Teilhard de Chardin

Teilhard de Chardin: Closet Racist? Eugenicist?

Perhaps in dread of the next installment of Pope Francis’ environmental theology, Laudato Sí, v.2, Catholic media is turning search lights again on Teilhard de Chardin. With apologies to professional theologians and philosophers, I admit to weariness with zest for heresy-spotting. And scapegoating. If Teilhard’s mysticism came close at times to the edge of the precipice, it was his fidelity to the absolute primacy of Christ that, in the words of Henri de Lubac “saved him from a fall.” [See de Lubac’s Teilhard de Chardin: The Man and His Meaning.] Continue Reading
Spelling, Dreams, and Pavel Florensky

. . . a dreamer passes into another, system, another dimension, another measure wherein time is understood and experienced in ways completely unlike the ways of time in the visible world. In this new experience of time, the dreamer’s time, compared to time in the visible world, runs at infinite speed.
—Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis   I am one of those bitter clingers. Among things I cleave to are spelling rules and all that grammar stuff. Communications mavens and editors of Wired can chirp all they like about the glorious way new technologies liberate spelling from the oppressive dogma of fixed rules. Continue Reading