I see men as trees walking, part 2: A capacity for wonder.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • January 8, 2013 • Personal Narrative

 

Oth­ers besides myself have described the jour­ney from Protes­tantism to Catholi­cism as a “par­a­digm shift” [1]. It always dis­tress­es me when I describe some­thing to myself in what I think is a unique way, only to find that some­one else has used that very same descrip­tion. I pre­fer to think I’m orig­i­nal, but occa­sion­al­ly need the reminder that oth­er peo­ple have been there before; orig­i­nal­i­ty is an attribute of God alone. As far as par­a­digm shifts go, I don’t find very many con­verts describ­ing what the expe­ri­ence of one feels like. Some do.

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Twelfth Night: We await in joyful hope.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • January 5, 2013 • Literature; Liturgical Year

 

Today is Twelfth Night. I love vig­ils of any kind the Church gives us, but this one may be my favorite apart from the East­er Vig­il. In an impor­tant way each is like the oth­er: At the East­er Vig­il we wait for Res­ur­rec­tion — Christ come back to us from the tomb; on Twelfth Night we wait for Incar­na­tion — Christ come to us in the manger and adored by wise men. Christ­mas begins in Nativ­i­ty and cul­mi­nates in Epiphany. We wait for Christ, and we wait, and fol­low, and at last we behold Him, born or risen. We await in joy­ful hope. For tomor­row is Epiphany.

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Mr. John Bugay, defending the perspicuity of Scripture, cries: “God is not some kind of loon!”

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • January 3, 2013 • Apologetics; sola scriptura

 

Over on Pseudo­logue today, anti-Catholic polemi­cist Mr. John Bugay informs us, with his cus­tom­ary mad zeal, that “God is not some kind of loon.” Right. I’m pleased to report we can agree with him on that. For who among us says God is? Is Mr. Bugay swat­ting the air against imag­i­nary flies again? Does he suf­fer floaters? These are real ques­tions, I am afraid. But Mr. Bugay, as is his wont, insists on start­ing with self-evi­dent premis­es and then get­ting lost down tan­gled paths of non sequitur.

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I see men as trees walking, part 1: The tree with the lights in it.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • January 1, 2013 • Personal Narrative

 

I am not scared of much in the way of ill­ness and death but I am scared of demen­tia and blind­ness. These are an intellectual’s fears: being unable to think and unable to read. There’s braille, yes, but that’s dif­fer­ent from being able to see words and let­ters; it’s dif­fer­ent, that is, to some­one for whom read­ing has always been a form of see­ing rather than feel­ing. I sup­pose that’s also an intellectual’s dis­tinc­tion; pos­si­bly a curmudgeon’s too. Main­ly the fear has to do with adjust­ing to a world that is less. “Some­thing in the sight / Adjusts itself to mid­night,” Emi­ly Dick­in­son writes.

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