Ben CitM
@contemplativeinthemud
“If eyes are always kept blindfolded, one must fear that they may become blind.” — Marcel Văn Benjamin Embley | English, français, ไทย | Living on Wabanaki land | contemplativeinthemud.com
Come to learn Vietnamese, get asked to do the arithmetic yourself!
As I keep saying, the reason we imagine God as powerful and also in every way invulnerable—even though it flies in the face of our freedom to accept or reject God—isn't really about theory. It's a social question. It's about how we frame and use power. Pope Leo today: www.vatican.va/content/leo-...
Feast day in the U.S. (really no idea why it's not on the actual day she died at Kahnawà꞉ke there)—but I'll celebrate any day!
Ok, yes, thx, I did that part. Giáo sư đó tên là Văn. What I want from you, dear book, is to help me improve my Vietnamese.
Aw, and the next Văn newsletter arrived in the mail today, right on time for the day.
This is my best shot at summarizing into a coherent narrative what I know of the Early Philippe Affair using my familiarity with the Complete Works of Jacques & Raïssa Maritain and the letters between J. Maritain and his friend Charles Journet. I hope it's helpful as a starting point of some sort.
If Humbert Clérissac OP is somehow connected, possibly. But then again, there's already the connection to Action Française—Clérissac's the one who got the Maritains involved. So it's not like their surrounding world was great at the time on other grounds.
Invites, asks, all kinds of stuff. Maritain, living in NJ, finds it very weird. Does a few talks. But quickly—before The News breaks—even from another continent starts to say this guy Lacks Some Basic Things. I'm exasperated. I'm scandalized. Quite frankly, this guy Operates Under the Cover of Fog.
How I read the Journet–Maritain correspondence: A decade later, Th. Philippe decides the best way to Get What He Wants is to mimic Maritain a bit more on the surface and set up a school that's kinda Maritainian in theory (Eau Vive)—kinda. on the surface. Keeps trying to associate M. with it.
Yeah, I think so. That's the only mention in the Complete Works. M. continues to believe this privately about Th. Philippe + mysticism, but the context is the Angelicum's favour of Th.Ph. to oust Chenu + M. being the author of Integral Humanism and not exactly free from danger of the Index himself.
Part of this dynamic, iydk: Maritain reacted very early against Th. Philippe's tendencies surrounding mysticism. For his own reasons, M.'s basically got it pinned as a totalizing demon that diminishes trust in the human, already in 1937. It's not his topic to defend against abuse. But in retrospect?
35 years ago today, Fr. Antonio Boucher CSsR passed into eternal life. He was Marcel Văn's spiritual director, got him to write his autobiography, conserved Marcel's writings, translated them into French, wrote a short bio, encouraged a beatification cause. A debt of gratitude of immense proportion.
Just enjoying how the rain sticks to the sealant but not to the stones
I think I lack context on various questions here—but betcha didn't know you could be this Luddite and this hopeful! (I didn't) britmonkey.com/2020s-politi...
Unfortunately for Kara, though, it's kinda a "fast is slow, slow is smooth" thing (at least from her perspective—I can't move the thing that fast)
Fwiw, I was living in Bangkok when Laudato Si' came out. I think a clear example of what Pope Francis actually addresses in no. 55 is building larger and larger volumes of extravagant interior space (e.g., many of the shopping malls in Asia) but then expecting to keep them positively frigid.
Okay, I have no idea what controversy this is, but you guys yourselves make "art" with generative AI and post it in the Diocese's name
We don't usually see each other's headers. Here's mine; quote post yours (if you feel like it)
When it was becoming obvious that there weren't going to be many, if any, Indigenous Turtle Island theologies in this quiz, I started to wonder what the result could even be—but "The New Testament in Color" (ed.) is certainly not wrong given the premise
I really like your result. My own probably just means "you are in the Indigenous theology world and we don't know and/or didn't input data for (many) others in this sphere"
On the surface, Indigenous peoples are not mentioned in MH, but they were key to the lives of two out of eight women in this section:
Picking right up where Francis left off (Via Crucis 2025, just three days before his passing):