Flowers for Algernon

"[von Neumann] spent the last year of his life in Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he surprised and dismayed friends and family by seeking out a priest for counsel.  His brother explains this away as merely an effort to find intellectual companionship; his daughter Marina affirms, to the contrary, that von Neumann was taking up Pascal's Wager—betting on the existence of God, since he couldn't lose by being wrong:  'My father told me, in so many words, once, that Catholicism was a very tough religion to live in but it was the only one to die in.'
     "Whatever his spiritual state may have been, we know that he was distressed by the disease's effect on his mind.  An old joke among mathematicians says, 'Other mathematicians prove what they can; von Neumann proves what he wants,' but in the last weeks of his life he felt his mind rapidly deteriorating.  What had always come so easily to him—almost supernaturally easy—became difficult and then impossible.  Marina von Neumann told George Dyson that near the end her father asked her 'to test him on really simple arithmetic problems, like seven plus four, and I did this for a few minutes, and then I couldn't take it anymore.'  Even as von Neumann stumbled over the most elementary sums, he never lost his awareness that mathematics was important and that he had been marked from childhood by the astonishing fluency with which he could do it.  Marina von Neumann fled the hospital room:  in George Dyson's words, she could not bear to watch her father, one of the greatest minds of the 20th or any other century, 'recognizing that that by which he defined himself had slipped away.'"

     Alan Jacobs, "The man who delivered the computer," Books and culture (September/October 2012):  38.

Van Leeuwen's "Brief Sermon on Method"

"All this to say that when studying human gender traits, gender identity, or sexual orientation, essential conditions for inferring cause and effect—the manipulation of one factor (sex) and the control of others (social as well as biological)—cannot be met.  It means that 'all data on sex differences, no matter what research method is used, are correlational data,' and as every introductory social science student learns, you cannot draw firm conclusions about causality from merely correlational data."

     Mary Stewart van Leeuwen, "Neurohormonal wars:  old questions and dubious debates in the psychology of gender," Books and culture (September/October 2012):  12, small caps mine.  This cuts, of course, both ways.  But still. . . .

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).