Liberal Christian nationalism

       "There is a name for [Ryan P.] Burge's preferred cocktail of religion and civics, Church and state.  It's Christendom.  Burge's book [The vanishing church] is one long lament for the passing of mainline Christendom in America.  You might even say it is both a paean and a dirge for a certain style of Christian nationalism—liberal Christian nationalism.  Make the mainline great again!"

     Brad East, "Mainlining nostalgia," a review, First things no. 362 (April 2026):  52. 

"many who are in a state of grace suffer from dullness of mind"

"multi habentes gratiam adhuc patiuntur mentis hebetudinem."

     St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II-II.8.4.Praet 1, trans. FEDP (Shapcote).  Ad 1:  "Some who have sanctifying grace may suffer from dullness of mind with regard to things that are  not necessary for salvation; but with regard to those that are necessary for salvation, they are sufficiently instructed by the Holy Ghost, according to 1 John 2:27, His unction teacheth you of all things."

Faith is enigmatic knowledge

FEDP (i.e. Shapcote): "faith is knowledge in a dark manner."

"est . . . fides cognitio aenigmatica."

     St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II.67.5.Praet. 1.  Cf. the Resp.:  "faith is of the same genus, namely knowledge, as the beatific vision [(fides . . . cum visione patriae convenit in genere, quod est cognitio, faith comes together with the visio patriae in the genus cognition)]."
     But note the "But"!  For this is an impressively difficult Resp.  And most especially, "when you remove a specific difference, the substance of the genus does not remain identically the same".

 

 

Richard Rohr, Andreas Ebert, and the Enneagram

For what it's worth:

• Huggins, Ronald V. "The Enneagram’s False History and Occult Roots." Bibliotheca sacra 179, no. 714 (2022): 146–162.
• Cusack, Carole M. "Ṣūfism and the Gurdjieff 'Work': A Contested Relationship." In Handbook of Islamic Sects and Movements, edited by Carole M. Cusack and Muhammad Afzal Upal. Brill, 2021.
• etc. (I stopped here, though there is more to be found).

The Blessed, "who have the glory of the soul[,] are not, properly speaking, said to hope for the glory of the body, but only to desire it."

Source

"illi qui habent gloriam animae, non proprie dicuntur sperare gloriam corporis; sed solum desiderare."

     St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II.67.4.ad 3.  For "a good whose unerring cause [(inevitabilem causam)] we already possess is not related to us as something difficult."

"without thee we are not able to please thee"

Vat. Reg. lat. 316, fol. 178v

"May the working of your mercy, O Lord, we pray, direct our hearts aright, for without your grace we cannot find favor in your sight.  Through".

"Dirigat corda nostra, quaesumus, Domine, tuae miserationis operatio, quia tibi sine te placere non possumus."

My translation: 

May the work of your compassion, O Lord we pray, set our hearts in order, because without you we cannot please you.

     Prayer for Saturday of the Fourth Week of Lent, Liturgia horarum.  =Corpus orationum no. 2234, going back to the mid-8th-century Gelasian Sacramentary (Vat. Reg. lat. 316, fol. 178v, representing mid-7th-century practice) at least. 

BCP 1549:

"O GOD, for asmuche as without thee, we are not able to please thee; Graunte that the workyng of thy mercie maye in all thynges directe and rule our heartes; Through".

BCP 1662:

"O God, forasmuch as without thee we are not able to please thee; Mercifully grant, that thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through".

BCP 1979:

"O God, forasmuch as without thee we are not able to please thee, mercifully grant that thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through".

"O God, because without you we are not able to please you, mercifully grant that thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through".

"the [twentieth-century] narrative concerning the medieval [Christian] reaction to [Hindu-Arabic numerals] and the number zero" constitutes "a bizarre funhouse mirror image of the Middle Ages"

Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 3 (1905), 155–195

"the way the introduction of the number zero as well as the whole system of Hindu-Arabic numerals into medieval Europe has been represented in modern scholarship and popular media" constitutes "a bizarre funhouse mirror image of the Middle Ages", "a rather depressing case study of the way careless scholarship and failure to check one’s sources can allow false narratives and made-up ‘facts’ to proliferate in the modern world."

     From a pre-pub version of C. Philipp Nothaft, "Medieval Europe’s satanic ciphers: on the genesis of a modern myth," British journal for the history of mathematics 35, no. 2 (2020): 107–136.