Audio links of Bishop Perry and Fr. Mankowski, S.J.

From the Capstone Pilgrimage to Chicago, 2013...

Capstone students with Bishop Perry at St. John Cantius.

Click on the links below to hear and download the two major talks the students heard while in Chicago.  Also, the link at the bottom allows you to contribute to the travel and other expenses of the Senior Capstone Seminar - your generosity is appreciated.

• His Excellency, Bishop Joseph Perry of the Archdiocese of Chicago
• Fr. Paul Mankowski, S.J. of Loyola University, Chicago

Like what you see and hear about Capstone and Saint Agnes School?  Support the Senior Capstone Seminar (noting "Senior Capstone Seminar" in your entry).

St. Michael's Abbey

Just a short note to remind you that this Sunday, January 20, 2013, the parish will be celebrating the close of its 125^th Anniversary Year.  To commemorate this and the Feast of our dear Patroness, Fr. Moriarty has invited the Right Reverend Abbot Eugene J. Hayes, O.Praem., of St. Michael’s Abbey in Silverado, CA, to deliver a lecture on the building of a Catholic Culture.  St. Michael’s is a community of Norbertine monks whose primary apostolate is educational and liturgical.  Their engagement of the whole person intellectually, physically, and spiritually has produced many a fine student and has nourished a very solid Catholic community in California.   Indeed, very similar to that of Saint Agnes.   Here is a short video of the Abbey (very inspiring!):

New Saint Agnes School video!

Kudos to our Admissions staff for producing this great, new video.

Thought provoking article from David Brooks of NYT

David Brooks is an inconsistent writer. He jumps from one school of thought to another. He's a classic liberal, though he's branded as a conservative thinker. (There's a difference between today's political liberalism and "classical liberalism"... we won't get into that right now!)

Anyway, here are some tidbits from a recent Brooks article that I found interesting.

"How to Fight the Man" by David Brooks

A few weeks ago, a 22-year-old man named Jefferson Bethke produced a video called “Why I Hate Religion, but Love Jesus.” The video shows Bethke standing in a courtyard rhyming about the purity of the teachings of Jesus and the hypocrisy of the church. Jesus preaches healing, surrender and love, he argues, but religion is rigid, phony and stale. “Jesus came to abolish religion,” Bethke insists. “Religion puts you in bondage, but Jesus sets you free.”

[...]

Right away, many older theologians began critiquing Bethke’s statements. A blogger named Kevin DeYoung pointed out, for example, that it is biblically inaccurate to say that Jesus hated religion. In fact, Jesus preached a religious doctrine, prescribed rituals and worshiped in a temple.

Bethke responded in a way that was humble, earnest and gracious, and that generally spoke well of his character. He also basically folded.

[...]

Bethke’s passionate polemic and subsequent retreat are symptomatic of a lot of the protest cries we hear these days. This seems to be a moment when many people — in religion, economics and politics — are disgusted by current institutions, but then they are vague about what sorts of institutions should replace them.

This seems to be a moment of fervent protest movements that are ultimately vague and ineffectual.

[...]

But rebellion without a rigorous alternative vision is just a feeble spasm.

Read the thoughtful conclusion here.

BXVI on Integrated Education

The Greatest English Teacher

Fabulous article that I can relate well to (I'll have to check my grammar on that dangling preposition). Required reading for all of you. Here is a sample:

Father John Becker, S.J., sat at the front of the classroom, paperback in hand, glasses pushed to the end of his nose. As he spoke, he looked intently from one student to another.

"This semester, I am going to teach you how to read 'King Lear,'" he said. "It may be Shakespeare's most difficult play. But it has a powerful message to tell."

When we were done reading "Lear," the priest promised, we would not only understand it, but we would have learned the secret of understanding any thing written in English — anything, that is, with a meaning to discern.

And we would love Shakespeare.

At the time, I don't think any of us understood what Father Becker meant. But the things he started teaching us that day made him the greatest English teacher I ever had.

Read the rest here.
The Greatest English Teacher CNSnews.com

(Incidentally, the English Grammar Book referred to in the article sits on my bookshelf. It is the classic, Writing Handbook by Frs. Michael P. Kammer, S.J. and Charles W. Mulligan, S.J. and updated by my English teacher at St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland, Fr. Bernard J. Streicher, S.J. Get it...you will not regret it!)

Thanking that than which nothing greater can be conceived

We had a great conversation in yesterday's class on chapter ii of St. Anselm's Proslogion. Keep in mind that Anselm starts from a position of faith and is wrestling with the idea of God and its reasonableness. Faith in God is reasonable. Fides et ratio inform one another.

The frustration with the argument is legitimate and I remember feeling the same frustration when I read this for the first time as an undergraduate. The important thing to keep in mind with Anselm and all of these authors is to try not only to understand the words and meanings of their thoughts and writings but also--in the words of the late great Thomist, Fr. Leo Sweeney, S.J. (1918-2001)--to "inner-stand" them. A goofy word, I admit, but one that seems to capture what your job is as a student.

That job is to give the authors that you are reading a fair hearing. Ask yourself: who is this guy? what are his influences? what is the culture he is living in? what are the cultural assumptions of his time? Likewise, in addition to these questions, we must have the courage to leave aside some of our own 20th-21st century cultural assumptions (e.g., "Equality," understood popularly today as egalitarianism, was not understood that way in the 11th century.) The preoccupation with higher things--i.e., God, His nature, our life with Him, how to live well--was much more a part of an 11th century man's mind than ours today. This robust "life of the mind" is very instructive to us moderns and, indeed, as it is simply human, shows us the way. As a friend of mine once said (and I paraphrase), "sometimes the answer to the question you are asking has already been given; you just have to have the courage to open up a 900 year old book to find it!"

So keep wrestling with these authors; give them a fair shake; see them as good guys who are trying to find the right answers to life's questions; and remember to thank "that than which nothing greater can be conceived" for the great gift of your intellect to know and understand.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Building a "culture of the word"

The pope instructs "ministers of culture"

After reading The Rule of St. Benedict, we took in the pope's "Address to Ministers of Culture" when he visited Paris, France and Lourdes.  The pope gathered all the intellectual elites, politicians and dignitaries and, gathering them at an ancient Cluniac monastery, sought to teach them to re-discover their roots: in western monasticism.

The address is quite remarkable. 

The pope points out how every Christian is called to live in and develop a "culture of the word" whereby he contemplates the Scriptures and the various other great writings of the Church - precisely what we are doing in the Capstone Seminar.  I hoped to emphasize, dear students, that we are - in our class and in our small way - developing and living in a unique "culture of the word". 

Here's what the pope says [my emphasis]:

"What motivated men [the monks] to come together to these places?  What did they want?  How did they live?

"First and foremost, it must be frankly admitted straight away that it was not their intention to create a culture nor even to preserve a culture from the past.  Their motivation was much more basic.  Their goal was: quaerere Deum.  Amid the confusion of the times, in which nothing seemed permanent, they wanted to do the essential – to make an effort to find what was perennially valid and lasting, life itself.  They were searching for God.  They wanted to go from the inessential to the essential, to the only truly important and reliable thing there is.  It is sometimes said that they were “eschatologically” oriented.  But this is not to be understood in a temporal sense, as if they were looking ahead to the end of the world or to their own death, but in an existential sense: they were seeking the definitive behind the provisional.  Quaerere Deum: because they were Christians, this was not an expedition into a trackless wilderness, a search leading them into total darkness.  God himself had provided signposts, indeed he had marked out a path which was theirs to find and to follow.  This path was his word, which had been disclosed to men in the books of the sacred Scriptures.  Thus, by inner necessity, the search for God demands a culture of the word or – as Jean Leclercq put it: eschatology and grammar are intimately connected with one another in Western monasticism (cf. L’amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu).  The longing for God, the désir de Dieu, includes amour des lettres, love of the word, exploration of all its dimensions.  Because in the biblical word God comes towards us and we towards him, we must learn to penetrate the secret of language, to understand it in its construction and in the manner of its expression.  Thus it is through the search for God that the secular sciences take on their importance, sciences which show us the path towards language.  Because the search for God required the culture of the word, it was appropriate that the monastery should have a library, pointing out pathways to the word.  It was also appropriate to have a school, in which these pathways could be opened up.  Benedict calls the monastery a dominici servitii schola.  The monastery serves eruditio, the formation and education of man – a formation whose ultimate aim is that man should learn how to serve God.  But it also includes the formation of reason – education – through which man learns to perceive, in the midst of words, the Word itself."

Read the entire address of the pope here at the Vatican's website.

Pupils Delighted

This article very much summarizes what we are attempting to do with the seniors in the Capstone Seminar.

"Pupils Delighted"
by Anthony Esolen

Here's an excerpt in medias res: 

"The Pearson Integrated Humanities Program must have violated every educational truism of our time. Two hundred freshmen and sophomores, for six hours a week for two years, sat in the company of three professors, John Senior, Frank Nelick, and Dennis Quinn, who discussed art, poetry, music, history, philosophy, and Scripture with one another, while the students overheard them and eventually learned to participate in the discussions themselves. The students also recited poetry, learned to waltz, and were introduced to such words as truth, faith, honor, love, courtesy, decency, simplicity, and modesty, not words much used in an Age of Iron, but then, Don Quixote was sent into that time precisely to bring back something of the Age of Gold.
The motto of the program was Nascantur in Admiratione, “Let Them Be Born in Wonder.” One of the pages of the brochure explains why:

In our day wonder has been so cheapened by sensationalism and so crippled by skepticism that the college freshman, instead of being as one newly awakened to the excitement of learning, is often, rather, as one who has never been born. To such a young person learning is so much drudgery and routine, alien to his real interests, remote from reality itself. To revive wonder may be said to summarize the aims of the Pearson Program. Hence it should be regarded as an elementary or elemental course, where one discovers the love of wisdom; a course for beginners, who look upon the primary things of the world, as it were, for the first time.
An ancient philosopher said that to look at the stars is to become a lover of wisdom—a philosopher. Since the Pearson Program aims to make all students philosophers in that sense, we say, with a modern poet, “Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies!” Not only are students in the program required to look, literally, at the stars, but they are also expected to look up through poetry and through all that is great in Western civilization. It is by the light of the stars (or “something like a star”) that we discover the world, ourselves, and our destination."

Read Anthony Esolen's entire piece at Touchstone Magazine.