David L. Schindler. The Given as Gift: Creation and Disciplinary Abstraction in Science

From the Spring 2011 issue, on the theme of “Ascension and Pentecost”:

David L. Schindler. Creation and Disciplinary Abstraction in Science (pdf).

From the text:

The upshot is that abstractions in science are not and can never be indifferent to the reality of God or a universe under God. Each abstraction in science will imply, even if unconsciously, some conception of the unity or identity of the thing abstracted relative to God and to the universal community of beings. The God-world distinction as disclosed in the act of creation shapes the primitive nature of all distinctions, and hence all abstractions, in the cosmos. Indeed, every distinction and abstraction most basically implies a sense of the God-world relation. . . . (full text)

DAVID L. SCHINDLER (bio) is Provost and Gagnon Professor of Fundamental Theology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Also by this author:

Norris Clarke on Person, Being, and St. Thomas. (1993) | Religious Freedom, Truth, and American Liberalism: Another Look at John Courtney Murray. (1994) | Homelessness and the Modern Condition: The Family, Community, and the Global Economy. (2000) | Is Truth Ugly? Moralism and the Convertibility of Being and Love. (2000) | Creation and Nuptiality: A Reflection on Feminism in Light of Schmemann’s Liturgical Theology. (2001) | Toward a Culture of Life: The Eucharist, the ‘Restoration’ of Creation, and the ‘Worldy’ Task of the Laity. (2002) | Biotechnology and the Givenness of the Good: Posing Properly the Moral Question Regarding Human Dignity. (2004) |  The Dramatic Nature of Life: Liberal Societies and the Foundations of Human Dignity. (2006) | In memoriam: Patricia Buckley Bozell. (2008) | The Embodied Person as Gift and the Cultural Task in America: Status Quaestionis. (2008) | Editorial: President Obama, Notre Dame, and a Dialogue That Witnesses: A Question for Father Jenkins. (2009) | Living and Thinking Reality in Its Integrity: Originary Experience, God, and the Task of Education (2010) | The Anthropological Vision of Caritas in veritate in Light of Cultural and Economic Life in the United States.

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The Feast of the Transfiguration

José Granados, dcjm, (bio) Embodied Light, Incarnate Image: The Mystery of Jesus Transfigured. (pdf, 2008).

From the text:

What is new and surprising in Christ is that in him we see not only a fraction of the past, but the ultimate origin from which everything comes; that he foreshadows not only a slice of the future, but the ultimate goal of the universe. In the life of the Son, time encounters its own truth by making visible the depths of eternity.

Now the glory of the one who eternally comes from the Father and eternally returns to him in love enters into the flesh, into the space where past and future, coming from and walking toward, memory and promise, are joined in the density of the present. We see then how Christ can fulfill the human experience of time beyond what is imaginable while faithfully preserving its structure. These reflections allow us to see in the Transfiguration a key to understanding the rhythm of salvation history. That the glory of Easter is anticipated on Mount Tabor is no exception, but rather a witness to Christ’s dominion over time, including the past and future. The second epistle of Peter tells us, indeed, that the Transfiguration validates the Old Testament in retrospect. From this point of view it is possible to see how the prophets and the just of the Old Testament were justified by the Spirit of Christ. We can glimpse also the meaning of Tertullian’s sentence, quoted in Gaudium et spes 22, in which he sees in the image of man a prefiguration of Christ’s image: “Thus that clay, already putting on the image of Christ who was to be in the flesh, was not only a work of God but also a token of him.” (full text)

More on the Transfiguration. More by José Granados.

Mark Sebanc. Tolkien: Lover of the Logos

From the Spring 1993 issue: Mark Sebanc, JRR Tolkien: Lover of the Logos (pdf).

From the text:

Tolkien’s is an exquisitely proleptic art that takes a pagan, pre-Christian universe and suffuses it discreetly with a sacramental holiness stemming implicitly from what Balthasar makes bold to call a Christian form. . . . . Like a colossus, Tolkien bestrides the abyss which separates the ancient and medieval worldviews from that of modern man, who has utterly lost sight of the Christ form as the primary means of access to the noumenal world. The power of the Word has been repudiated, and all around us now we see only its debased and slatternly distortions, hideous and mass-produced, like Tolkien’s Orcs. Tolkien’s art restores the incarnational, Christo-logical inclination of language. . . .  (full text).

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Jonah Lynch. Mirth and Freedom in The Magic Flute

From the Winter, 2006 issue: Jonah Lynch, Mirth and Freedom in The Magic Flute (pdf).

From the text:

Indeed no words can better be used to describe Mozart’s music than “sublime” and “natural.” Beethoven is heroic, tragic—although at the end, he too can be sublime, with the autumnal serenity of a warrior turned contemplative; Bach erects his marvelously ornate cathedrals of sound—and occasionally he too passes into a timeless realm which could be truly termed sublime, though rarely natural. But Mozart’s melodies carry something of the birth of an infant God, the remarkable union of opposite absolutes, total simplicity and infinite depth. Only here is the completely free and ever-surprising united to formal structural perfection. Mozart speaks with human words, as God spoke his Word through a birth, a life, and a death. Yet in those simple events lay the Incarnation, the eternal mission of the Son from the Father, suffering which destroys death, and transfiguration into deathless life. (full text)

Also by Jonah Lynch:  Music, Silence, and Technology