a new year

returning to work .. . . . . . 

looking back on the blog: my illness was surely a blessing;
it can still bear fruit
though this will take some determination.

be brief:
this is more important than I realised . . . .

in the Tablet this week, a review of a new book entitled 'the face of God':
God  . . . . .  is irrelevant to many philosophers and scientists because he seems to "clutter up a universe which functions perfectly well without him". But, Scruton reminds us, humans are not two different things (body with soul "free-rattling inside us") but one thing which can be seen in two ways: as subject and as object. Scientific language is fine-tuned to the description of objects, processes and causes. . . . "To try to speak of minds, souls and freewill to the scientist is (using C S Lewis' image) like trying to convince a two dimensional creature that there is such a thing as a third dimension by pointing to the convergence of two lines on a drawing and calling it a street. But while two-dimensional shapes really are the only material objects present they carry an intention which exceeds the stroke lines and alone gives them meaning."
Scruton continues, "God disappears from the world as soon as we address it with the 'why?' of explanation." The God of the philosophers disappeared behind the world because he was described in the third person and not addressed in the second. 

Rowan Williams: 

"We live in a culture where ownership is often seen as the most significant relationship we ever have to anything."

Further on in the same talk he says:
". . .  and to speak of Hell in the broadest possible terms is to speak of a condition where we are no longer able to look at God with joy." 

and also this:
"Our acts change us; Our acts make us the kind of people we are."
 

it is now 00.31 on 15th April 2012. Exactly one hundred years ago the Titanic was filling with water in the Atlantic. How it can still be such a significant event considering the millions and millions who died in that century of catastrophe it is hard to tell but it certainly seems so to me just now: perhaps because it was a first sign of what was still to come?

A fascinating lecture given by Giovanni Franzoni, who, as a Benedictine Abbot, was an eyewitness at the Second Vatican Council.