man. His memoir captures the last 60 years of Catholic confusion and ebbs and flows.

240811 Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions by Kate Cooper

https://www.amazon.com/Queens-Fallen-World-Augustines-Confessions/dp/B0BLXN23BY/ref=sr_1_1?crid=KEXPLM0RSTFZ&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.qk5z0rhKQG799ySjhTcOizUopmDtk-23XQvJbs4ARSOZcTMRslmtmkkCAO9VKSccQeNg_yN8leN68v3-YUqfJ2Ve39pfWZQo-EdJvI0UvYi6SoVQ5oubd3hg98fhxRQ3YzEq0PIw6-YJwaXQDs8xnMdDFyBmtyTNxS_83HpB5tXmwO0yjIM78C4bPEobDVfuknAdCU-J5Qw3GiSecvNcUGV5yk-6bXBze-NZ8ikp2AE.IkfzkDuxUrkqAVck_XmOhK3pkjMNUiV1NR0eUHs6jww&dib_tag=se&keywords=queens+of+a+fallen+world&qid=1723439077&sprefix=Queens+of+a+fallen%2Caps%2C240&sr=8-1



As the subtitle says, this is a book about the women in St. Augustine's life. Since two of the for women discussed in this book are never named by Augustine and one of the two remaining women are never mentioned in the book, I had two thoughts: first, how much invention and mind-reading would the author indulge, and, second, how much of a feminist polemic would this be. The latter concern almost kept me from buying the book.
The good news is that Kate Cooper pulls off her assignment in a scholarly and interesting way. The historical part is well done. The scarcity of biographical information is rounded out by Cooper's knowledge of Roman society. The theological/historical part is even-handed and avoids any tendency to make St. Augustine into a monster of the patriarchy.

The four women that Cooper discusses are Monnica – Augustine's sainted mother; Tacita – the twelve year old heiress with the fat dowry that Augustine would have married as his ticket to Roman high society; Una – the concubine that Augustine was involved with for twelve years and with whom he had a son named Adeodatus; and Empress Justina, who is not mentioned in The Confessions, but who played a significant behind-the- scenes role.

Cooper provides a good deal of Roman cultural knowledge and history as a way of filling out the stories of these women. For example, she explains Roman inheritance rules and how those rules connected with the institutions of marriage and concubinage. The purpose of marriage in Roman society of the fourth century was to create an heir to property. Only the children of marriage could inherit. Concubinage was an accepted institution in the fourth century and carried no bit of shame or dishonor. It was a relationship of inequality between the man and the women, although it was not uncommon for a man to free a concubine slave in order to marry her.

In concubinage, the man had no duties to the concubine or the children of the relationship. The children of a concubinal relationship could never inherit. When the relationship was over, the woman would take the children with her.

This is why it was so remarkable that Adeodatus remained with Augustine after he ended the relationship with “Una” in order to enter the relationship with “Tacita.” Augustine loved Una. Except for the fact that he was ambitious, he could – he should have – remained dutiful to Una, something that he realized too late.

From the Confessions, one doesn't get a sense that Augustine saw concubinage as morally problematic for the reasons we see it as morally problematic. I think we see it as morally problematic because it involves sex outside of marriage. This doesn't seem to be a problem for Augustine, even when he was writing the Confessions as a Christian bishop. According to Cooper, Augustine's moral problem with his concubinal relationship was that it actually was a marriage, but he didn't recognize it as such until later. This says a lot about the moral change in Western society between Augustine's age and ours.

Empress Justina isn't mentioned in the Confession, but knowledge of her role behind the scenes is informative. Justina was the stepmother of Emperor Gratian, who was murdered in 383 AD, and the mother of Valentinian II, the minor was the sole sovereign of the Western Roman Empire. Gratian was murdered by a usurper named Maximus, who positioned himself to the north of Italy. Augustine's mentor, St. Ambrose, acted as an intermediary between Justina and Maximus to stall Maximus' invasion of Italy. Ambrose was successful – Maximus delayed long enough for Emperor Theodosius to intervene to end Maximus' insurrection.

All of this plays out, unmentioned, in the background of the time that Augustine is in Milan studying under Ambrose. All the time of Augustine's spiritual turmoil, his conversion after hearing “tolle lege,” and his baptism by Ambrose are foregrounded against a never-mentioned reality that an army was about to invade Milan. In fact, people were fleeing Milan and Italy, general. Augustine's departure from Italy may have been motivated by the threat of the invasion, but this is never mentioned.

The woman most clearly described is Monnica. In Cooper's telling, Augustine had a loving relationship with his mother, Monnica was a wise woman, and Augustine respected her intelligence. Monnica taught Augustine that social status was less important than personal merit. Monnica's lessons were propagated into Western society.

Usually, Augustine is blamed for being addicted to lust, who transmitted a negative attitude about sex to the future. Cooper disagrees with this understanding. In her eyes, Augustine's addiction was to greed and ambition, not lust. The following is such a revision of the traditional picture of Augustine, that it deserves quoting in full:

But reading the Confessions carefully, we encounter a different story. Augustine tells us that he and Alypius had debated whether marriage was a better way of life than asceticism, but he makes clear that he, Augustine, had won the debate. Largely by pointing to the example of his own harmonious home life with Una and their small son, Augustine had persuaded his friend that marriage had to be better than the single life. As he saw things in hindsight, the problem he had faced in the summer of 386 was not that sex and marriage were obstacles to communion with God. Rather, it was that his way of pursuing them had been immoral.

On this reading, the received view is not wrong that Augustine was recoiling from sin when he decided not to marry. But the sin that repulsed him was not lust; it was greed. What shook him, finally, was his willingness to betray the woman who ought to have been his wife—the mother of his child—for a lucrative arranged marriage. The root of his problem was not sexual desire. It was ambition.

Years later, after returning to Africa, Augustine would go on to become first a monk and then a Christian bishop, and his pastoral writings would repeatedly recognize a spiritual value in romantic partnerships outside wedlock. He would argue that a man who had lived with a concubine should not be allowed to marry, since in his day, second marriages were prohibited. Even if Roman law saw concubines as a having no legal standing, he argued, the church should see the union as spiritually equivalent to marriage. In other words, neither one of the pair should move on to marry someone else while the other was still living. This was and remained a minority view. Many Christians shared Monnica's view that divorce was impossible, but this only applied to marriage, while others believed that under the right circumstances, Christians could divorce and remarry. With the exception of Augustine, no one seems to have believed that men should be forever faithful to a concubine whom they had specifically chosen not to marry.

If Bishop Augustine came to argue that a man who takes a concubine has a moral obligation to her, his contemporaries mostly saw a concubine as a person there to be exploited. Whether slave or free, she provided a service, and if she earned genuine affection from her partner, this spoke well of her but did not alter her position. By sleeping with her, the male partner acquired no long-term obligation toward her or her children, even if he was the biological father. Augustine would break with this tradition by arguing that in moral terms an established extramarital relationship carried the same responsibility as the legal bond of marriage.

We can see this in the famous scene in the garden at the climax of Book Eight of the Confessions, when Augustine decides to dedicate his life to God. This momentous scene has been persistently misunderstood. Certainly, he was guilty of a terrible sexual sin, but the sin was not sleeping with his concubine. It was casting her away.

Augustine's story of his conversion begins with an admission that he had been a slave to lust and to worldly ambition. But now, God had freed him: “I will tell the story of how You, my help and my salvation, set me free from the chains of sexual desire, which held me so tightly, and from the slavery of my worldly ambition.”3 That Augustine addresses God by the term dominus—which means both “lord” and “master”—here is no accident; he wants to underline the helpless subjection he had labored under. “I was going about my usual activities,” he says, “with anxiety mounting ever higher, and every day I sighed for You.”4

Cooper, Kate. Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions (pp. 195-196). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

This crystallizes something for me that I had long intuited. I've read The Confessions three or four times. I've never formed the picture that Augustine was a particularly “lustful” guy. His relationship with “Una” was one of faithfulness. He was obviously torn by putting her away. Admittedly, he said that he needed to have a woman in his life, but we do not hear about him visiting prostitutes, which were plentiful in the Roman Empire.

Based on what Augustine says, Cooper's understanding is that Augustine came to understand himself as actually married to “Una.” This meant that marriage was not simply about inheritance. It involved a mutual willing of the “goods of marriage,” a term that the Church would use to describe the openness to children and the unity of life.

Augustine wrote on marriage in several books. He also wrote pastoral letters where he expressed these ideas. In a letter to a married woman named Ecdicia, he gave her counsel about her relationship with her husband. Augustine insisted that marriage was more than a contract, it was a spiritual fellowship. According to Cooper:

The letter to Ecdicia caught the eye of these later divines for it contained many distinctive ideas about the spiritual value of the marriage bond. It argued that marriage was not, as the Romans had always believed, simply a contract between families to organize the transmission of property. Instead, it was a spiritual fellowship that could be undertaken between individuals who had no intention of having children or even sleeping together, and it involved a vow before God that would last into eternity.

No one would have been more surprised than Ecdicia to learn that something good had come of her troubles. But in the eyes of the medieval church, her predicament was nothing less than providential; it was the grain of sand around which the pearl of the medieval Christian sacrament of marriage later grew.

Cooper, Kate. Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions (p. 229). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

In a treatise, Augustine equated marriage with fidelity. According to Cooper:

In his treatise On the Good of Marriage, Augustine makes an unprecedented argument for an element of fair play between the sexes. The Confessions and On the Good of Marriage have traditionally been dated to the same period, the years directly after Augustine's consecration as a bishop in 395, but in fact the date of both is uncertain. Yet the two texts need not have been written at the same time for us to see what they have in common. Both develop an impulse of self-criticism and offer an implicit critique of male privilege in relations with women.

Marriage is about trust, Augustine argues—the Latin term is fides, often translated as “faith” or “fidelity.” This means that each partner should be accountable to the other in the same way. A husband and wife enter the bond on the same terms: “They owe equal fidelity to each other.”18 So far, Augustine might not have ruffled too many Roman feathers—but only if he held back from spelling out in detail what his words actually meant.

But Augustine did not hold back: “Betrayal of this fidelity,” he says, “is called adultery, when through the prompting of one's own lust, or through acceding to the lust of another, sexual intercourse takes place with another man or woman contrary to the marriage-pact.”19 With a stroke, he makes radical departure from the Roman understanding of marital fidelity, which deemed the relationship exclusive only for the wife.

By suggesting that for a man to sleep with a woman other than his wife constitutes adultery simply because he himself is married, even if she is single, Augustine steers definitively away from the Roman legal definition of adultery as a crime that turned exclusively on the violation of a married woman's chastity. That definition was still in force at the time he was writing.

Cooper, Kate. Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions (pp. 239-240). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

This is getting closer to the modern – Christian – understanding of marriage. It is hard for us to see how a Christian marriage could be otherwise, how it could be “Roman,” but that is an artifact of shapers of culture like Augustine.

This is a good work of intellectual history. It manages to demonstrate that the past is a different county and how we got from there to here. I do question one thing in this book. It seems that Cooper believes that Arianism was an invented issue:

Originally, the presbyter Arius taught that the Son of God was a human being born like any other creature, while his rival Athanasius, later bishop of Alexandria, taught that the Son of God was much more than a historical person: he was also the Word of God—the Logos—which had been spoken at the creation of the world. The creed proclaimed at the Council of Nicaea in 325 captured the idea by speaking of the Son of God as “eternally begotten of the Father.” After Nicaea there was no enduring “Arian” movement—Arius himself quickly modified his views to try to keep the peace. Still, the Nicene party discovered that constant accusations of heresy against their rivals was a powerful tool for populist crowd-building, and the fact that “Arianism” was an empty accusation made it particularly useful as a slur to aim at whomever the Nicene bishops disagreed with.2

Cooper, Kate. Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions (pp. 137-138). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

First, I believe that the issue was whether the Son was created or eternal. Arianism agreed that the Son was divine, but also claimed that the Son was created by the Father, i.e., “there was a time when he was not.”

Second, there were emperors, churches, and entire Germanic tribes, such as the Ostrogoths, who were Arian. These groups persecuted Catholics, and vice versa, to be fair.

I am not sure what Cooper means here.

Nonetheless this is a short, accessible read that provides interesting background for one of the most interesting men in history.

The Devil's Triangle by Mark Judge

Mark Judge was a “supporting player” in the Brett Kavanaugh Confirmation fight. Judge was identified as a witness to Kavanaugh's alleged sexual assault of Christy Blasey Ford when he, Judge, and Ford were high school students. His yearbook was read at a Congressional hearing for the titillation of the entire nation. Judge was depicted on Saturday Night Live as a drunken frat boy.

The problem for Judge is that the alleged assault never happened, and Judge had never met Ford. Since his testimony did not advance the Democrat line, and since the media is largely a Democrat operation – something we know more about in the summer of 2024 after the media has embarrassed itself by flipping and flopping on the issue of Joe Biden's cognitive abilities – the edict came down that Judge's credibility was to be destroyed.

Another problem for Judge is that he gave ammunition for this project because he was a public figure as a journalist. Judge had started out on the Left as an intern at the New Republic. He had been a heavy drinker and an alcoholic, until he straightened out his life in his late twenties, and he had written a book about his experiences, painting the Washington DC crowd he had grown up with as decadent drunks.

Judge believes that it was his books that gave Ford the idea of casting him as the other person in the room. Judge had written about his black-out drunks – which happened after his high school graduation – and decided that she could neutralize his denial of the event on the grounds that he must have been in a black-out drunk at the time. This also explains her inability to pinpoint the date of the alleged assault. Her inability was strategic: she couldn't know for sure when Judge started his heaviest drinking.

Judge learned from the experience about how deeply the corruption of media involvement in politics runs. Journalists uniformly took the advocacy position against him. Journalists invaded his privacy, intruded upon the senile mother of a family friend, and put him under surveillance.

In one particularly chilling story, Judge describes how he was driving home to D.C. from Maryland and a young girl ran out into the street to demand that he drive her somewhere. Judge didn't. On reflection, he decided that it was a set up to nail a fiftyish man for driving a teenager across state lines.

He also describes how pressure was placed on Leland Keyser – Ford's other witness to the alleged assault – who also denied that the assault occurred. Keyser was bombarded by journalists and friends who asked her to take one for the team and keep Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court.

We might think that is paranoid, but in 2024, with lawfare experience behind us and having seen Democrat enclaves like D.C. and New York being used to railroad Republicans, it may not have been wrong. After the experience of watching the lies told about the source of Covid, the utility of social distancing, the efficacy of masks, and the mental stability of Joe Biden, we can no longer call “BS” on conspiracy theories like we would before 2016.

A warning is in order here. My recounting is straightforward. Judge's narrative is not straightforward. He is writing a memoir which contains a lot of biographical reflections. There are long discussions into his drinking, rehabilitation, various friends he's know, and filmmaking. These sections break up the story about the “Stasi media.”

That said, the life story is interesting. For example, Judge's father was a long-time editor who was friends with William Peter Blatty, the author of The Exorcist. Some of the characters in that book were based on Jesuit priests who taught Judge at Georgetown Prep. There are a number of stories about Washington D.C. in the 1980s, away from the politics.

Judge met Brett Kavanaugh in high school. He stays away from recounting most stories about Kavanaugh or any conversations he might have had during the confirmation battle for obvious reasons.

During the confirmation battle, Judge was basically on his own. He had hired an attorney to represent him, but he was in a Democrat town during a time when Democrats loathed D.C. native, Brett Kavanaugh, and loathed Judge by association.

After cleaning up his life, Judge had become conservative and returned to his Catholic faith. It is unfortunate that there was no support structure for him as there was for people on the other side, who feted Ford no matter how irrational and unsupported her story became. Democrats in this Democrat town seized on ever implausible fantasy spun up by attorney Michael Avennatti, including claims that Judge had engaged mass rapes of girls while in high school. On one occasion, “Morning Joe” had regaled the country with a story about how Judge had engaged in a threesome with another Catholic school boy. Mika Brzeznski gasped “My God” in reaction.

No lie was outside the lines during this awful episode.

Judge is really a wonderful writer. I started reading his columns after fame was forced on him. I have found that his reasoning is cogent and his writing is clear.

Theology Matters - The Unnamable God
Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture by Janet Soskice

Can we give God a name?

Why do we name God?

The naming of God was once a major theological topic. Pseudo-Dionysius (Ps-Denys) wrote a book on the Divine Names, ideas from which were incorporated into Scholasticism by St. Thomas Aquinas. Author Janet Soskice reminds of us the change in practice in the first chapter:
Generations of Christians knew and named God and Christ with many names - hundreds of them: Messiah, Emmanuel, Alpha, Omega, Eternal, All-Powerful, Lamb, Serpent, One, Goat, Lion, Word, Worm, Bridegroom. These names, all drawn from Scripture, were said, sung and chanted in plainsong and polyphony, woven into the worship of the faithful. Today, a remnant of what we might call this ‘piety of the names' remains in the popular Advent hymn, ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel', where names come from the ‘O Antiphons', each verse heralding the coming of Christ with one of the titles Christians took from the Old Testament: ‘O come, Emmanuel! O come, Rod of Jesse! O Come, Dayspring from on High! O come, Key of David! Oh come, Adonai!'

Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (p. 1). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

In the course of reflecting on the topic, Soskice takes the reader through chapters on Moses, Philo, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and Aquinas. Ps-Denys does not get a chapter but is mentioned throughout the text.

Soskice explains that a traditional critique of naming God argues that God's names can become idols. God is greater than we can imagine. To say that God is the Almighty does not do God justice. To identify him as Bridegroom is to limit God, which is, in a way, the core of idolatry. Man cannot know God's nature. Man can only have the barest sense of who or what God is; any name is insufficient.

In modernity, the naming of God runs the risk of anthropomorphizing God and, worse, creating an understanding of God that reinforces the oppression of the weak, women, and the poor. According to some like Gordon Kaufman, it is better to move beyond naming God, ideas of God, or a belief in God.

It seems to me that to name God as the Unnamable is to create an inhuman concept of God, a kind of Lovecraftian horror. As I was reading this, I was listening to an audiobook entitled In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy by Eugene Thacker[1]. I had just finished a book on the Philosophy of Dionysius.[2]

Ps-Denys went a long way to the argument that God is totally alien and unnamable. God is being beyond being. Life beyond life. God is unknowable and unnamable. God's being give the universe being but God is so far beyond being that he is properly thought of as non-being.

The Dust of the Planet book reflects on H.P. Lovecraft's idea of horror and how it relies on a lot of theology. Lovecraft's Elder Gods were pure horror because they were beyond human comprehension. Much of Lovecraft's writings are florid prose about shapes that cannot be comprehended and colors that cannot be described. Horror is founded on the other, found in pure form in the Unnamable.

Is this God? Is God a horror? A Lovecraftian Elder God?

The naming of God begins in Genesis 3, where God speaks from the burning bush and tells Moses that his name is “I Am Who Am.” When Moses asks for a name to take to Pharoah, God condescends to give Moses a name. This is the nature of naming in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Man does not impose a name, rather the name is revealed to us. Thus, God is not the Unnamable since God gives us a name.[3]

In the Old Testament, God's name becomes the Tetragrammaton (YHWH), translated to preserve the sacredness of the name as “Lord.” The name appears over 6,000 times in the Hebrew Bible, but in modern translation is replaced by LORD. Attempts have been made to correct this. Moses Mendelssohn translated the Pentateuch into German in the early 19th century, replacing YHWH with the Eternal based on the idea that “I am that am” communicated the idea of omnitemporality - of always being with His people.

Soskice argues that the purpose of naming is not a philosophical exercise. Its purpose is to pray, to communicate with God, to praise God. This is possible because God has condescended to such communication:

Augustine's recognition is that we can speak of God only because, as with Moses and Israel, God has first spoken to us.

Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (p. 36). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Philo represents a starting point for one tradition of naming God, namely, the negative or apophatic naming tradition. Thus, we can identify God by what He is not. Words like “unnamable” and “unutterable” are part of this tradition. [4]

But there's more. Although God is transcendent beyond the imagination of most modern Christians, God is also imminent. God graces mankind with his name so that there can be a relationship between man and God. God cannot be given a common name, like dog or cat, because there is nothing to share the name with. God's names are relative to humans; they state what God is for us, not what God is. As Soskice observes:

We've seen that Philo has a special interest in naming of God. On his reckoning, God both cannot be named and yet must be named for the purposes of prayer.

Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (p. 66). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

After discussing Philo, Soskice moves to Christian theologians. She offers an interesting argument I have not seen before. According to Soskice, the doctrine of Creation ex nihilo is foundational to the Christian understanding[5] but exists in the Jewish tradition also:

A linking of Exodus 3 with the creation narratives of Genesis was embraced early on by Christian theologians. ‘The One Who Is' was understood as the one who confers being on all creation. Seeing the ‘One Who Is' as the ground of all existence should not, however, be thought of as just an imposition on the Book of Exodus by Christian theologians marinated in Greek philosophy. The Palestinian Targums, Jewish texts written in Aramaic and within the Semitic milieu, provide us with the following glosses on the ehyeh asher ehyeh (‘I Am Who I Am') of Exodus 3.15: ‘He who spoke and the world came into being, spoke and everything came into being.' (Pseudo-Jonathan 14a) ‘He who said to the world, “Be”, and it came into being, and who will again say to it: “BE”, and it will be. (Fragmentary Targum 14aV)

Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (pp. 67–68). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Soskice defines “Creation ex nihilo” as meaning that “God from no compulsion or necessity created the world from nothing - really nothing - no pre-existent matter, space or time.” “Creation ex nihilo is not just a teaching about the created order but about God.” Central to the teaching is the power of goodness and freedom of God and the dependence of creation on God. If God were to cease holding the world in being for a moment, it would cease to be.[6]

It is a tenet of Scholasticism that the “good is self-diffusive.” After Philo, Aquinas would base the doctrine of analogia entis on the idea that there is a relationship between God and creation because God created the world. Soskice observes:

Although God does not need creation to be God, the creation stands in a real, if contingent, relation to God. God's creatures are gratuitously created from abundant love. In classical theology it is because God is always already abundance and fullness of life that creation is wholly gift and grace. It is not out of need but from pure love and delight that God creates. In sum, creatio ex nihilo emerges as a core teaching when Jews and Christians felt a need to defend their understanding of God's relation to the cosmos, God's power, freedom and love.28 This teaching became integral to Christian theology. As we have seen from Philo, one of its effects was to transform the meaning of certain divine names which had enjoyed currency in Greek philosophical monotheism - those known to us as ‘classical attributes' - and to impel the introduction of others.

Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (pp. 81–82). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

These ideas were developed through Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and Aquinas. In Aquinas, in particular, we have the idea that God is somewhat knowable because of creation's dependence on God. Because of that dependence and the fact that God is Creator, there is nothing in creation that is not in God in a fuller and more perfect way. [7]

Soskice offers an interesting way of viewing the Summa Theologica:

It is often remarked that, for all the attention they have subsequently received, the ‘Five Ways' take up little space in the Summa theologiae. Here, as in the earlier Summa contra gentiles, God's existence is taken as given, and indeed there is some debate as to whether Aquinas intended them as proofs. What is clear is that, in the architecture of the Summa theologiae, the Five Ways are used to set the stage for the extended discussion over Questions 3 to 13 as to how we can know and name God.24

Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (p. 179). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

For Aquinas the relationship of creation and God in creation ex nihilo meant that there positive things that we could say about God. When we speak of God we do not mean merely negative things:
Aquinas tells us that ‘When a man speaks of the “living God” he does not simply want to say that God is the cause of our life, or that he differs from a lifeless body.' Here he has Maimonides in mind: Maimonides, as we have seen, applies such strictures to divine transcendence, that to say, ‘God is living' could mean no more than ‘God is not like an inanimate thing.' Aquinas observes that to say, ‘God is good' cannot mean just that ‘God is the cause of goodness in things', for God is also the cause of bodies, and we don't say God is a body (S.T. Ia.13, 2). He argues that some of the words we use of God do express something of what God is. It follows that some (positive) things may be said literally of God (article 3), a point of departure from both Maimonides and Dionysius.36 Of course all our names for God are, of necessity, taken from our human speech about creatures - we have no speech but human speech. Many scriptural ascriptions are metaphors, such as that God is ‘a rock' or ‘a lion'. These are all evidently qualified by materiality. But certain perfection terms - Aquinas mentions ‘being,' ‘good' and ‘living' - are not tinged with materiality and so can literally apply to God, as long as we are mindful of the fact that ‘what' they signify belongs to God (in fact even more to God than to creatures ‘for these perfections belong primarily to God and only secondarily to others'), but our way of signifying these perfections (modus significandi) is tailored to creatures and thus inadequate.

Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (pp. 188–189). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

We speak of God in human terms because we are human. We necessarily understand God in the mode in which we exist. This is perfectly acceptable since it is not entirely wrong because created things reflect God's goodness and being in their goodness and being.

God condescends to allow us to use names in order to allow us to communicate with and about Him:
To sum up, analogy is discussed in the Summa theologiae as a semantic tool and not an epistemological strategy. It does not to determine what we can say positively of God, still less what we can know of God - above all Scripture does that. An epistemology is present - of course we must know about God - but it is a Christian epistemology, grounded in the doctrine of creation.42 Aquinas' account of analogical predication shows how our names, even scriptural names, which derive their meaning from what we know of creatures, may be ordered to the God who brings about creation. It is thus a way of explaining how our terms signify in this unique situation of metaphysical dependency. Here semantic and metaphysical points fuse.

Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (p. 195). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Naming God, then, is about prayer more than knowledge. It is possible because God allows it and because we can understand God in a limited sense because He is the creator and every created thing stands in a relation of dependence on Him.
 
 I've recently gone through the Summa Theologica chapter on God's name. So, this was a welcome commentary and background for what I read. Also, there was information here that I didn't know but very much appreciate knowing. I think Soskice writing is accessible and straightforward. The topic is worth reflecting upon. I think I would recommend it to anyone with a serious interest in theology.

[1] Dust of the Planet by Eugene Thacker. 
[2] Theophany by Eric D. Perl
[3] Actually, a name of God is “unnamable”:
Philo is our first source for certain distinctive divine epithets, for instance ‘unnameable' (akatonomastos), ‘unutterable' (arrhêtos), which subsequently find their way into Christian and pagan philosophical writings. We will find in Philo argumentative strategies that will subsequently characterise the ‘divine names' tradition in Christian writings and which will reappear in the work of Moses Maimonides in the twelfth century and Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth.
Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (p. 45). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
[4] Philo also makes a point that will be central to Aquinas:
The cosmos is totally dependent on God and God is in no sense dependent on the cosmos. And finally, ‘God, being One, is alone and unique, and like God there is nothing' (L.A.. II.1).23 This last is an altogether critical point for Philo when it comes to naming God. Since God cannot strictly be like any created being, we cannot class God or insert God into any category appropriate to our created kind.
Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (p. 50). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
[5] “[F]or Aquinas, the theology of participation spills out from the biblical name, ‘the One Who Is'.” [Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (p. 212). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.]
[6] Aristotle rejected Creation ex nihilo, believing that the “notion that something could come from nothing” was absurd (Physics 187a333–4).
[7] Concerning Ps-Denys, Soskice observes:
Yet for all his deference - and Aquinas cites Dionysius some 1,700 times - there is little in the Summa which marks him strictly as a disciple, and at times Aquinas introduces Dionysius' views only to qualify, if not apparently to contradict them.
Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (p. 171). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
This confirms my recent reading of Aquinas.

The Sunless Countries: Book Four of Virga Kindle Edition
by Karl Schroeder


This is book four of the Virga Chronicles. Author Karl Schroeder has been revealing the amazing world of Virga by shifting viewpoint characters as he tells his adventure story. The first book began with Hayden Griffin, a young man from the nation of Aerie. Aeri was conquered by the nation of Slipstream. Griffin entered the service of Slipstream's navy and became involved in a dangerous adventure that revealed secrets about Virga. The second book shifts the perspective to Venera Fanning. Venera married into the aristocracy of Slipstream and was part of Hayden Griffin's expedition. The third book features Chaison Fanning, Venera's husband and an aristocrat of Slipstream. Chaison is as noble and honest and Venera seems to be conniving.

In the fourth book we are introduced to Leal Malspeth, a historian in the sunless country of Sere. She meets up with Hayden, who has fulfilled his mission of giving a sun to Aerie, and the focus moves out from the world of Virga.

This is a call-back to classic science fiction with big ideas about big objects. Virga is a planet-sized, gas-filled bag in space. It lacks gravity. It is inhabited by humans who have created low-tech versions of artificial gravity through centrifugal force. Lumps of soil provide farmlands. Water may exist in vast bubbles. Animals have evolved to move by flying. We know nothing of the universe outside of Virga, except that there are hostile artificial intelligences who are prepared to take over Virga if the field surrounding Virga that suppresses electronics is turned off.

The center region of Virga is home to Candesce, the Sun of Suns, which illuminates the central region of space. Candesce is an artificial sun. Other artificial suns in outlying regions allow humans to live outside the central regions in nations that stay together and float in the air current around Virga.

The inner skin of Virga is the home of icebergs. The region toward the skin is the “sunless countries” where no one has built an artificial fusion reactor.

Sere is in the sunless countries. Sere has recently fallen under the control of an political/religious faction – the Eternists - that defines truth as that which the majority of the population votes for. This is a ploy to ram a religious/political orthodoxy down the throat of Sere which defines as truth the propositions that Virga has always existed and that there is nothing beyond or outside of Virga.

Leal is a historian who knows differently.

Needless to say, the Eternists are committed to destroying the university where Leal works.

Added to this is the complication that when Hayden Griffin turned off Candesce in the first book, he let in entities from outside that wanted to occupy the one place in the universe that is not under the control of “artificial nature.” It seems that one of those entities is tearing up the outskirts of Sere.

This novel is about the plots and counterplots in Sere and the expeditions to discovery what it is from outside that came into Virga.

I enjoyed the book. I think that someone who didn't read the prior books might find themselves lost since there are callbacks to the events of the prior stories. Also, the story ends on a cliffhanger, as did the first book. The various “books' of the Virga Chronicles are probably better thought of as chapters in a much larger novel.

My full review is on Medium - https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/theology-matters-how-do-we-participate-in-god-0253a99075b3

I wish that the lay critics of traditional Theism/Christianity would read this book before they popped off their next salvo on why Christianity is stupid because they have what is for them an unanswerable new idea about why monotheism doesn't hold together – but is in actuality a very old and tired idea that has been answered many times. If they got this book, read this book, and comprehended this book, they would level up their thinking a few notches and start engaging the real issues instead of strawmen.

This book is accessible for the intelligent layman. The author, Andrew Davison, takes the reader from the beginnings up to higher levels on the fascinating issue of how we participate in God and with God. Davison is a professor at Cambridge University, and an Anglican priest, so he has familiarity with teaching and the subject matter. I found that the book did not read as a cold treatise but brought to life a pastoral dimension to the living God.

I really want to underscore that last point. Davison is often fun to read. His writing isn't dry. He uses examples from pop culture and daily life to underscore complicated theological points. The Lord of the Rings comes in to explain the grayness of evil. Spinach is used to explain “participation in the good.” To my way of thinking, all other things being equal, if you can't translate theology to real experience, you are not doing your job of teaching.

“Participation” is a key concept in Christian thinking, and, yet, it is nebulous. How do we participate in an infinite, eternal transcendent divinity beyond being and comprehension. We must participate if we are to have a hope of eternity or a share in the goodness of Creation.

The beginning of Davison's answer is that we participate fundamentally through three of the four Aristotelian causes:

Effective cause and also formal cause, and final cause – God – but at no time is he the material cause.

Adam of St Victor, ‘Profitientes Unitatem'

Davison, Andrew. Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (pp. 11-12). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

God is the efficient cause because God creates ex nihilo. God made everything that has been made out of nothing. This is a departure from the God of the philosophers:

None of the pagan philosophers had imagined that the supreme god chose freely to create, or was in the business of making.26 The nearest that Plato came was his ‘demiurge': a divine craftsman who had to consult eternal ‘forms', or patterns, external to him, as blueprints.27 Aristotle's god – or as near as Aristotle got to proposing a god – seems blissfully unaware of the world and certainly did not make it.28

Davison, Andrew. Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (p. 20). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

As a creation out of nothing, there is no change. Nothing is nothing. Nothing cannot change. At no point was there something midway between nothing and Creation.

God created matter, but God is not matter and matter is not God. The material cause is the one cause that is not in or from God. God works Creation (the efficient cause), the form of created things comes from God (the formal cause), God's goodness is the end of all creation (the final Cause), but the stuff of which things are made is not God (the material cause.) God causes matter to exist, but he does not use “God stuff” to create. This forecloses pantheism.

God's creation is a relationship rather than a moment:

Rather, this doctrine addresses what it means for creation to be creation at this and at every moment, and for a creature to be a creature. Creatures, it proposes, stand in as dramatic a relation to nothing, or non-being, as the initial burst of light stood to nothing in the first moment of creation. Creatures receive their being from God as freshly, at this moment, as creation did in its opening moment.51 Moreover, they are only preserved in being, and prevented from returning to nothing, by God's continued gift.

Davison, Andrew. Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (p. 26). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Davison explains: “On the standard view of Christian theology, creation is like the sunbeam, not like the house or the bowl of soup.55 God is responsible for creation's ‘being' as well as for its initial ‘becoming'.” Id at p. 27 .

Davison explains the radical asymmetry of God and Creation. Created beings participate in God; God does not participate in Creation. Davison observes:

Neither is God's relation to creation like creation's relation to God. There is a radical asymmetry. The creature is constituted by its relation to God, but God is not constituted by relation to creatures. The creature's relation to God is at the heart of what it means for it to exist, and to be what it is, while God's relation to the creature does not lie at the heart of what it means for God to be God. Creation means everything for a creature: it makes it what it is. Creation does not mean everything for God: it does not make God what God is. To be blunt, creatures need God; God does not need them.

Davison, Andrew. Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (p. 29). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

God is not simply the “first cause.” Rather, as Davison points out God is the cause “beneath all causes.” Space and time are creatures. Physics is a creature of space and time. Unless one is prepared to say that space and time are “brute facts” – which seems unlikely given the non-eternity of space/time – something must lie beneath space and time that is eternal and immutable.

Participation, therefore, begins with the “three causes” excluding material cause from the four causes. The three causes are traditionally assigned to the Trinity in the formula “by him, with him, and in him,” which should be very familiar to liturgical Christians:

In Gregory of Nyssa, for instance, we read that ‘every operation which extends from God to the Creation ... has its origin from the Father, and proceeds through the Son, and is perfected in the Holy Spirit'.7 In what follows in this chapter, we will explore the association of the Father as origin with efficient causation (and the preposition ‘from'), the association of the Son with formal causation (and the preposition ‘through'), and the association of the Spirit, and perfection, with final causation (and the preposition ‘in').

Davison, Andrew. Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (pp. 44-45). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

This is not to divvy up the Trinity into roles. All operations outside the Trinity are unitary. The division is more a logical construct than a real operation.
The division and unity of the Trinitarian persons is expressed by the word “perichoresis” which has a “rich range of meanings,” including “co-inherence, reciprocation, intercommunion, and interpenetration.” To think of the persons as standing apart from each other is theologically wrong. The persons of the Trinity co-inhere, rest within, interpenetrate each other. To face one is to face all three; to address one is to address all three.

Created beings also participate God through the formal cause:

God is the origin of form, and we can approach that idea in terms of formal causation. Behind a discussion of God as formal cause lies a fairly universal element of any participatory outlook, namely, the conviction that whatever we find in an effect must in some sense have been present first in its cause. Brian Davies has described this as the principle that ‘you cannot give what you have not got, and though what you give might not look like you, it will still reflect what you are'.4

Davison, Andrew. Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (pp. 85-86). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

The language of participation is nuanced. One has to be very careful to describe the direction of participation. God does not have being; God is being. Creation participates in God; God does not participate in the universe. Davison explains the reasoning behind this as follows:

The doctrine of simplicity confirms the sense of saying that the world has a ‘part in' God rather than that the world is ‘part of' God, since God does not have parts. A further analogy may be helpful here: that, in relation to creation, God is more like greenness itself – simple greenness – than like a green thing. We might imagine a plate of spinach. I can a take part of it and, in doing so, I decrease what is left. That is because what I have, and that from which I have it, are of the same order: they are both so much cooked plant. In contrast, we can say that the greenness of the spinach participates in the idea of greenness itself not by annexing a ‘part of' greenness but by having a ‘part in' greenness: the participation of the spinach in greenness does not diminish greenness itself. This analogy bears upon the discussion of material causation in Chapter 3: the spoonful of spinach relates to a mound of the vegetable materially, since the spinach is ‘that from which' the spoonful comes. That makes it a bad image for the relation of the world to God. On the other hand, the greenness of the vegetable relates to the idea of ‘greenness itself' not materially but formally, and one form is not diminished in imprinting itself on, and as, another.

Davison, Andrew. Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (p. 141). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

One important key I picked up from Davison is the “modus principle.” After two decades of reading Aquinas, I realized the significance of something that was always there. The modus principle is a core of the participatory outlook and teaches that things participate in God according to their mode of existence. Plants participate physically; man participates through reason (and physically, also.) Davison writes:

Many of the approaches to participation we have considered up to now come together in an idea that John Tomarchio has aptly called the modus principle.56 I will give it in its knotty form first, and then offer an explanation. It is the idea that when one thing is received into another, it comes to be present in the recipient in the manner (or ‘mode') of the recipient, and not in the native manner of its source. As Aquinas put it, ‘what is in another is in it according to the mode of the receiver'.57

At root, this modus principle embodies a metaphysical respectfulness for the character of things.58 The idea of revelation offers a theological example, where truth from God is mediated to human beings, to be received by them in a human way. On a more mundane scale, when I understand an apple, it comes to be in my mind in a mental way (according to the manner of the mind that understands it) rather than being present in the manner of the apple in its native state: that would have it in my brain in a physical way, much to my detriment.

Davison, Andrew. Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (pp. 150-151). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Davison reaffirms that causation is participation, which explains how finite creatures can participate in a transcendent God:

Instead of saying that God is either present as part of the substance of creatures or present merely accidentally, Aquinas turns to causation, writing that God is present to each creature ‘as an agent is present to that upon which it works'. Nothing is so intimate as the bond between a cause and an effect, and in this way God is present to creatures ‘immediate[ly]', as a cause is present to its effects. We can even call this a ‘touch', since causes touch their effects.69 This creative relation of creature to creator remains as long as the creature remains: ‘God causes this effect in things not only when they first begin to be, but as long as they are preserved in being; as light is caused in the air by the sun as long as the air remains illuminated.' Aquinas underlines this intimacy, writing that ‘being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things ... Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly [intime].' The final word there means ‘intimately', ‘closely', or ‘deeply'.

Davison, Andrew. Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (p. 154). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

“Nothing is so intimate as the bond between a cause and an effect” is an aphorism worthy of committing to memory.

Given the mode of reception, and the mode of being, which recognizes the finitude of created beings, such beings do not participate in God qua God. Rather they participate in a “likeness” of God, something that is analogous, albeit limited and finite found in God which comes from God. “Likeness is not identity.” (Id at 157.)

This provides another key to understanding “participation.” Creatures participate in God but God is also not participated in. This requires a historical turn; enter Iamblicus:

Once we reach the Neoplatonist Iamblicus (AD 245–325), that pairing is expanded to three terms, so as to emphasise the transcendence of the origin. We find an analysis of participation set out according to not only the participant and the participated, but also the unparticipated (améthekton), which is to say, the source. In that way, alongside the participant (metéchon), we can now distinguish between the source (améthekton) and what comes from it, which is now how metechómenon (what is participated in) is now understood. As an example, God as good and the source of goodness would be the améthekton, while the goodness that comes to be in the creature, from God but not as God, would now be the meaning of metechómenon.

One effect of this shift is to put the emphasis on the creature (the participant) and what comes to be in it (that which is participated), while drawing a veil over what it means for the participated quality to be as it is found in the source. We can know the metéchon and the metechómenon, but not the améthekton. This accords perfectly with what Aquinas would later write about participation, namely, that we know that something (goodness, for instance) comes from God to the creature, and we know what that means as it is encountered in the creature (as creaturely goodness), but we do not know what it means as it is in God (divine goodness), except that in God it is both perfect or eminent, and identical with every other perfection and with God's very self.

Davison, Andrew. Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (p. 156). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

So, God is Goodness itself. Goodness is shared with creation according to the mode of reception that creation is capable of, which is not transcendent and infinite. Creation, therefore, shares a likeness of the Goodness of God, but not God qua God. Creation is dependent on God for Goodness, i.e., if God shuts of the goodness faucet, there is no more goodness for creation. Therefore, Creation participates in God, but God does not participate in the universe.

Davison applies the “participatory outlook” to various theological issues, such as the Incarnation. The incarnation was sui generis; “no other event or state of being is like the incarnation.” (Id at p. 205.) The union of humanity and divinity is beyond prior religious imagination; it is unexpected; it is a gift; it is beyond the order of things but does not violate that order. (Id. at p. 206.) The participatory outlook helps to explain the relationship of human and divine:

The emphasis, in saying that the humanity of Christ did not previously exist as a concrete person, before its assumption by the Word (the anhypostasis and enhypostasis of the human nature), is to stress the priority of the divine Person, and the divine nature, over the human nature: the humanity of Christ has its being from God, not vice versa. That is participatory language. Here, against the often-suspicious attitude towards high Christology in the twentieth century, this participatory approach also serves to uphold the full humanity of Christ, not least in stressing that the humanity of Christ relates to God in the participatory ways in which any human being relates to God. One important aspect of that is to say that if it is characteristic for human beings to grow in their participation in God, then we must also say that of Christ as a human being. This is, indeed, the message of Luke's Gospel: ‘The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favour of God was upon him' (Luke 2.40).

Davison, Andrew. Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (p. 208). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

According to the modus principle, Christ's humanity received divinity according to the human mode of being:

In short, the fact that the humanity of Christ is the humanity of the Second Person does not make it any less human, and to be human is also to participate in God. His divine person and nature were in no way changed; nor did they substitute for anything that is human. As the later ecumenical councils of antiquity stressed, Christ must therefore be said to have two wills, one human and one divine, and two activities, not only one: in taking up a human nature, the Son took up all that belongs to a human nature.

Davison, Andrew. Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (p. 210). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

The participatory outlook also undercuts the currently popular “kenotic theology” which holds that the Son limited His divine powers during the Incarnation, an approach that respects neither the divine or human natures of Jesus. Davison observes:

At this juncture, it will suffice to point to the conflict between a participatory understanding, by which the life of Christ is the perfect manifestation of the divine life, and the kenotic sense that what is encountered in Christ is in some sense a truncation of God.

Davison, Andrew. Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (p. 212). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Davison turns to the subject of evil with the observation that “Badness, or evil, is not a likeness to God; it is a failure of something to bear the likeness to God proper to it.” (Id. at p. 239) “Evil is the failure of things to be properly what they should be, or to have what they out to have, and that can be baneful” (Id. at p. 239.)

This is a “time-loop” mystery with elements of romance. The main character wakes up with total amnesia and the memory of “Anna” being murdered. No one seems overly concerned as he goes through his day, has odd encounters with odd people, including someone dressed as a “plague doctor,” and reconstructs his life as a drug-pushing doctor.

And, then, he wakes up as someone else entirely.

Gradually, it emerges that he is living the same day as eight different people. The setting is Blackheath, an elegant but decaying English manor at which an indeterminate number of guests and servants are preparing for a party in honor of the return of the daughter of the lord and the lady of the manor. It seems like the temporal setting of the story was after World War I, but that isn't made clear. Some of the characters are unfamiliar with automobiles, which seems anachronistic.

We learn that the real name of the viewpoint character is Aiden Bishop and that he has been tasked with solving the mystery of “the murder which does not seem like a murder.” We also learn that there are other players to this game, namely, the “footman” who wants to kill Bishop's “hosts” and the mysterious Anna, who may be an ally or a competitor.

We follow Bishop as he tries to figure out what the mystery is. We then see his attempts to prevent the murder. Ultimately, late in the game, Bishop keys in on solving the mystery.

The mystery element was decent. There were clues that I could have used to anticipate the solution. I found it frustrating to follow the many characters who passed in and out of the story. If I had been a dedicated mystery reader, I would have started a list of names and drawn lines between the names to note their relationship, but I didn't have that kind of interest in the mystery.

The romance angle was weak. It seemed more stipulated than actual. We do see character development as personalities change, but why did they change so quickly. We learn that the characters have been playing this game for a long time, but the change in attitudes apparently happened in this loop, which seems without proper motivation.

The science fiction element is the weakest element of the story. We learn that the entire Blackheath scenario serves a penal purpose, but we are given no explanation about how it works. Was it time travel? Was it virtual reality? Hypnotism? There is no explanation. We are given no explanation about the world of the “present” from which the characters come. We get only enough information about the characters to make us sympathetic to them, well, two of them.

All in all, it was decent but not terrific reading experience.

This book examines the intellectual foundations of identity theory. Lindsay is the former CEO of the Center for Inquiry and of its affiliates, the Council for Secular Humanism and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. These projects reject religion, often with great hostility, which would tend to place them on the left in American politics. Since identity theory is a leftwing project, one might think that Lindsay would be sympathetic to identity politics.

However, Lindsay identifies himself as a “classical liberal.” He is a critic of identity politics. This underscores a fissure on the left between traditional liberals and leftists. Classical liberals adhere to one of the core tenets of liberalism, i.e., individualism. [1] Leftists go all in on collectivism in the form of racial/sexual/gender identities, subsuming the individual in the group identity. Having been canceled by their homeland, many classical liberals have taken refuge with conservatives, who share the core foundation of Enlightenment presuppositions, such as individualism and liberty.[2]
Lindsay steers clear of using the phrase “woke,” which he feels is as meaningless as the term “racist.” Instead, he speaks of “identity theory” or “critical race theory,” which he characterizes as being predicated on the following:

The new trinity of standpoint theory, the doctrine of systemic racism, and the equity mandate is bringing about radical and extensive changes in education, healthcare, employment, entertainment, law enforcement, and government policy.

Lindsay, Ronald A., Against the New Politics of Identity (p. 8).

Lindsay's discussion of “standpoint theory” is extremely informative. Lindsay explains standpoint theory as follows:

In a nutshell, standpoint theory holds that knowledge is rooted in and derives from a person's social circumstances and that those who are oppressed (by some criteria) are in a better position to acquire knowledge than those who are not. To use the standard jargon, all knowledge is “situated” and the oppressed are “epistemically privileged.”

Lindsay, Ronald A., Against the New Politics of Identity (p. 20).

Standpoint theory is Marxist in orientation. It is also responsible for much of the Woke nonsense....excuse me, “CRT nonsense”.....that posits that racial minorities and the oppressed have greater insights into scientific knowledge and/or scientific knowledge is not to be trusted to the extent that it says something that CRT theorists disagree with:

Sandra Harding, a leading and frequently cited proponent of a modified version of standpoint theory, has argued at length that the findings of natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology) are affected by bias, which cannot be recognized by the (male) scientists themselves, but only by the oppressed, and in this view she is definitely not alone: “Scientific knowledge, like other forms of knowledge is gendered. Science cannot produce cultural or gender-neutral knowledge.”4 As with sex, so too with race. There is no race-neutral knowledge. Even some aspects of physics are adversely affected by “white empiricism,” which is defined as the “specific practice of epistemic oppression paired with a willingness to ignore empirical data.”5 Moreover, “the presence of white empiricism involves a refusal to acknowledge that white supremacy has limited the scientific community's capacity for knowledge production.”

Lindsay, Ronald A.. Against the New Politics of Identity (pp. 21–22).

As with scientific knowledge, so it goes with sociology, psychology, or common sense. “Knowledge” is context-dependent. The context that controls is that of the “oppressed.” The “oppressed” is a group identity; therefore, the vanguard of the oppressed defines reality. The technical idea in CRT theory is that oppressed minorities have an “epistemic advantage,” which is why white people should just shut up and listen.

This permits a totalization of power on the part of Leftist leadership. It also gives a formula for Leftist proles to avoid the difficult project of thinking and responding to arguments:

Among the immediate consequences of accepting standpoint theory are that one can dismiss the positions and arguments of persons in the alleged dominant group (again, typically white men) as being based on an inadequate and distorted perspective. Moreover, one can dismiss their positions and arguments without engaging at any length with them. In other words, such individuals can be dismissed out of hand because they literally do not know what they are talking about. For adherents of standpoint theory, were a white man to address a conference focused on discussing best policies for securing women's rights, the first reaction from attendees should be, “Why is a white man talking to us?” One doesn't need to ponder at length the dynamics of this relationship to see how attractive it is - to the self-appointed advocates for the allegedly oppressed. Just as Marxists dismissed arguments questioning their economics or politics by labeling their opponents “bourgeois,” so the views of anyone who might demur from some claim put forth by one of today's spokespersons for the oppressed can be dismissed as “patriarchal,” “white supremacist,” or “heteronormative,” depending on the situation.

Lindsay, Ronald A.. Against the New Politics of Identity (pp. 26–27).

“Racist,” they shouted.

And that's why they do it.

A person's upbringing and social context can substantially influence what a person thinks is true. It is more than a bit of a fallacy to confuse what a person thinks is true with what is true. Likewise, it may well be the case that marginalized voices can bring a useful perspective to a subject. But it is fallacious to think that the “oppressed” are automatically more informed - that they have an epistemic advantage - because of their oppression. Their oppression may have nothing to do with the subject at hand. Further, it may well be the case that the “oppressed” form the wrong conclusions simply because they are too close to the issue. The fact that the aristocracy oppressed peasants did not mean that they had an epistemic advantage when they blamed the Jews for their problems.[3]

For the rest, go to https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/race-matters-you-dont-need-to-think-critically-about-race-because-we-ve-don-t-that-for-you-463fa74002d5

240704 Spectrum of a Forgotten Sun (Dumarest 15) by E.C. Tubb

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GVFQQOW?notRedirectToSDP=1&ref_=dbs_m_mng_rwt_calw_tkin_tmmp&storeType=ebooks



We are fifteen volumes into the Dumarest saga, and there are two things that you must keep in mind. First, Earl Dumarest wants to find his forgotten, mythical home planet of Earth. Second, he wants to stay away from the clutches of the galaxy spanning scientific-religious cult of the Cyclan.

This “pull/push” framing was a staple of television during the 1960s. Think of television series like The Fugitive, The Immortal, and The Invaders. The hero wanted to find something, which kept him moving around, and he needed to escape someone, which provided tension.

Tubb wrote the Dumarest saga during the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. So, he was undoubtedly swamped with that story-telling technique. In addition, his stories reek of film noir. Earl Dumarest is Phillip Marlow among the stars. He realizes that life is brutal, everyone lies, there is no morality, no one can be trusted, but he has an unfailing moral code where he will kill only the right person and only for the right reason, and he will be loyal to good people while recognizing the frauds.

Dumarest #15 finds Earl Dumarest on the losing end of a mercenary war. Faced with slavery or signing up for a long enlistment with the winners, Earl is rescued by the femme fatale, Dephine, who needs his help to steal a shipment from a warehouse. The pair find themselves riding High on a spaceship, which is afflicted by a plague. Earl is saved again by Dephine, who is naturally immune to the plague and concocts a serum. To pay the debt, Earl is then persuaded to take Dephine back to her home planet, Emijar.

Emijar is a typical society in Dumarest's universe. It is ruled by a decaying aristocracy of families. This aristocracy places a high value on personal honor, dueling, and earning manhood by hunting the dangerous Olcept. Dumarest has to fight for Dephine's honor. He also helps a crippled heir attain manhood. Most importantly, he gets another clue to locating the fabled Earth.

Does he stay with Dephine?

Do the Cyclan make an appearance on Emijar?

Does Dephine fulfill her role as femme fatale?

There are another twenty-two volumes left in the saga. You will have to read them to get your answer.

This book mixes several genres, including romance, fantasy, and science fiction, into its story. The gist of the story is that Ben meets Kate in approximately 2000 New York at the party of a wealthy Left-Wing political organizer. Kate is a kind of manic pixie dream girl of “Persian-Turkish-Hungarian” extraction, and Ben is “half Bengali, half Jewish.”

These things matter if you are trying to increase your points for “representation.”

Before you know it, Ben, who is working on a doctorate in geology, moves in with Kate.[1] Ben learns that Kate has a history of dreaming that she visits a medieval world called “Albion.” We soon learn that Kate is traveling in her dreams to the time of Good Queen Bess. While there, she is the courtesan of a wealthy noble and has an affair with “Sad Will.”

Of course, you know who “Sad Will” is.

Strangely, in Kate's, Shakespeare is unknown, having died in 1603 without writing any plays.
In her dreams, Kate intervenes with Shakespeare, who doesn't die in 1603. Instead, Shakespeare goes on to write plays that are remembered in Kate's time.

Unfortunately, the more Kate intervenes with Shakespeare, the more things get screwed up in her own time. Originally, she spoke French, and the Louisiana Purchase was made in the 1930s. Also, the president in 2000 was a Green Party candidate who danced in the streets with stereotypical ethnic votes that the Left trots out as props at speeches. As time goes on, Gore replaces President Chen and, then, nightmare! President Bushitler becomes President in time for 9/11, which is not the multicultural utopia Kate started in.

Kate's life takes a tumble. Everyone thinks she's crazy because her memories are different than what they should be. Ben leaves her. One friend stops being a brave, counter-cultural icon of diversity, inclusion, and equity and becomes a hooker....I mean, “sex worker.” Kate's parents' divorce. Her father disappears. Her brother is completely erased from history. Kate ends up becoming pregnant with the child of a gay home garden designer, although, in the original timeline, that was a role played by someone else.

Then we discover that a lot of people have this time-travel experience. Shakespeare had been traveling back to help Alexander the Great conquer Asia. Kate herself meets someone who claims that he is from a future where Kate becomes an influential community organizer.
But like her own personal life, it is all leading to total worldwide disaster.

How does it end?
 
 Who knows. We aren't told.

This book is in the nature of a fantasy-romance. We have romantic angles played out in the present and in the past. There is a typical romance trope of misunderstanding and miscommunication. No one understands what Kate is going through because no one believes she is going through it. Shakespeare understands initially, but at some point, he doesn't and cruelly rejects her. Kate's life is mostly about helping Shakespeare live up to her potential.

The book is more like a fantasy, e.g., travel through dreams. In the final part of the book, there is an information dump that explains that something incomprehensible-but scientific-happened in the future to cause this cascading of time-traveling identities through time. However, that is all mumbo-jumbo and hand-waving.

This book speaks to the feminization of science fiction. The main character does not have much autonomy. She mostly rolls along with the changes and spends no time trying to figure out a solution to her problem. The most science fiction part of the story-the future collapse of civilization-is shunted to the side.

For all that, it is not a bad book. It is well-written, and I enjoyed watching the changes occurring around Kate. I think this might be made into an entertaining movie. If your tolerance for romance is higher than mine, and given the success of Outlander, time-travel romance is very popular, then you will rate this book higher than I do.

A final point about “representation.” I have seen several reviews on YouTube that make “representation” a separate category along with plot and character. It seems to matter to people to know that there are X many gay characters or X many black characters and how they are portrayed.
I think that kind of bean counting is silly at best and regressive at worst. Why not bean count based on religion? How about hair color? How is the representation of Republicans? Bean counting is simply a way of politicizing the discussion to one side's advantage by defining what beans get counted.

But if we play the “representation” bean counting game, we might want to note some of the underrepresented groups that the bean counters ignore, such as “Americans.”

In this book, there are no positive portrayals of any non-leftist American. All the characters are Leftwing and, as such, are assumed to be Good People. On the other hand, toward the end of the book, the wealthy Leftwing political organizer invests in West Virginia to turn West Virginia purple.
We get these kinds of observations:

 It was in West Virginia, in an ex–coal region. For hundreds of miles around, the people were white, xenophobic, open carry, evangelical. Sabine had bought the neighborhood to test-drive a strategy for turning poor red states into swing states by talking to every single person there.
Newman, Sandra. The Heavens: A Novel (p. 234). Grove Atlantic. Kindle Edition.

And:

 “White privilege is kind of my cocaine.” Then she talked about privilege, self-castigatingly, gloomily, and fell silent. Ben turned the radio on. They listened to a Christian station denouncing the Red Cross as Satanic. On the hills, billboards began to appear, which exhorted them to protect America and scolded them about the horrors of abortion. Meanwhile, the sun went down in fits and starts. Long after night appeared to have fallen, they would crest a hill and find another purple remnant of dusk backlighting the farther trees, while the people on the radio quoted Isaiah and assured each other that they, too, had at first found it hard to believe.
Newman, Sandra. The Heavens: A Novel (p. 238). Grove Atlantic. Kindle Edition.

How nuanced! No stereotypes here! No treating a diverse native culture as the Other by imposing a parochial contemptuous colonizing attitude on the Natives.

Sure, one could find these elements in this culture, but then one can find cliches and expected stereotypes in any culture. But the culture that Newman and Leftwing urban characters come from - and with the DEI bean counters reflect - is supposed to be above and better than this kind of racist/colonializing stereotyping.
 
 Unless it fits the prejudice of the Good People who live in the vibrant and diverse culture they approve of.[2]

Newman blames the West Virginians she characterizes as “xenophobic” without realizing that she is afflicted by the same disease. She suffers from xenophobia, except the “xenos” in her case are people living in the rural areas of her own country. We can call her xenophobia “oikophobia.” [3]

This book did not sell itself to me. The smug contempt of her attitude to the Other Americans did not help.

Footnotes:

[1] The doctorate in Geology is an unfired Chekhov's gun. It is mentioned and then forgotten. It has nothing to do with the story, although since this is nominally a science fiction story, it probably should have. If you are an experienced science fiction reader, a degree in science is a road flare.

[2] After Trump's 2016 victory there was some interest by some Leftists in determining what had gone wrong and why they were so out of touch with so much of America. This was a short-lived genre since Leftists determined that the answer was that Trump had stolen the election with Russian help. However, one of the better entries in this mini-genre was White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America by Joan C. Williams. Williams acknowledged that there was a class difference with the Left constituting the “Professional Managerial Elites” and the unwashed deplorables constituting the “White Working Class.” The PME despised the WWC on the level of social class. It is now June 2024 and the polling in the Trump-Biden election indicates that the four years of Biden have exacerbated this difference with even larger percentages of the working class of ALL races favoring Trump. The PME has attempted to racialize the issue but it appears that class is overtaking that effort.

[3] “Oikophobia” is the fear or hatred of one's own culture. The term was coined by British philosopher Roger Scruton in 2004, in his book England and the Need for Nations, who called oikophobia “the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours.'“

But is this really what's going on? Do we think that Newman or her Good People think that the unwashed Christian, White Xenophobes of West Virginia are part of her culture? I don't think she does. They might be content to see this culture wiped out by a plague, which is why she may be so disinterested in the coming end of the world...

William Abbey is a doctor who is exiled to South Africa before the Boer War because of a failed romance. While there, he witnesses a lynching. Because he did nothing to help, the victim's mother curses him with the “True Speaker's Curse,” which involves being able to see the truth of other people and the inability not to share that truth with others, sort of like a supernatural Tourette's Syndrome. The real downside of this curse is that the truth compulsion gets stronger when the spirit of the lynched boy (“Langa”) gets closer to him. Langa pursues Abbey, hence the title of the book. When Langa touches Abbey, someone who Abbey loves dies.

The story follows thirty years of Abbey's relentless travels to stay ahead of Langa. During that time, Abbey becomes a British intelligence asset. Since he is an upper-class white man, he can enter European polite society and get the truth on all manner of diplomatic dealings.

Abbey becomes a pawn and counter pawn of other intelligence services. He meets other people suffering from the same curse. He is frustrated in his efforts to find a cure. He falls in love with another cursed Truth Speaker working for a Socialist/Democratic revolutionary movement.

Ultimately, he ends up in a hospital near the front-line during World War I. It is here that we understand that he intends to close out his account with the person he believes has betrayed him. It is from this final situation that the story is told in a series of flashbacks to a Nightingale Nurse.

I was not impressed by this book. The characters were not sympathetic. North goes out of her way to impress on us Abbey's own view that he is a loser and craven. It is not clear that he is since he seems to roll with the punches. Also, it wasn't clear why Abbey was singled out for the curse. It seems that it would have been more appropriate for the mother to have cursed one of the actual murderers. North obviously wanted Abbey to be unsympathetic but not too unsympathetic – which he would have been if he had participated in the lynching.

But why not? And this raises the second problem which is the absence of a story arc. It would have been far more interesting to see Abbey as a lyncher who worked to redeem himself, than what we do see, which is Abbey as a kind of zero who never moves off zero. Abbey finds himself trapped in precarious positions on two occasions, and on both occasions, a female character mysteriously rescues him. One was paid off, certainly, but the motivation for the second seems to have been an insulted professional pride. These are perhaps plausible from a plot standpoint, but the overall effect is to make Abbey a passive and annoying figure.

The element of conflict was also muted. There was initially the issue of Abbey versus Langa, but that was quickly dealt with by Abbey staying ahead of Langa. Then, there was a brief episode of Abbey v Ritte – another intelligence asset – but that was taken care of. Ultimately, the story ends with Abbey versus someone who morphed into the enemy about 80% of the way through the story. It was almost as if North needed some reason to end the story.

The ending was not really a conclusion. It was more of an image of two men stumbling through the bullets and bombs of a World War I front line. It seemed that North had this image of an ending and wrote the final chapters to get there.

The book is well-written and readable. Somebody in a better state of mind will probably get much more out of it.

An Ordinary Man's Rather Long Letter to God by Robert Garland

This book will make you dumber by reading it. It is part of the “New Atheist” oeuvre, published 20 years after New Atheism went past its “sell by” date.

This is a very disappointing book. I have been watching Robert Garland's presentations on the Great Courses. Garland is an emeritus professor at Colgate University. He does courses on daily life in ancient Greece and Rome. He is currently doing a course on Polytheism and Monotheism, which I am watching. Garland has a winsome delivery, and I trusted him to be delivering factually accurate material.

Now, I am not so sure.

I was willing to put up with Garland's approach in this book, where he claims to be just asking questions. The questions are shallow, and he exhibits not the least scintilla of charity when it comes to presenting the Christian position as anything other than a strawman. He quotes several sources to set up his chapters or as provocative springboards for launching into some thought, but they are invariably atheists, not only atheists but New Atheists. On the other hand, on the other side, he quotes Richard Bauckham – which is fair enough – and there is one quotation from Aristotle. Aquinas, Augustine, or the other great Christian thinkers go completely missing, even though he raises what he thinks are new and unanswered question about Christology. It is entirely weird that a professor of antiquity is not aware or interested in the fact that his questions were answered in antiquity.

I always question whether I am being uncharitable but there was a particular weird and obnoxious set-piece that convinced me that Garland is singularly ignorant about the subject he is writing on. At one point, Garland writes:

Perhaps we should start with how Your son came into the world. Even as a child I had a very hard time believing in the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth. The Immaculate Conception is the belief that the BVM was conceived without sex, whereas the Virgin Birth – a better term would be “virginal conception” – is the belief that the BVM gave birth to Jesus without having sex[lxxxviii].

Garland, Robert. An Ordinary Man's Rather Long Letter to God (p. 96). Kindle Edition.

Note that Garland actually wrote: “The Immaculate Conception is the belief that the BVM was conceived without sex......”

I will grant that a lot of people confuse the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth, often thinking that the Immaculate Conception has to do with the virginal conception of Jesus. It doesn't take much fact checking to discover that the Immaculate Conception involves the conception of the Virgin Mary, who Catholic doctrine teaches was conceived without original sin. It doesn't take much in the way of research skills to go to the Catholic Catechism and learn:

491 Through the centuries the Church has become ever more aware that Mary, “full of grace” through God,134 was redeemed from the moment of her conception. That is what the dogma of the Immaculate Conception confesses, as Pope Pius IX proclaimed in 1854:

The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin.135

http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p122a3p2.htm

The Immaculate Conception had nothing to do with the absence of sex. It had to do with the absence of original sin.

I was going to be charitable to Garland and assume that this was a typo. Perhaps Garland meant to type “sin,” not “sex”

However, two paragraphs later Garland lays this abomination on us:

In addition, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and of the Virgin Birth remove the messiness of sex from the equation, and we all know what Christianity thinks about sex. So, we don't have to think of the BVM or her mother screaming, “God, oh God, oh my God!” in the throes of ecstasy, as the BVM conceives Jesus or her mother conceives the BVM.

Garland, Robert. An Ordinary Man's Rather Long Letter to God (p. 97). Kindle Edition.

Garland actually doubles down and tells the reader that the purpose of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is to let Christians, presumably only Catholics since Protestants don't accept that doctine, not think about the mother of Mary having an orgasm.

So, Garland was quite serious when he instructed his readers that the Immaculate Conception involved the mother of Mary conceiving without sex.

This is ignorance on steroids. Garland is a professor. He is writing a book that is highly critical of Catholicism and Christian doctrine and he gets something basic like this completely wrong. Needless to say, if he gets this wrong, what else does he get wrong.

Beyond the Garland's ignorance, there is Garland's creepy shallowness. He assumes that Catholics don't want to think about Mary or her mother having an orgasm. With respect to Mary's mother, we know sex was involved.
We can all hope that Mary's parents, St. Joachim and St. Anna, orgasmed contently in conceiving their daughter.

As for Mary being overlain by the Holy Spirit, that sounds like a mystical experience, and mystical experiences are often quite ecstatic. If Garland got out of his narrow comfort zone, he could read bona fide Christian texts like “The Dark Night of the Soul” and “The Song of Songs” on this point.

And does Garland often think about whether his mother had an orgasm on the night he was conceived? Is that a big issue for him? This is creepy projection on his part about his own potential hang-ups; it has nothing to do with Christian doctrine.

Garland's view of God is a complete strawman. Garland does not seem to be acquainted with Augustine, Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, Dionysius the Areopagite, or Aquinas, none of whom gets a mention, although Dawkins is cited like Holy Writ. In contrast to orthodox Christianity, Garland seems to treat the Christian God as another being in the world, rather than being itself on a completely different plane of existence.

He explains the Incarnation as being motivated by God's desire to experience existence from within as if God's omniscience was somehow limited. He does not seem to know the many Christian theologians who reasoned that God was immanent within existence in that God's knowledge and will brings and keeps everything into existence.

Garland treats God as a being with limited bandwidth, who is overtaxed by having to monitor trivia:

They seem to think You're equipped with an insatiable appetite for trivia, as well as with an inexhaustible passion for judging absolutely everything that everyone does or merely idly thinks about. Bor-ing is what I say. Surely variety is the spice of eternity? I also think it makes You look rather, well, for want of a better word, like a lower-level administrator.

Garland, Robert. An Ordinary Man's Rather Long Letter to God (p. 28). Kindle Edition.

Good grief, this is lame. Aquinas answered this nonsense in the 13th Century:

For God knows things not by receiving anything from them, but, rather, by exercising His causality on them. Hence, since God is of an infinite power in understanding, as is clear from what has preceded,1 His knowledge must extend even to the most remote things. But the gradation of nobility and lowliness among all things is measured according to their nearness to and distance from God, Who is at the peak of nobility. Therefore, because of the perfect power of His intellect, God knows the lowliest possible among beings.

Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Contra Gentiles: Book One: God (p. 232). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.

In other words, God is not some person looking down from Heaven who might not notice what you are doing in the bathroom. God is causing your existence at all times, which means that his knowledge extends to the things he causes, which includes you in the bathroom. Maybe that creeps you out, but that's the logic of the argument.

Concerning the “bandwidth problem” this is what Aquinas had to say:

[5] Again, the lowliness of the things known does not of itself redound to the knower. For it belongs to the nature of knowledge that the knower should contain the species of the thing known according to his own manner. Accidentally, however, the lowliness of the things known can redound to the knower. This may be either because, while he is considering lowly things, his mind is turned away from thinking of more noble things; or it may be because, as a result of considering lowly things, he is inclined towards certain unbefitting affections. This, however, is not possible in God, as is clear from what has been said.4 The knowledge of lowly things, therefore, does not detract from the divine nobility, but rather belongs to the divine perfection according as it precontains all things in itself, as was shown above.5

Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Contra Gentiles: Book One: God (p. 233). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.

God is not going to be distracted by considering one thing rather than another; in fact, he considers all things at all times. Moreover, it is not as if God is going to be attacted by lowly things.

Garland then floats this blimp:


How likely is it that Universe exists solely for the sake of human beings? Not very. And if it doesn't, that will be a very big disappointment for all the world's religions. It means that lots and lots of dogs have been barking up lots and lots of wrong trees for millennia.

Garland, Robert. An Ordinary Man's Rather Long Letter to God (p. 93). Kindle Edition.

I am sure that this sounds pretty sophisticated relying as it does on the presumed naivety of “ignorant Christians.” The problem with this bit of nonsense is that this is a strawman. It is not what classical Christianity teaches. Here is Aquinas again:

Moreover, the good of the order of the universe is more noble than any part of the universe, since the individual parts are ordered, as to an end, to the good of the order that is in the whole.

Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Contra Gentiles: Book One: God (p. 232). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.

Got that? The good of the order of the universe is more noble than any part of the universe. This means that the order of the universe as a whole is higher than human beings. This was taught in the 13th century, but Garland builds a strawman that has nothing to do with anything more than what he thinks the people he holds in contempt think.

Sad, really.

Here is another bit of “deep thinking” that Aquinas answered in the 13th century:

If You do have friends, who are they, apart from Moses? Are all good people Your friends? And how many is that? At least 144,000 according to the Book of Revelation.[xiv] But how can anyone, even You, be friends with 144,000? Don't You like certain people more than others, even if they're all good? And don't You like some bad people more than You like some conventionally good people?

Garland, Robert. An Ordinary Man's Rather Long Letter to God (pp. 17-18). Kindle Edition.

The answer is that God loves everyone equally but that some people get greater gifts which is tantamount to a greater love in practical effect:

I answer that, Since to love a thing is to will it good, in a twofold way anything may be loved more, or less. In one way on the part of the act of the will itself, which is more or less intense. In this way God does not love some things more than others, because He loves all things by an act of the will that is one, simple, and always the same. In another way on the part of the good itself that a person wills for the beloved. In this way we are said to love that one more than another, for whom we will a greater good, though our will is not more intense. In this way we must needs say that God loves some things more than others. For since God's love is the cause of goodness in things, as has been said (Article 2), no one thing would be better than another, if God did not will greater good for one than for another.

https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1020.htm#article3

Notice the difference in approach between Aquinas and Garland. Aquinas defines the issue and then analyzes it. Garland makes uncharitable assumptions and then reasons like a shallow seventh grader.

None of this means that anyone has to accept Aquinas. The point is that Garland's essential picture that Christianity has never addressed his questions is entirely false. If you've spent any time reading Augustine, Dionysius, or Aquinas, you realize how shallow and childish Garland's approach is.
Beyond that, for all his winsomeness, Garland is a “wanker.” He forefronts his own nasty, narrow bigotry as it suits him, and then he preaches tolerance. No one has to believe in Catholic saints, of course, but is it too much to ask that something other than a strawman be presented? That would be the fair approach, but New Atheists were never interested in fairness. This is what Garland writs about Catholic saints:

Talking about saints, here's the first question I want to put to You. Has the Catholic Church correctly identified the very best people who have ever lived or even the very best Christians or, more limited still, even the very best Catholics? Surely there must be one or two crooks and lowlifes among the 5,120, whom the Church, in its less than infinite wisdom, has sanctified?

Garland, Robert. An Ordinary Man's Rather Long Letter to God (p. 11). Kindle Edition.

Of course, saints are not the “best persons.” They are persons who are in Heaven. There are saints you would not invite to dinner. But all saints had some love of God that was recognized as exceptional.

Was Maximillien Kolbe – who traded places with a man going to a starvation cell – the “best person”? Not but his love for his fellow man was exceptional.

Was St. Damien of Molokai – who took care of lepers until he contracted leprosy – the best person? Maybe not, but there is something there that we ought to admire. [Read this defense of Father Damien to slanderous attacks on him. http://forum.catholic.org/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=64389 ]

If Garland has a problem with someone, let's hear it. Instead, he relies on Catholic baiting, inviting other anti-Catholics to share in the joke. He double downs throughout the book with cliché attacks on the priest scandal, supposed Catholic hostility to sex, hostility to homosexuality, and various imagined Catholic crimes throughout the ages. None of this has anything substantive to with his thesis, but it must feel empowering to lash out in this way.

The problem for me is how I assess Garland's other work in light of this weak and misleading book. If doesn't know what the Immaculate Conception is, why should I trust him as a scholar on anything.

The Blighted Stars (The Devoured Worlds Book 1) by Megan E. O'Keefe


I am giving this a solid four out of five stars for the science fiction, and then subtracting a star for the Romance.

Megan O'Keefe has penned a solid adventure story set in a unique future with characters who face some unique problems. Her story fires on all cylinders from the start as we placed on one of the two star ships approaching a planet called “Sixth Cradle.” Things immediately fall apart as one ship fires on the other ship, which is beset by a problem involving “misprinting” crew members. A handful of crew members abandon ship. Their shuttle discovers that the planet is already in the grips of the Death Shroud lichen, which kills off all plant life native to the planet. The expedition is headed by the Tarquin Mercator — heir to the Mercator dynasty — who does not know that the EX who is supposed to protect him is his deadly enemy Naira Sharp, who has been printed into the EX body for nefarious reasons.

WTF?

There is a lot going on here, and virtually none of it gets explained up front. Yet, the confusion and ambiguity is part of the charm of this book.

We discover through the book, that habitable planets are called “cradles.” Somehow all cradles, and the Earth, have been infected with the Death Shroud lichen, which causes complete ecological collapse within months of introduction. How the Death Shroud lichen gets introduced to planetary ecosystems, and where it came from, are mysteries.

In addition, science has discovered the key to uploading people's memories, personalities, and experiences onto “maps,” which can then be loaded into “printed” bodies. How that happens is not explained, but it allows society to resurrect people and confer immortality.

Society has been hegemonized by six or seven mercantile families that control this high-tech and have areas of specialization. The Mercator family specializes in building starships and mining Relkalite. Relkalite is a miraculous mineral used in building the shield of starship warp cores and in the “pathways” that are installed into “prints.” These pathways improve the printed bodies' strength, stamina, or dexterity.

Relkatite is mined with the Canus fungus, which was found on Venus.

That turns out to be important.

The story has an impressive science fiction component. Tarquin has to figure out what's going on with the Sixth Cradle. How did it get infected? What happened with the ships? What is causing the “misprints,” essentially bodies without human souls loaded into them? He has to do this while facing a dangerous planet loaded with dangerous misprints and no food. This part of the story was wildly successful. The story moves along at a fast clip, and we get answers to the mysteries.

You might think that Tarquin was the story's hero, but you would be wrong. The hero is Naira Sharp, an “iced” Ex, who is a stone-cold killer, and impossibly attractive. An “Ex,” aka “EX” or “E-X,” is a bodyguard with hair-trigger reflexes and killer instincts wired by pathways into their bodies. I assumed that Sharp was a fireplug of a creature, but given Tarquin's infatuation with her, I began to assume that she was built more like Sydney Sweeney.

Sharp is dangerous, beautiful, commanding, misunderstood, and courageous. She is the Mary Sue of Mary Sue.

Her introduction turned this science fiction story into a Romance with all of the tropes of Romance. Tarquin is a gentleman, but he is drawn to this person, who he does not know is the person he testified against for claiming that the Mercators had created the Death Shroud plague. She knows and hates him. But he's cute and noble, and her ice shell begins to thaw. He realizes that he cannot compromise her, but he knows that she is literally “incredible.”[1]

She hates him, but she likes him. She's so confused. Can these two crazy kids ever say what they feel? Just when they do, they are torn away, and her memories are wiped.

I don't read Romances, but I've seen at least one Romance in the process of being written, and I learned that the misunderstanding, sulking, drama, and changing emotions at the backbone of the genre.

I hated it.

Other people like Romance. Their fantasy is not to solve the death of planets but to be so adored that they can act like brats—brats with the ability to kill dozens—and still be forgiven.

I liked the science-fiction element of this book a lot. If that's all there was, I would be signing up for Book 2. But I did not like the Romance element at all. Frankly, I found the Romance far less believable than the Science Fiction, and I did not believe that fungus could become sentient.

Eventually, the story becomes about the mineral (Relkatite) and the fungus (Canus) as the McGuffins of the story. If you are interested in what that is about, you must read the book.

It wasn't a bad story. If you are in the possession of two X chromosomes or are oriented in that direction, you will probably find the story exceptional.

Footnote:

[1] We know this because Tarquin tells his mother that very thing!

“Naira was right,” Tarquin snapped. “She's not vile. She's incredible.”

O'Keefe, Megan E.. The Blighted Stars (The Devoured Worlds Book 1) (p. 417). Orbit. Kindle Edition.

Lectures on the Christian Sacraments the procatechesis and the five mystagogical catecheses ascribed to st cyril of Jerusalem of Jerusalem, Cyril by Maxwell E. Johnson


https://www.amazon.com/Lectures-Christian-Sacraments-Procatechesis-Mystagogical-ebook/dp/B07BFPV1V1/ref=sr_1_1?crid=FVQJRW6CFGE&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.mit5LrKx95Lx3yL3ur1nkWl2pyM0CWuThaY7XcIDpSo49QULByYX9QX0Ri2XHYnsVLQBYo5_3H0fGC8-v90-vOuRVo_arCht5_ivDxss_TE.Fc8WRKgN_YraBdYilxNrVc3mCk8ggS_8HpLNph3MKbI&dib_tag=se&keywords=Lectures+on+the+Christian+Sacraments&qid=1717874324&s=digital-text&sprefix=lectures+on+the+christian+sacraments%2Cdigital-text%2C248&sr=1-1




Repeat after me....

4 After this the priest cries out, “Lift up your hearts.” For truly in that awe-filled hour it is necessary to have our hearts up toward the Lord, and not below with regard to the earth and earthly activities. For this reason the priest exhorts you with authority in that hour to leave behind all everyday cares and household worries and to have your hearts in heaven with the God who is the lover of humanity. Next, you answer, “We have [lifted] them to the Lord,” having made by this your agreement with him according to what you confessed. But let not such a one enter who with the mouth says, “We have [lifted] them up to the Lord,” but whose thoughts in his mind are focused on everyday cares. Always, then, keep God in mind! But if, on account of human weakness, you are not able to do this, try to do it especially in that hour.
5 Next, the priest says, “Let us give thanks to the Lord.” For rightly we are bound to give thanks, that he has called us, being unworthy, to such great grace, that, being enemies, he has reconciled us, and that he has made us worthy of the “Spirit of divine adoption” (cf. Rom 8.15). Next, you say, “It is right and just.” For by our giving thanks we do a right and just thing. But our Benefactor did not do only a just thing but more than just by making us worthy of such great love.

of Jerusalem, Cyril. Lectures on the Christian Sacraments: The Procatechesis and the Five Mystagogical Catecheses Ascribed to St Cyril of Jerusalem (Greek and English Edition) ... Patristics) (Popular Patristics Series) (p. 78). St. Vladimirs Seminary Press. Kindle Edition.

For some of my readers, this is going to be very familiar.

In fact, tomorrow, they will these lines and recite the corresponding response.

They will have no idea that the lines they will recite are the same lines that are found in an ancient manual on the meaning of the liturgy to explain an ancient liturgy. The manual's dating is uncertain, some scholars date it back to 330 AD, others to 490 AD. Whatever the date, modern American Catholics will be using on Sunday the same call and response - and form of liturgy - used by their Greek speaking ancestors almost two-thousand years ago.

The manual is actually a series of lectures given to newly baptized Christians. The lectures represent “mystagogy” – teaching about the divine mysteries – in the rites of baptism and chrismation that the believers have just gone through. The mystagogy also explains the liturgy and the Eucharist.

There is a lot of value here fore modern Catholics who probably don't know their faith, and almost certainly don't appreciate how deep their faith goes back into history.

This is a short read, encompassing four short paragraphs. The provenance of the text is not clear. Efforts are made to link the text to Cyril of Jerusalem or his successor, but this connection may not exist, particularly if the text dates to a century after their deaths. The text was used in other church.

The introductory material gave me some insights I hadn't possessed previously. For example, Jerusalem was one of the five leading patriarchates in early Christendom, including Antioch, Alexandria, Rome, and Constantinople. However, Jerusalem was unoccupied for a long period after the disaster of the Bar Kochbar Rebellion, and then became an exclusively pagan city. When Jerusalem emerged as a Christian center it was within the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan of Caesarea. In 325, Canon 7 f the Council of Nicea, promoted Jerusalem to a position of special honor. So, interestingly, two of the five historic patriarchs were established (or re-established) after the apostles.)

Those who want to think that transubstantiation was a late medieval invention will be inconvenienced by this text. These mystagogical lectures affirm transubstantiation without its Aristotelian nomenclature. Thus:

1 And this teaching of blessed Paul should prove to be sufficient to give you full assurance about the divine mysteries, of which you were made worthy when you became members of “the same body” (Eph 3.6) and blood of Christ. For he has just declared: “That in the night in which our Lord Jesus Christ was betrayed, taking bread and having given thanks, he broke [it] and gave [it] to his disciples, saying: ‘This is my body.' And taking the cup, and having given thanks, said: ‘Take, drink, this is my blood'” (cf. 1 Cor 11.23–25). Therefore, since he himself said plainly about the bread, “This is my body,” who will dare to cast doubts from now on? And he, having also confirmed and said, “This is my blood,” who will ever doubt, saying, “It is not his blood?”

of Jerusalem, Cyril. Lectures on the Christian Sacraments: The Procatechesis and the Five Mystagogical Catecheses Ascribed to St Cyril of Jerusalem (Greek and English Edition) ... Patristics) (Popular Patristics Series) (p. 74). St. Vladimirs Seminary Press. Kindle Edition.

And:

3 So with every assurance, we receive as of the body and blood of Christ. For in the figure of bread is the body given to you, and in the figure of wine the blood is given to you, in order that, having received the body and blood of Christ, you may become [his] one body and one blood of Christ. For in this way we become “Christ-bearers,” his body and his blood having been given into our bodily members. Thus, according to blessed Peter, we become “sharers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1.4).

of Jerusalem, Cyril. Lectures on the Christian Sacraments: The Procatechesis and the Five Mystagogical Catecheses Ascribed to St Cyril of Jerusalem (Greek and English Edition) ... Patristics) (Popular Patristics Series) (p. 74). St. Vladimirs Seminary Press. Kindle Edition.

It is interesting that the author of the Lectures refers to the bread as the “figure” – or perhaps “form” - of the body. Likewise, the author cautions newly-received Christians not to be deceived by their eyes and taste:

6 Stop, therefore, considering the bread and wine to be ordinary; for they are body and blood according to the Lord who made the declaration. For even if your senses suggest this to you, let faith confirm you. Do not judge this by taste, but be informed without doubt from faith that you have been made worthy of the body and blood of Christ.

of Jerusalem, Cyril. Lectures on the Christian Sacraments: The Procatechesis and the Five Mystagogical Catecheses Ascribed to St Cyril of Jerusalem (Greek and English Edition) ... Patristics) (Popular Patristics Series) (p. 75). St. Vladimirs Seminary Press. Kindle Edition.

To put a knife into the symbolic perspective, the author writes:

9 Having learned and being informed, namely, that what appears to be bread is not bread—even if that is suggested by taste—but it is the body of Christ, and that that which appears to be wine is not wine—even if this is suggested by taste—but it is the blood of Christ.

of Jerusalem, Cyril. Lectures on the Christian Sacraments: The Procatechesis and the Five Mystagogical Catecheses Ascribed to St Cyril of Jerusalem (Greek and English Edition) ... Patristics) (Popular Patristics Series) (p. 76). St. Vladimirs Seminary Press. Kindle Edition.

As with Catholics today, the Lord's prayer was an integral part of the liturgy. The author of the Lectures offers an explanation of the prayer. This reflection on the importance of “daily bread” – actually “supersubstantial bread” – is worth noting:

15 “Give us today our super-substantial bread.” The bread that is common is not super-substantial. But this holy bread is super-substantial, on account of which it is ordered to the substance of the soul. For this bread does not go into the stomach to be passed out into the latrine (Mk 7.19), but it goes into every part of your being for the advantage of both body and soul. And by “today” he means every day, as also Paul has said: “as long as it is called ‘today'” (Heb 3.13).

of Jerusalem, Cyril. Lectures on the Christian Sacraments: The Procatechesis and the Five Mystagogical Catecheses Ascribed to St Cyril of Jerusalem (Greek and English Edition) ... Patristics) (Popular Patristics Series) (p. 80). St. Vladimirs Seminary Press. Kindle Edition.

I have seen Protestant apologists and scholars who will offer up Ratramnus in the ninth century and Berengar of Tours in the eleventh century to suggest that transubstantiation was an “open question.” Of course, those two figures were quickly canceled and their ideas was assigned to dustbin of history, until the Protestant Reformation. One can see why this occurred when one reflects on the fact that the Christian Church had been teaching as official doctrine for centuries the uniform position that “what appears to be read is not bread.”

It is almost as if Newman's canard that “to be deep into history is to cease to be Protestant” has some merit.

The Naked Neanderthal by Ludovic Slimak

https://www.amazon.com/Naked-Neanderthal-Understanding-Human-Creature-ebook/dp/B0C7RNLJ66/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1Y3IVGCW79A56&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.raVHePqviZQBMdHITyitiiX4aYSOj8wex-ockuZLBXfQ47HdQ8j_Hwk9b15HG8aHzS24AFM5r5BXVbJ1MxqsRSTuY8gd_oAL0drCgYec7R7M1D5-tXPBDw4ADWdr7Nj62qRGXneIuHPNs4eu66YhyQ.4cH3bEaQjLxVkbSDFTpmVX05zJAO60ed3_2G2RxusHU&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+naked+neanderthal&qid=1717817649&s=digital-text&sprefix=the+naked+neanderthal%2Cdigital-text%2C217&sr=1-1

In this book, paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak promises to show that Neanderthals were a distinctly different kind of humanity than homo sapiens. Slimak notes that the two species are separated by at least a half million years of divergent evolution and that it would stand to reason that they were different creatures with substantially different perspectives on reality.

Given the popular depiction of neanderthals in the modern popular media, this approach is revisionist. Neanderthals are now presented as something almost identical to sapien humanity, as if mentioning differences would be racist. Neanderthal physical differences is downplayed such that Neanderthals could pass for sapien in an urban setting. Even the Neanderthal extinction is treated almost as if the neanderthals didn't go extinct; they just married into the sapien family.

By the end of this book, Slimak sorts this out in a tour de force, but it is slow getting there. By about 70% of the book, I was not sure that Slimak was going to offer anything but the conventional tropes.

In the first 705 of the book, we learn that that there may have been a Neanderthal community in the Siberian polar regions that lasted until 28,000 years ago, approximately 14,000 years after Neanderthals disappeared from Europe. This is interesting but not revolutionary. We also learn that Neanderthals probably were not cannibals, at least not because of environmental stress. Again, this seems to be part of the trope that Neanderthal was just like us.

But 70% of the way into the book, Slimak kicks into high gear.

First, he debunks Neanderthal art. Slimak points out that scientists have not discovered the first hole in any object that might have been used to string together shells, beads, or other adornments. We have examples of these kinds of things in sapien archeological sites, but not Neanderthal. The reports of shells with holes in them are artifacts created by crabs.

Likewise, while we can find figurines and undisputed artwork among sapien sites, we have not found anything similar at Neanderthal sites.

Similarly, much has been made about bird feathers being found at Neanderthal sites, but remains of bird feathers have been found at more primitive hominid locations. Further, it turns out that the attachment points of bird feathers have been known by Innuits to contain locations of fats that are easily sucked out for nutrition.

So, there are either no indications of Neanderthal art or not enough to matter. In comparison with Sapiens, this is a substantial difference.

More significant and surprising for me was weaponry. Neanderthal stone crafting techniques had “remarkably few weapons” in their inventory, i.e. tools that were designed solely for killing game. Slimak notes:

We can pose this hypothesis because it seems that the Neanderthals had remarkably few weapons. Take any series of tens of thousands of flint objects from any Neanderthal collection and you will find only the very occasional weapon. I would even go so far as to say that you will find them only if you really look hard for them. As objects they are consistently heavy, oddly shaped and often lacking in any technical refinement. At best, assuming they are indeed weapons, we are talking about ends of lances that would be used for stabbing rather than throwing. This has been discussed in a number of recent studies, which have come to somewhat binary conclusions. The frantic quest for Neanderthal weapons is rather like the quest for Neanderthal art: a tenuous project, as we discussed earlier.

Slimak, Ludovic. The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature (p. 174). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.

And:
direction. Despite a systematic search for weapons in some very well-endowed archaeological ensembles, the fact that such objects are so rare suggests that weapon production was a very marginal activity for the Neanderthals. The question of Neanderthal weapons remains little understood to this day. The picture we get is one of rudimentary technologies based on the production of massive lances or javelins that required a close contact with the game being hunted. The hunt would have been carried out using a lance and would have involved the hunters approaching their prey and taking them on at close quarters. In Mandrin as elsewhere, when we discover arms in the Neanderthal layers, they are always massive objects and would have been used as pole weapons.

Slimak, Ludovic. The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature (pp. 174-175). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.

In contrast:

When we look for sapiens arms, just a cursory glance at any collection will reveal a large number of objects that could potentially be used for hunting purposes. In Neanderthal collections, you need to dissect huge corpora of flint pieces to uncover the odd vaguely diagnostic trace of weapon use. The rarity of arms in the Neanderthal archive is striking.

Slimak, Ludovic. The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature (p. 175). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.

There is also the question of technique. Each Neanderthal tool is a creation in itself. Each tool is “de factor a unique object.” Slimak attributes this to the “artisanal freedom” and “very rich freedom of thought about the world” that Neanderthals enjoyed.

In contrast, Sapiens are in the grip of efficiency and routine. Sapien craftsmen would turn out scores of identical products of the same type for specific single uses, where a Neanderthal might turn out a single multi-purpose tool for multiple uses.

There is also the fact that Neanderthal technology did not change for hundreds of thousands of years. In contrast, Sapien technology was leaping forward. Sapiens were inventing projectile weapons – bows and javelins. There was a world of difference between the Neanderthal approach which involved coming into close contact with prey and running it through with physical strength versus standing off at a distance and plinking the prey with projectiles. If there was to be conflict, then the latter strategy was going to make the difference.

And it may have come down to that. Slimak shares the fascinating discovery at Mandrin cave where a Mousterian point was found in proximity to a small white blade that was the work of a modern human. By analyzing the chemical traits of soot on the walls of the cave, scientists were able to date Neanderthal occupancy of the cave to within a yar of Sapient occupancy. Slimak explains:

This high-resolution detective work produced an unexpected discovery: analysis of the films of soot revealed that the two humanities inhabited this cave no more than a year apart. A maximum of a year. That meant that, for the first time in Europe, we had evidence pointing to a physical encounter between them in a well-defined territory. The two humanities must have physically met right here. We are unable as yet to achieve a resolution greater than a year, but we have shown for the first time that the two human groups were effectively contemporaries in a very precise territory, whether their encounter took place in the wider territory, the mid Rhône valley, or in this very cave itself. As the Mandrin cave had been continually used for nearly 80,000 years by Neanderthal populations, the fact that the moment of this meeting also marks the end of Neanderthal societies everywhere in Europe can hardly be put down to an unfortunate coincidence. Not only do we find no more traces of Neanderthal cultures after the exact moment of the encounter, but it seems these populations ceased to exist, biologically speaking, outside of a few peripheral areas of the continent, which takes us back to the possible polar zones of refuge that we discussed earlier.

Slimak, Ludovic. The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature (p. 161). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.

So, Mandrin cave shows (a) 80,000 years of Neanderthal occupation, (b) a point of contact within a year of Sapient and Neanderthal occupancy, and (c) complete replacement of the Neandertal population by Homo Sapiens from that point on.

This is the story of Sapient/Neanderthal interaction. Wherever Homo Sapien showed up, Neanderthals disappeared, and they disappeared quickly. This is the time to consider those bow and arrows and something that looks like Westerners with a technological edge overcoming the American Indians within decades.

Again, when Sapiens made an appearance, Neanderthal disappeared from the archaeological record. So the implication is that the Neanderthals did not die a beautiful death.

Slimak, Ludovic. The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature (p. 167). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.

At this point, it seems that there was something substantially different between Sapiens and Neanderthals. The difference may have been genetic:

In April 2021, Nature: Molecular Psychiatry published a study that aimed to decipher the emergence of human creativity by focusing on three main aspects of personality: emotional reactivity, self-control and self-consciousness. It revealed the existence of genetic structures in Neanderthals similar to those identified in chimpanzees when it came to emotional reactivity, and a position halfway between chimpanzees and modern humans when it came to self-control and self-consciousness, which directly impacted on their creative potential, their consciousness of self and their prosocial behaviour.

Slimak, Ludovic. The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature (p. 157). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.

In addition, that trope about not recognizing a Neanderthal in modern clothes is nonsense:

You've probably heard it said that you wouldn't recognize a Neanderthal if you met one on the subway? Well, it's not true.

Slimak, Ludovic. The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature (p. 148). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.

Things like eye sockets, receding forehad, occipital bun, would give the game away.

Of course, it is well-established that Neanderthal genes are found in surviving human populations. The anti-racist, “can't we all be friends” tropes argue that this points to a beautiful homogenizing of populations.

But wait a second. While Neanderthal genes are found in human populations, human genes are not found in Neanderthal samples.

We know from the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1949 on the elementary structures of kinship that the exchange of women is a fundamental, invariant feature of the organization of every human society. By way of alliance between two human groups women are systematically integrated into the group of men. Genetics suggests that this ‘patrilocality' was already practised by Neanderthals. But this exchange of women, which ensures the biological survival of the population, is based on reciprocity: ‘I give you my sister, you give me your sister.' Aside from ensuring the simple genetic survival of the two groups, this act creates or enables an alliance between the two peoples. The absence of signs of sapiens interbreeding in the last Neanderthals and, conversely, their widespread presence among the first Sapiens in Europe could then represent a fundamental indicator as to the nature of the relationships between these populations, whether they took place in Europe or in Asia.

Palaeogenetics, then, reveals an unexpected non-reciprocity which might be summed up as follows: ‘I take your sister but I don't give you mine.' This lack of reciprocity in one of the fundamental structures of the relations between populations is disturbing. In ethnography the exchange of genes is not about love but is rather foundational and characteristic of the structure of alliances between human societies.

Slimak, Ludovic. The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature (p. 165). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.

In addition, the Neanderthal genes come from a period much earlier than the end:

Genetics in fact has told us nothing about the fate of the last Neanderthals, since the small percentages that survive in current populations seem to derive from much earlier interbreeding, perhaps around the 100th millennium, somewhere in Asia.

Slimak, Ludovic. The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature (p. 163). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.

At this point, Slimak has met his claim. Neanderthals were alien to human beings. They didn't change their tools. They didn't produce weapons. They didn't innovate. They didn't create forms. They didn't create art. Perhaps their tools were their art, with each one being a unique creation, but whatever they were they were not going to hold their own against Sapiens and the ability to turn out efficient weapon forms using the most modern technology.

Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite by Eric D. Perl


Strap in. This is going to be a bumpy ride.

There is initially the matter of this guy, Dionysius the Areopagite, aka Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Who is this guy? On the one hand, he turns out to be a seminal theological foundation for Thomas Aquinas's Scholasticism. We always hear about Aristotle as a foundation for Aquinas, but I would estimate that fully half of the ideas in Aquinas's thinking about God qua God are from this guy.

On the other hand, this guy, Dionysius the Areopagite, is a total mystery, except we know he wasn't Dionysius the Areopagite. The real Dionysius the Areopagite was a person living in the first century Athens, and a judge on the court at “Mar's Hill,” hence “Areopagite,” who was converted by St. Paul, and gets a mention in Acts 17:34:

32 And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked: and others said, We will hear thee again of this matter.

33 So Paul departed from among them.

34 Howbeit certain men clave unto him, and believed: among the which was Dionysius the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.

This Dionysius was not that Dionysius. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tells us this about Pseudo-Dionysius:

But it has only become generally accepted in modern times that instead of being the disciple of St. Paul, Dionysius must have lived in the time of Proclus, most probably being a pupil of Proclus, perhaps of Syrian origin, who knew enough of Platonism and the Christian tradition to transform them both. Since Proclus died in 485 CE, and since the first clear citation of Dionysius' works is by Severus of Antioch between 518 and 528, then we can place Dionysius' authorship between 485 and 518–28 CE. These dates are confirmed by what we find in the Dionysian corpus: a knowledge of Athenian Neoplatonism of the time, an appeal to doctrinal formulas and parts of the Christian liturgy (e.g., the Creed) current in the late fifth century, and an adaptation of late fifth-century Neoplatonic religious rites, particularly theurgy, as we shall see below.

The imposture of the obscure Dionysius paid dividends as scholars in the Middle Ages accepted Pseudo-Dionysius as a near apostolic authority.[1]

Pseudo-Dionysius (hereinafter for the sake of my typing “Dionysius”) was a well-informed Neoplatonist with all that entailed. Author Eric D. Perl situates Dionysius firmly within the Neoplatonic tradition — from Plontinus to Proclus to Dionysius — showing how different points would develop until they were transplanted almost directly from paganism to Christianity.

This is not an easy read. However, since I've been reading Aquinas for over two decades, much of it resonated with my sense of Thomism. I was repeatedly surprised that some point or other made by Dionysius was central to the Thomistic project. I will try to point those out as I go along.

The book is organized into the following chapters, which I will adopt for this and the following reviews I do of this book:

Chapter 1 Beyond Being and Intelligibility

Chapter 2 Being as Theophany

Chapter 3 Goodness, Beauty, and Love

Chapter 4 The Problem of Evil

Chapter 5 The Hierarchy of Being

Chapter 6 The Continuum of Cognition

Chapter 7 Symbolism

Chapter 1 Beyond Being and Intelligibility

The core concept in this chapter is being — existence — is convertible with intelligibility. If something exists, it is capable of being understood: “The foundational principle of Neoplatonic thought is the doctrine that to be is to be intelligible.” (Theophany, p. 78.)

This conclusion follows from the principle that things exist because they have “forms” (aka “natures.”) “Forms” are those things that the mind extracts from its sense experience (and which are therefore above and common to different things with the same form but different matter.)[2]

Being (existence) and intelligibility are both grounded in “the Good.” Perl explains that Socrates responded to Anaxagoras claim that the intellect is the orderer and cause of all things by responding that the “intellect by nature demands to see goodness in its object in order to understand, to make sense of it.” (p. 120.) Why is this the case? The answer is that “any thing, event, action, or process can be intellectually understood only in terms of the good which is the ultimate “why” for it. And whatever can be so understood, whatever is intelligible is so only because and insofar as it is ordered on the basis of goodness.” (Id.)

So, we might want to ask, what is this “goodness”?

In Aristotle and Aquinas, good is that which all desire. Goodness is that aspect of existence that moves the will to desire the thing. The desired thing becomes the desired end for the will. Thus, if the intellect is going to understand something, it is going to understand it only through understanding its causes—including its formal and final causes—which are the “why” of something. The “why” of something is its form or nature, which is its goodness.

There is also the issue of “truth.” Truth is a quality of mind that conforms the intellect to the actual form of the thing. How does all this conforming occur? Apparently, through the Good:

This argumentation underlies Plato's representation of the Good in the Republic under the image of the sun. Just as the sun, by providing light, makes it possible for sensible things to be seen and for the eye to see them, so the Good provides that which makes the forms able to be known and the intellect able to know them (Republic 508b12-c2). The Good, in other words, is the enabling source of intelligibility and intellection. (Locations 124–127.)

And:

The truth of the forms is their unconcealedness, their availability or accessibility to the mind-in short, their intelligibility. And this, Plato says, is provided by the Good. For in the absence of goodness, consciousness, attempting to understand reality, is like the eye in the absence of light: it is at a loss, it flounders, it cannot “see” its objects; it “does not have intellect.” Just as there can be neither visibility nor vision without light, so there can be neither intelligibility nor intellection without goodness. Consequently, as Plato goes on to say, “That which provides truth to the things known and gives power [i.e. the ability to know] to the knower is the form [iBEav] of the Good” (Republic 508e1–3). In other words, any and all beings, i.e. the forms, are intelligible only in virtue of the “look of goodness” that they have and display.' (Locations 130–134.)

You can see this in the Question 10 of the Summa Theologica where Aquinas explains that we will not see the essence of God without the “light of Glory.” Moreover, it seems that we cannot even see natural truths without some kind of divine light:

S.T. Q.10, Art. 11, obj. 3:

Objection 3. Further, that wherein we know all other things, and whereby we judge of other things, is known in itself to us. But even now we know all things in God; for Augustine says (Confess. viii): “If we both see that what you say is true, and we both see that what I say is true; where, I ask, do we see this? neither I in thee, nor thou in me; but both of us in the very incommutable truth itself above our minds.” He also says (De Vera Relig. xxx) that, “We judge of all things according to the divine truth”; and (De Trin. xii) that, “it is the duty of reason to judge of these corporeal things according to the incorporeal and eternal ideas; which unless they were above the mind could not be incommutable.” Therefore even in this life we see God Himself.

Reply to Objection 3. All things are said to be seen in God and all things are judged in Him, because by the participation of His light, we know and judge all things; for the light of natural reason itself is a participation of the divine light; as likewise we are said to see and judge of sensible things in the sun, i.e., by the sun's light. Hence Augustine says (Soliloq. i, 8), “The lessons of instruction can only be seen as it were by their own sun,” namely God. As therefore in order to see a sensible object, it is not necessary to see the substance of the sun, so in like manner to see any intelligible object, it is not necessary to see the essence of God.

It is an amazing fact that I see “2+2=4” and you see that “2+2=4.” How is it that we both “see” the same thing if there is not something outside of us and common to us both that we share? The answer would appear to be that we both see in the same light.

The light in the Neoplatonic tradition is Goodness, which seems to be before existence.[3] Goodness informs and forms existence.

The Good is the One in Plotinus. For Plotinus, Goodness is the first principle, not Existence, as it is in Aquinas. Perl explains that the conundrum is that Being means “a being,” and any being is by definition unitary and finite. It seems that if something exists we should be able to point at it in some way. The fact that there is an “it” to point at implies a limited finite thing, no matter how big and important. Such a limitation seems inconsistent with God, who is, by definition, not limited, not finite.

The Summa shares this intuition in defining God as outside of any genera. In ST, Q.3, A 5, Aquinas explains:

Secondly, since the existence of God is His essence, if God were in any genus, He would be the genus “being”, because, since genus is predicated as an essential it refers to the essence of a thing. But the Philosopher has shown (Metaph. iii) that being cannot be a genus, for every genus has differences distinct from its generic essence. Now no difference can exist distinct from being; for non-being cannot be a difference. It follows then that God is not in a genus.

It is philosophically essential that God not be in a genus. As Aquinas explains in ST Q. 4, A 2:

First, because whatever perfection exists in an effect must be found in the effective cause: either in the same formality, if it is a univocal agent — as when man reproduces man; or in a more eminent degree, if it is an equivocal agent — thus in the sun is the likeness of whatever is generated by the sun's power. Now it is plain that the effect pre-exists virtually in the efficient cause: and although to pre-exist in the potentiality of a material cause is to pre-exist in a more imperfect way, since matter as such is imperfect, and an agent as such is perfect; still to pre-exist virtually in the efficient cause is to pre-exist not in a more imperfect, but in a more perfect way. Since therefore God is the first effective cause of things, the perfections of all things must pre-exist in God in a more eminent way. Dionysius implies the same line of argument by saying of God (Div. Nom. v): “It is not that He is this and not that, but that He is all, as the cause of all.”

Saying that God has all perfections, does not put him into a different genus than everything else — sort of like Superman fits into a genus of Superman because Superman has superpowers.

Instead, it puts God above genus itself, and, also, above the genus of existence into which everything fits.

But what about calling the One “one”? According to Plotinus, this terminology did not mean a limitation but was instead “a denial of multiplicity.”

This “apophatic approach” leads to some of the more difficult aspects of Dionysius's philosophy.[4] Dionysius takes the position that any description of God is wrong because it is limiting:

Dionysius adopts his doctrine of God as “nameless,” “unknowable,” and “beyond being” from the Neoplatonic tradition established by Plotinus, and his thought can be understood only in that context.2° His “negative theology” ogy” is not fundamentally a theory of theological language but a philosophical cal position taken over directly from Neoplatonism, although, as in Plotinus, it has implications for language in that words are discursive expressions of intellection and hence cannot apply to God. Dionysius expressly adopts the Parmenidean and Platonic account of being and thought as coterminous, and therefore locates God beyond both together: “For if all knowledges are of beings and have their limit in beings, that which is beyond all being also transcends all knowledge” (DN 1.4, 593A). Dionysius' God, like the One of Plotinus, is transcendent, not in a vague, unspecified sense, but in the very precise metaphysical sense that he is not at all included within the whole of reality, of things that are, as any member of it. If he has no “name,” this is because he is not anything at all. God is not merely beyond “human thought” or “finite thought,” as if there were some “other” sort of thought that could reach him, or as if his incomprehensibility were simply due to a limitation on our part, but is beyond thought as such, because thought is always directed rected to beings, and hence to that which is finite and derivative.” When we hear that God is beyond being, we inevitably imagine some thing, a “superessentiality,” lying above or outside of being. But this fails to realize the meaning of “beyond being,” because it still thinks of God as something, some being.22 (Locations 211–220).

So, to be is to be intelligible.

But God is not intelligible.

God is beyond our ability to make any sense of Him because by making sense of Him, we limit God, and, by definition, it is not God that we comprehend.

So, God does not exist?

That's disturbing.[5]

According to Perl:

If our thought cannot attain to God, this is not because of our weakness but because there is no “there” there, no being, no thing that is God. Understanding Dionysius within the Neoplatonic tradition to which he belongs, we must take him at his word and not seek to mitigate the force of his negations by interpreting his thought in the light of later theories which attempt to allow for “infinite being” and thus break with the fundamental Neoplatonic principle that to be is to be intelligible and therefore to be finite. (Locations 221–224).

Some people like this kind of thing. I am not one of those people.

Nonetheless, it seems to check out, at least philosophically. Is God a “being”? Should we describe God as “a divine being”? Probably not. Those words imply that God is one kind of being out of many kinds of beings. We get comfortable with that. We lose sight of the fact that God is not “a being” or even “the divine being,” but, rather, that He is Being Itself, that which communicates existence to the forms that make up the reality of matter formed by nature that we live in. God is sui generis in a way that we can't comprehend.

Theologically, I have my questions about this Dionysian conclusion insofar as we have a theological account of immanence as well as transcendence. This God who is not “there” assumed a human nature in a personal union with one of His divine persons. Likewise, this non-being with “no there there” had a relationship with an obscure Middle Eastern tribe. It seems like even the definitions of “non-being” and “no there there” may be overly limiting.

Perl explains:

We may be inclined to ask whether such a radical treatment of divine transcendence means that God simply disappears from view altogether, in such a way that, as has been remarked, “the truth of negative theology is atheism.” But Dionysius' Neoplatonic negative theology transcends atheism no less than it does theism. To be sure, Dionysius is not a theist, since theism, as ordinarily understood, involves the claim that God exists (whatever ever qualifications may then be added concerning the “mode” of his existence); and many misunderstandings have arisen from attempts to interpret Dionysius and other Neoplatonists theistically and thus not to take with full seriousness their insistence that the One or God is beyond being and is not anything at all, that no common term whatever can embrace both God and his products. But neither is Dionysius an atheist, for on his principles it is no more correct to say “God is not” than to say “God is” (i.e. is a being). Simply to deny that God exists, to say “God is not” or “There is no God” is still to consider God as some (putative) being, and then to deny that there is such a being, as when we say “There is no tenth planet” or “There are no unicorns.” corns.” This still treats God as some distinct conceptual object and so fails truly to intend God at all. Neoplatonic and Dionysian negative theology, on the other hand, refuses to consider God as anything at all, whether to affirm or to deny the existence of such a thing. (Locations 249–257).


Not the bet “pick up line” ever advanced at closing time, but maybe not the worst either.
Perl previously gave Dionysius a Wittgenstein spin:[6]

Ultimately, then, for Dionysius as for Plotinus, negative theology consists sists not in any words or thoughts whatsoever, however negative or superlative, but in the absolute silence of the mind. We must “honor the hidden of the divinity, beyond intellect and reality, with unsearchable and sacred reverence of mind, and ineffable things with a sober silence” (DN 1.4, 592D). (Locations 238–240).

Aquinas disagreed. Aquinas taught the Analogia Entis whereby God is not so alien that He is entirely incomprehensible. We can comprehend God in our human mode by understanding that creaturely perfections are reflections of God's perfections insofar as God is the cause of those perfections. Therefore, we do not have to pass over everything in silence. We can have a limited and finite understanding of God — not an understanding of God that is wrong per se, just limited and finite.

And we can talk about that.

This approach is called the “analogia entis” (“Analogy of Being.) The method of aalogia entis is an “affirmative theology” that makes affirmative statements about God by way of analogizing from the created world to the creator of that world.[7] For example, we see order in the created world and conclude that order would not be found in the created world unless there was order in God.


Edith Stein aka St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
So, the big concepts thus far are (a) to be is to be intelligible, and (b) God is not intelligible (according to Dionysius).

More to come.

Post-script:

[1] I would love to learn how this Neoplatonic student of Proclus picked out the incredibly obscure Areopagite as his beard. The real Dionysius gets barely a passing mention in Acts. He's probably better remembered because of Pseudo-Dionysius than because of Acts. He's hardly an obvious choice.

[2] In contrast, “matter” is entirely unknowable because matter as matter lacks any form. Presumably, matter that was simply matter without a form might be perceived by our senses but it would be alien to our mind. (Reading th

Ghost Frequencies by Gary Gibson is a nice time filler. It is a short novella that runs through its paces and comes to satisfying conclusion. An attentive reader should be able to spot the answer midway into the book, but it is still worth reading for the characters and mystery element.

The story is set in Ashford Hall, a historic English house with a reputation for being haunted. Susan McDougall and her team have been hired by Christian Ashford, the multi-millionaire owner of the house, to research quantum entanglement from the perspective of time travel. The idea is that quanta become entangled because they are communicating with each other now by going back to then, when the two quanta were in contact.

Then, Ashford hires a team of paranormal investigators to explore the ghost angle. This is particularly important to him because he can't keep security staff employed for longer than a month or two.

The physicists protest bringing the paranormal investigators into their research area, primarily out of snobbery, although the investigators are bona fide scientists. The circus act of ghost hunters could taint the credibility of their findings.

But the ghost hunters have receipts. Something is haunting the Ashford Hall.

Could the two research programs have a common denominator?

It is a short, enjoyable read. I don't think anyone's worldview is going to be changed.

The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy by Heinrich A. Rommen

This is a fascinating and illuminating text.[1] I have an extensive background in Thomism, so reading this was like visiting with a wise, older friend who can share his wisdom and connect many dots for me. However, It may also be a good introduction for those without a background in this subject. Dr. Rommen starts with the beginning and then builds from there to his conclusions in an orderly and accessible manner.[2]

Part of the interest I had in this book was its historical provenance. Dr. Rommen was a Catholic anti-Nazi. Dr. Rommen was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1897 and died in the United States in 1967.[3] He worked for Catholic Social Action from 1928 to 1933. Hitler shut down Catholic Social Action in 1933 as part of the Nazi move to shut down all independent Catholic groups. Dr. Rommen was probably a member of the Catholic Center Party, so it is not surprising that he was arrested by the Nazis at some point. He remained under police surveillance until he left Germany in 1938. While under police surveillance, he wrote this book — The Natural Law — published in 1936.

With that background, I was surprised by how little Dr. Rommen had to say about the Nazis or totalitarianism. He would have been at great personal risk if he had condemned the Nazis in his writing. Still, it seemed to me that his general attitude was that the “perennial philosophy” would survive whatever ephemeral difficulties he was going through. His point was to elucidate the ideas of that philosophy.[4]

On the other hand, the book in its entirety can be read as a condemnation of totalitarianism in both its National Socialist and Communist incarnation. The thesis of Dr. Rommen's book is that law is law because it is founded on reason, not on will. Dr. Rommen's bete noir is “positivism,” which asserted that law is law because it represents the will of someone, i.e., the powerful, and can compel compliance by force. The Nazis made quite a bit of the will, as did the Communists. In his conclusion, Dr. Rommen makes this point explicit:

Modern totalitarianism with its depersonalization of man, with its debasement of man to the position of a particle of an amorphous mass which is molded and remolded in accordance with the shifting policy of the “Leader,” is of its very nature extremely voluntaristic. Voluntas facit legem: law is will. How seldom the theorists and practitioners of totalitarianism mention reason, and how frequently they glory in the triumph of the will! The will of the Leader or of the Commissar is not bound by or responsible to an objective body of moral values or an objective standard of morality revealed in the order of being and in human nature. The will is not bound by the objective, conventional meaning of words or by the relation of these to ideas and things.

Rommen, Heinrich A.. The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy (NONE) . Liberty Fund Inc.. Kindle Edition.

In the first part of the text, Dr. Rommen turns to a survey of history. He explains that natural law had roots in antiquity. He points to Heraclitus, who “flashed” on the “idea of an eternal law of nature that corresponds to man's reason as sharing in the eternal logos.” Surprisingly, the Sophists contrasted their social criticism based on what is naturally right against what is “legally right.” Callicles, who was the first to advance the idea that “might makes right,” criticized that idea.[5] In contrast to Plato and Aristotle, who justified slavery, Alcidamas wrote, “God made all men free; nature has made no man a slave.” Antiquity ends with the Stoics who fashioned a robust idea of natural law that stood outside the human order and was modeled on the Logos, the ordering of reality accessed through human reason.[6]

See rest of review here - https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/theology-matters-why-we-need-natural-law-b1087c59670e

Morpho (NewCon Press Novellas Set 5 Book 2)
by Philip Palmer

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NKLBB1D?ref_=dbs_m_mng_rwt_calw_tkin_1&storeType=ebooks



I like the idea behind the NewCon Press Novella series. NewCon Press collects four novellas per series from different authors around a common idea. The novellas have no relationship to each other. They are just variations on a theme. For example, Set 5 explores “The Alien Among Us.”

Novellas are cool. Because they are shorter than novels, they have to cut out a lot of fat. But they are longer than short stories, so there is some room to explore character.

In this case, we spend the early parts of the book wondering what is going on. We seem to have two people who are really old and really hard to kill. We might be thinking “vampires,” but they walk in the daylight and don't seem to be drinking blood.

We learn that these people are being hunted. They seem to be monitored by some government. Their blood has surprising life extension effects for humans.

One of them is “killed,” but wakes up in the morgue where she gives a kind of gift to surprised attendant. That starts the attendant's introduction to this alien among us.

I didn't find this NewCon Press novella to be as successful as the other novellas I've read. The perspective jumps were sometimes hard to follow. I am not sure that I approve of an alien invasive species being portrayed as a good thing. On the other hand, the author did provide us with a glimpse of the alien among us. The story read well, and the characters were interesting.

The Man Who Would Be Kling by Adam Roberts


Something weird has happened to Afghanistan. Not far north of Kabul, Afghanistan has become surreal. People who go into the area die, but not because of pragmatic Islamofascism, which counts as a perfectly ordinary thing. Instead, electronics do not work as they should; simple electronics stop working, complex electronics become chaotic and unpredictable. The mind does not work. Things get transformed. Strange things are seen in satellite surveillance. A large part of Afghanistan has become a “no go zone.” Again this is not unusual for Afghanistan, except in this case, no one goes there....no one at all.

The main character of this novella is Rudy, the head of British Intelligence's Kabul Station.[1] He is approached by two individual — Chillingworth and Dallas — who plan to enter the Afghanizone. Chillingworth gets Rudy's help because he is a Star Trek fan and she uses a phrase from The Next Generation as a kind of code phrase.

Chillingworth believes she is a Vulcan; Dallas believes he is a Klingon. Both have had surgical alterations to pass as their respective fictional creatures. Their theory is that the Zone disdains mere humans but will recognize their superior species as emissaries of a higher civilization.

Clearly, they are batshit crazy.

Rudy tries to talk them out of their plan, but they maintain their resolve.

Only Chillingworth comes back.

Most of the novella is about the experiences of Dallas and Chillingworth. A lot of it does not make sense. We can suspect that Chillingworth is not a reliable narrative. Do Dallas and Chillingworth survive for as long as they do because they are playing?

Roberts tells us he has given us an answer, but I didn't see it.

I did enjoy the story. It falls into the category of “Zone Story.” These stories involve humans dealings with the problem of an alien reality being laid over a mundane region of space. Physics, reason, and perception are twisted and untrustworthy inside the zone. The theme of experiences in such zones involves unintelligibility. Classic stories of this kind include Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky, as well as M. John Harrison's Kefahuchi Tract trilogy.

I am not sure that I like Zone Stories. Unintelligibility is not a feature I appreciate in my literature. [2]

I liked this story, perhaps because of the weirdness of the characters. Adam Roberts is also a solid writer. He is rapidly becoming one of my favorite living writers.

This novella is part of the NewCon Press collection. This one is part of Series 5 — “Aliens Among Us.”

It is a quick read, has engaging ideas, and is well-written. The absence of an ending that ties the whole thing up is a feature of the Zone subgenre.

Footnotes:

[1] While putting this review together, I realized I didn't know the character's name. Since the book is written from his first-person perspective, this is easy to overlook. I did a snipe hunt through the book, and I came up with four references to the character being called “Rudy.” Since Robert's end note is “He considers Rudyard Kipling the finest writer of short stories in English,” I suspect we can guess what the character's last name might be.

[2] I have enough unintelligibility in my quotidian career as a trial lawyer.

Book Review - An engaging variant of a classic trope.

Generation Ship by Michael Mammay

This is a well-done reworking of a classic science fiction trope. The nice thing about the book is that it doesn't settle for the usual approach but offers something different than what I've seen in other books of this sub-genre.

The generation ship has been traveling to the planet Promissa for 300 years. It is about three months from arriving in the Promissa system. The preliminary indications are looking good. The atmosphere of the planet is perfect for human life. However, there is a pesky problem that none of the orbits can land on the planet.

However, this mystery is put on the back burner as people realize that it is no longer necessary to cap the population at 18,000 by liquidating people on their 75th birthday. The political pressure of near success is causing the human social system to become disordered.

The story is novel because of these two factors. Most generation ship stories occur mid-flight, when the passengers of the ship have lost all sense of what they are doing. Often, they don't even know that they are on a ship. Robert Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky is the classic and model of the genre. In orphans, the population is divided into crew and “muties” - short for mutineers. No one remembers that they are on a generation ship. The discovery that they are about to collide with the sun they have been aiming for moves the story.

In this book, the political issues about demanding relief from a necessarily oppressive social system and the need to keep things together until the mission is truly complete move the story. The book follows a half dozen characters on the various sides of the controversy. By and large, all of the characters are empathetic, even though they are opposed to each other, and even though some, like the governor, are extremely manipulative.

The author, Michael Mammay, asks what it would be like if people reached their goals after so long.
The actual completion of the mission is an anti-climax. It turns out that there is a reason for the problem with the probes, and it changes everything about the possibility of colonization of the planet. I found the author's resolution to be unsatisfying, although under the circumstances, it may have been the only course open. I find it hard to believe that people would give up the dream of their fathers quite so easily.

Nonetheless, apart from that, the idea of showing us the end of a generations-long mission from the perspective of people living through the last months of the project is a great idea. Mammay's writing is solid, and, as I've said, the characters were well drawn.

I was about three episodes into the Netflix Ripley mini-series when I decided to read the Patricia Highsmith novel it was based on. A question about the setting of the mini-series sparked my interest in the novel. The series claimed to have been set in 1961, but it gave me feelings of post-war Italy, maybe 1949 or so.

The answer is that the Highsmith novel was published in 1955, which means that it captures a cultural sense of the mid-1950s. 1961 is not too far off from that.

By now, everyone should know that the title character, Tom Ripley, is a sociopath[1]. The word “sociopathy” is not used in either presentation. The acting of Andrew Scott in the Netflix series captures the essence of a sociopath. Scott plays Ripley as awkward, autitistic, and anhedonic — Scott's Ripley is one off-beat, creepy dude.[2]


Offbeat and creepy.
The opening scene in the Netflix series is a perfect representation of the sociopath in action. On the spur of the moment, Ripley intercepts a letter from a postal carrier by acting as if he is going into an apartment. He then uses the letter to scam the sender to send a replacement check to him by posing as a bill collector. He has to abandon the cashing of the check when he senses that he is about to be unmasked. The sequence portrays the opportunism of a lot of crime, which has to be the domain of sociopaths who do not hesitate a moment out of guilt or conscience.

In contrast, it doesn't seem that Highsmith had a developed knowledge of sociopathy. Her Ripley is weirdly bipolar. He transitions from bouts of manic exuberance about his plans to bitter resentment about the injustices he feels he has been subjected to. Highsmith's Ripley is not nearly as disciplined as the Netflix Ripley. In Highsmith's novel, for example, Ripley just collects the checks from his victims without ever trying to cash them.

This could reflect the development of the idea of the sociopath/psychopath as a fictional type. We have had decades of tropes and caricatures about high-functioning sociopaths that Highsmith didn't have. While the idea of psychopathy was introduced in the 1950s, sociopathy had been known since the 1930s.[3] One source describes the history of sociopathy as follows:

While psychopathy was yet to make its premiere in the DSM, sociopathic personality disturbance, or sociopathy, was included in the DSM-I. Sociopathy was developed in the 1930s and consisted of antisocial and dissocial reactions and sexual deviation (Pickersgill, 2012). Differences and similarities existed between sociopathic personality disorder and psychopathy, however psychopathy would not have its own category in the DSM until the publication of the DSM III. In DSM-I, sociopathic personality disturbance, antisocial reaction was defined as a diagnosis for chronically antisocial individuals who didn't profit from experience or punishment and maintained no real loyalties (Pickersgill, 2012).

This could explain why Tom Ripley is not the smooth and charming manipulator we expect to see in more recent stories involving psychopaths.

It might also explain why Highsmith edges around the homosexual issue.

It seems clear from Highsmith's novel that Tom is “same sex attracted.” He is a young man (around 24 or 25) who has been “kept” by a wealthier male who treats him as a possession. Highsmith shares that Tom runs in homosexual circles and poses as a homosexual, but is actually a virgin:

His mind went back to certain groups of people he had known in New York, known and dropped finally, all of them, but he regretted now having ever known them. They had taken him up because he amused them, but he had never had anything to do with any of them! When a couple of them had made a pass at him, he had rejected them — though he remembered how he had tried to make it up to them later by getting ice for their drinks, dropping them off in taxis when it was out of his way, because he had been afraid they would start to dislike him. He'd been an ass! And he remembered, too, the humiliating moment when Vic Simmons had said, Oh, for Christ sake, Tommie, shut up! when he had said to a group of people, for perhaps the third or fourth time in Vic's presence, “I can't make up my mind whether I like men or women, so I'm thinking of giving them both up.” Tom had used to pretend he was going to an analyst, because everybody else was going to an analyst, and he had used to spin wildly funny stories about his sessions with his analyst to amuse people at parties, and the line about giving up men and women both had always been good for a laugh, the way he delivered it, until Vic had told him for Christ sake to shut up, and after that Tom had never said it again and never mentioned his analyst again, either. As a matter of fact, there was a lot of truth in it, Tom thought. As people went, he was one of the most innocent and clean-minded he had ever known. That was the irony of this situation with Dickie.

Highsmith, Patricia. The Talented Mr. Ripley (pp. 79–80). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

On the other hand, everyone who knows Tom suspects that he is a homosexual. He is fixated on Dickie. He becomes jealous when he sees Dickie with his girlfriend, Marge Sherwood.

In the Netflix series, this backstory is not revealed. There are clues that he might be homosexual and attracted to Dickie, such as the weird scene where he dresses as Dickie, which prompts Dickie to tell Tom that he is not “queer.”

In the book, Tom's two murders occur after homosexuality is derided. Before Tom murders Dickie, the two men are watching the gymnastics of a group of men that Dickie describes as “daffodils” by quoting lines from a poem. This sets Tom off on a chain of thinking about taking over Dickie's life after he remembers Aunt Dottie describing him as a “sissy.” Later, Tom justifies killing Freddie Miles for accusing Dickie of “sexual deviation”:

The gin only intensified the same thoughts he had had. He stood looking down at Freddie's long, heavy body in the polo coat that was crumpled under him, that he hadn't the energy or the heart to straighten out, though it annoyed him, and thinking how sad, stupid, clumsy, dangerous, and unnecessary his death had been, and how brutally unfair to Freddie. Of course, one could loathe Freddie, too. A selfish, stupid bastard who had sneered at one of his best friends — Dickie certainly was one of his best friends — just because he suspected him of sexual deviation. Tom laughed at that phrase “sexual deviation.” Where was the sex? Where was the deviation? He looked at Freddie and said low and bitterly: “Freddie Miles, you're a victim of your own dirty mind.”

Highsmith, Patricia. The Talented Mr. Ripley (pp. 140–141). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

However, Freddie didn't make such an accusation. Tom killed him because Freddie had noticed him wearing Dickie's shoes and Dickie's bracelet.

In contrast, the Netflix series take the Freddie character in the direction of gingercide. In the novel, Freddie is a redhead, which disgusts Ripley. Highsmith writes:

The American's name was Freddie Miles. Tom thought he was hideous. Tom hated red hair, especially this kind of carrot-red hair with white skin and freckles.

Highsmith, Patricia. The Talented Mr. Ripley (p. 64). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

And who doesn't feel this way? [4]

In the Netflix series, Freddie is played by a former (or current) female — the actor is Elliott Summer, who, as it turns out, is Sting's daughter. The actor who plays Freddie is obviously a woman trying to pass as a man, which means the character is obviously a woman trying to pass as a man, but nothing is ever made of this.

https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/the-talented-mr-ripley-a-sociopath-looks-at-70-ef5ee13b0d8a

Creepypasta

Tales from the Gas Station: Volume One by Jack Townsend

A Lonely Broadcast: Book One by Kel Byron

The Neverglades: Volume One by David Farrow.


Wiki defines “creepypasta” as:

“A creepypasta is a horror-related legend which has been shared around the Internet.[1][2][3] The term creepypasta has since become a catch-all term for any horror content posted onto the Internet.[4] These entries are often brief, user-generated, paranormal stories that are intended to frighten readers. The subjects of creepypasta vary widely and can include topics such as ghosts, cryptids, murder, suicide, zombies, aliens, rituals to summon entities, haunted television shows, and video games.[1] Creepypastas range in length from a single paragraph to extended multi-part series that can span multiple media types, some lasting for years.[4]”

The three books I picked out seem to fit this category. They started out as internet blogs, are in the horror genre, and are part of a series.

Tales from the Gas Station was the most entertaining by far. It occupied a horror zone adjacent to the weirdness of “Welcome to Night Vale.” Night Vale is a podcast that features developing news reports from a small town in the American Southwest. It has secret police, para-dimensional visitors, UFOs, and every other kind of conspiracy that the tin-foil hat brigade imagines emanates from Area 51.

The Gas Station in Townsend's story sits in the woods outside an unnamed small American town with dark, spooky forests. It is an area where cultists have compounds in the neighborhood, eldritch gods build enclaves, and the odd serial killer might wander in for a slushie. Jack is the protagonist of the story. He's dying of some odd ailment, so he doesn't engage much with his life. Things happen around Jack, who refuses to admit surprise or much interest because it would involve him in the life he is shortly to exit.

The existential weirdness and the nonchalant attitude of Jack are a great part of the charm of this story.

In addition, a plot, character development, conflict, and growth emerge in the story, which was a pleasant surprise. I enjoyed this story. It wasn't great literature, but it was entertaining.

I found A Lonely Broadcast less worthwhile. Evelyn McKinnon returns to Pinehaven to work in a radio station in an old first tower on the outskirt of another small American town surrounded by dark, spooky woods. This story has no humor, as Evelyn discovers that the forest is haunted. The haunting seems to be composed of equal parts of The Fog by Stephen King and Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. Dead things don't stay dead in the forest. They come back mutated and kill the living. The townspeople seem to know this to a greater or lesser extent but it is kept mostly quiet. The radio station where Evelyn works is a warning station against the macabre.

I found the story far beyond my tolerance for willing suspension of disbelief. Evelyn is the twenty-eighth person to work at the station – the others having been killed – but station management is still sending in people to get killed? Evelyn grew up in the town, and her father was killed fighting the mystery, but Evelyn knew nothing about what was going on? There was no orientation for Evelyn about what to expect? The government hasn't evacuated the entire area and sent in a pacification force? In the first part of the book, Evelyn gets a call on the air from somebody who it turns out was her best friend, but she didn't know the person when she got the call?

The Lonely Broadcast series seems to be well-received. It is now in multiple sequels. To me, though, it was not original enough to hold my interest.

Likewise, I did not finish The Neverglades by David Farrow. In this book, we have another secluded, remote, small American town hiding in the pine forests of the Pacific Northwest. The main character is a local police detective who runs into weird deaths. He's helped out by a seven-foot-tall being who wears a fedora, smokes a cigar, and goes by “the Inspector.” This being is from another dimension. It turns out that the “Neverglades,” as the area is called, is an arena for interdimensional incursions.

I didn't find the mysteries very compelling. It seemed like the stories I read were designed to bring in the Inspector, who can then unravel the mystery. There was nothing wrong with the stories. I didn't find the characters or plots compelling. Though, if Scoobie Doo is your kind of thing, this might be your kind of thing.