Buckley on the indispensability of "a specifically religious intellectuality"

"It was not the opposition of science to religion; it was much more the endorsement of [religion by] science that generated modern atheism.  It was not because science was indifferent or antagonistic; it was because it was too enthusiastically affirmative and comprehensively supportive that atheism emerged.  Science smothered religion by adopting it."

     Michael J. Buckley, S.J., Denying and disclosing God:  the ambiguous progress of modern atheism (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2004), 2.

"the unjust steward with his impious economy making up for his own private thefts by grudging honour to his Master."

"'To what purpose is this waste?'—the unjust steward with his impious economy making up for his own private thefts by grudging honour to his Master."

     John Henry Newman, Meditations on Christian doctrine II ("Hope in God—Redeemer").i.2 (August 18, 1855) (Prayers, verses, and devotions (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 342).

"I see now the meaning of that else inexplicable humiliation: He preferred to regain me rather than to create new worlds."

     John Henry Newman, Meditations on Christian doctrine I ("Hope in God—Creator").(3).2 (Prayers, verses, and devotions (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 2000), 340).

"the loss of a geocentric cosmology of nested crystalline spheres was not in any intrinsic way a fundamental break in human self-understanding"

     "The interesting and complex story that runs through the lives of Bruno, Galileo, and their learned contemporaries is not, as Rowland commendably knows, some science-versus-religion showdown still asserted today among historically ignorant scientistic ideologues.  But neither is it her repression-versus-liberation dichotomy.  It is rather the widespread inability of deeply Aristotelianized contemporaries, simultaneously aghast at the doctrinal, social, and political divisions within Christendom, to grasp the independence of traditional Christian theology from cosmology as such, and thus the compatibility of that theology with different cosmological models.  This is evident from the ways in which later Christians have grasped this distinction:  the universe's infinite spaces may have terrified Pascal in the mid-17th century, but they did not inhibit his ardent faith and devotion.  Nor do they prevent anyone today from accepting all of the Catholic Church's teachings, along with all scientific findings, provided one holds a traditional theology of creation.  God is love whether the universe is Ptolemaic or infinite.  It turns out that Bruno's moral and theological assertions are entirely independent of the vast universe he posited.  And that means that the loss of a geocentric cosmology of nested crystalline spheres was not in any intrinsic way a fundamental break in human self-understanding, whatever its continuing convenience for Western Civ lecturers."

     Brad S. Gregory, reviewing Giordano Bruno:  philosopher/heretic, by Ingrid D. Rowland, in "Giordano Bruno Superstar," Books and culture:  a Christian review 18, no. 2 (March/April 2012):   21 (19-21).  The reference to God's being love is a second slap at Rowland's comment that "[i]t would take another four hundred years for a pope to issue an encyclical that began with the words 'Deus caritas est'".

"How is it that a Jewish atheist is not thought to have left the Jewish people, but the Jewish Catholic has?"

     Hadley Arkes, in Marcia Segelstein, "Courage and conversion:  an interview with Hadley Arkes," Touchstone 24, no. 2 (March/April 2011).

"although they had borrowed the letter of the law, they could not carry over the spirit that gives it life."

     "The Constitution of the United States resembles those fine creations of human industry which ensure wealth and renown to their inventors, but which are profitless in other hands.  This truth is exemplified by the condition of Mexico at the present time.  The Mexicans were desirous of establishing a federal system, and they took the Federal Constitution of their neighbors, the Anglo-Americans, as their model and copied it almost entirely.  But although they had borrowed the letter of the law, they could not carry over the spirit that gives it life.  They were involved in ceaseless embarrassments by the mechanism of their dual government; the sovereignty of the states and that of the Union perpetually exceeded their respective privileges and came into collision; and to the present day Mexico is alternately the victim of anarchy and the slave of military despotism."

     Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America I (1835).I.VIII.22 ("Why the federal system is not practicable for all nations, and how the Anglo-Americans were enabled to adopt it"), trans. Henry Reeve, with revisions by Francis Bowen and Phillips Bradley ((New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), vol. 1, p. 167; Œuvres, ed. André Jardin (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), II (De la démocratie en Amérique), ed. Jean-Claude Lamberti and James T. Schleifer (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1992), 186-187.  This, however, would not be true today, or at least certainly not of me:

"I have never been more struck by the good sense and the practical judgment of the Americans than in the manner in which they elude the numberless difficulties resulting from their Federal Constitution.  I scarcely ever met with a plain American citizen who could not distinguish with surprising facility the obligations created by the laws of Congress from those created by the laws of his own state, and who, after having discriminated between the matters that come under the cognizance of the Union and those which the local legislature is competent to regulate, could not point out the exact limit of the separate jurisdictions of the Federal courts and the tribunals of the state" (167).

"A false notion which is clear and precise will always have more power in the world than a true principle which is obscure or involved."

     Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America I (1835).I.VIII.22 ("Why the federal system is not practicable for all nations, and how the Anglo-Americans were enabled to adopt it"), trans. Henry Reeve, with revisions by Francis Bowen and Phillips Bradley ((New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), vol. 1, p. 166; Œuvres, ed. André Jardin (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), II (De la démocratie en Amérique), ed. Jean-Claude Lamberti and James T. Schleifer (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1992), 185.