The Dead Philosophers Society is pleased to announce its 8th annual Online Conference. The theme of this year’s conference is The Church and the Common Good.
The theme for conference papers this year has in mind the link Acts 2:44 makes between the individual and the community in which we all live: “And all who believed were together and had all things in common…” The catechism instructs us that the common good presupposes respect for the person, requires the social well-being and development of the group and requires the stability and security of a just order.
Papers are solicited from Holy Apostles students, staff and faculty and from interested writers outside the college. Papers addressing any facet of the common good are invited. We are looking for papers up to 10 pages. The submission deadline is March 24 for the conference starting April 7. Papers will be posted on the first day of the conference. Readers then comment on the papers and the paper authors respond.
Please submit your paper by March 24 to deadphilosopherssociety@gmail.com . Include in your submission whether you are interested in having your paper published in a Catholic journal.
Examples of conference papers can be found in the March 2011 archives.
We look forward to receiving your contribution and to the exchange of ideas at the conference.
UPDATE: The journal Social Justice Review will review accepted conference papers with author permission for possible publication .
Dr. Mahfood and Raul both have made these codes available to Populi users but such a valuable tool is worth posting again. You can also see the list on the Populi support page HERE.
When posting messages in Populi you can format the text using the codes below:
There are a number of fields throughout Populi where you can use the following symbols to format the text:
*bold* = bold
_italics_ = italics
#underlined# = underlined
^superscript^ = superscript
~subscript~ = subscript
+inserted text+ = inserted text
-deleted text- = deleted text
@code@ = code
Just begin and end a string of text with the appropriate symbols and it will display with the desired formatting. You can also combine symbols… for instance, *_don’t go overboard!_* becomes don’t go overboard!
Scientific American magazine this month describes a set of studies done by Will Gervais of the University of British Columbia looking at why atheists are so disliked. A recent Gallup poll shows only 45% of respondents would vote for a qualified atheist presidential candidate.
Gervais found that participants thought atheists less trustworthy than a religious person. In one study Gervais presented a story about a person who accidentally hits a parked car and then fails to leave behind insurance information for the other driver. When asked if the person in question was a Christian, a Muslim, a rapist or an atheist, study participants selected the rapist and atheist equally as the probable culprit.
The other study asked participants to consider an atheist and a religious person for high-trust and low-trust vacancies. Religious job candidates were more likely to be selected for the high-trust job (daycare worker) and the atheist fared much better when considered for the low-trust position (waitress).
Interestingly, even study participants identifying themselves as having no religious affiliation held similar opinions on the desirability of religious people over atheists.
Articles such as this one contributed to Scientific American winning a prestigious magazine award in 2011.
Our own Father Brian Mullady has a 2-part piece in the National Catholic Register discussing Who is Christ?
Part One, appearing appropriately enough on Christmas Eve, asks the question
Why…is there such an attempt to dilute the message [of Christ] in the present world? To say that Christ is a savior means first that there must be a common human nature which is defective and then that one must identify exactly what that defect is.
Father Mullady spends the rest of this piece quite ably discussing Catholic teaching on this issue.
Part Two appeared on January 17. Father Mullady laments the tragedy of
Catholic thought for the last 50 years or so has been the attempt to develop a religion without dogma. In this, many Catholic theologians belatedly followed a tendency inherent in Protestantism for several centuries, in which theology was not important and being nice was. One of the principal places where this tendency has been evident is in regard to Christ.
This tendency leads to confusion amongst many Catholics, especially those who have not had sufficient instruction in Catholic thought, to wander away from Catholic dogma into a place where personal feelings and preferences about what the Church represents prevail. Fr. Mullady concisely describes possible outcomes of this tendency and the correct teaching to counteract these tendencies.
A very interesting and instructive piece. If the information is not new to you then it is a cogent reminder of what is important in Catholic teaching.
The Dead Philosophers Society received this email from Dr. William Mills, faculty member of Holy Apostles:
Dear Faculty, Staff, and Students:
I would like to announce that my new book, Encountering Jesus in the Gospels is being released today for publication. The book is a series of easy to read pastoral reflections on basic Gospel images of Jesus: Jesus the Bread, Jesus the Vine, Jesus the King, and so forth. Each chapter has a series of questions for personal reflection, for spiritual journaling, or for small group discussion. The book is a great resource for personal and group Bible study and sermon preparation.
You can read an excerpt from my book on my website www.williamcmills.com as well as order a copy via amazon.com:
Advanced Praise for Encountering Jesus in the Gospels:
In this welcome and wonderfully accessible book, Father William Mills very skillfully cuts through the fog of the current Jesus wars and helps readers discover for themselves the richly diverse answers provided in the gospels to Jesus’ own question: “Who do you say that I am?””
Adam DeVille, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Theology
University of Saint Francis
“At first glance this book is a study of the names and titles of Jesus, proves to be far more, as each name proves, in the author’s related experience to be a point of meeting with the Lord. Surely people will have a deeper intimacy with Christ from this brief, but life touching, book.”
The Vatican has created a marvelous virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel. Click on the link and you are taken to an interactive 360 degree view of the chapel. Move around the chapel, zoom in and out on the 26 sections depicting Biblical eras and characters. Follow Michelangelo’s history of the world from creation through the ancestors of Christ and on to the second coming and the summoning of mankind to salvation. Marvel at the Creation of Adam, the Creation of Eve and the Fall and Expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
All accompanied by choral music you can toggle on and off.
A blog dedicated to reporting on the interface between Catholicism and science reports that Google today honors Nicholas Steno, a Catholic convert who conducted ground-breaking research in anatomy and geology. Steno is important because
Steno’s life shows that, even in the era of supposed Church intolerance of science, orthodox Catholic churchmen were not only contributing to science, they were doing so in precisely the areas where there is supposed to be an intractable conflict between science and faith.
This piece in The Deeps of Time blog has links to the Google video clip and article describing why Google decided to single Steno out for attention.
“There is some urgency in getting back to the classical notions of justice built upon an authentic Christian anthropology because of the modern mindset of reducing or restricting justice by basing it on other criteria such as utility, autonomy, ownership, or egalitarianism.”
He goes on to advocate a more radical form of justice:
So the “social justice” called for by the Church is not something based upon a worldly philosophy; rather, it is “the most classical form of justice,” which in today’s age may actually be more rigorously revolutionary than anything dreamed of in the philosophy of Guevara and Alinsky. This classical form of justice includes those kinds of justice classified as commutative (between two persons), distributive (between the community and the individual), and legal justice (between the community and the one who has care of the community), but it goes beyond them.
Is he right to suggest a justice based on principles extending beyond our version of “worldly justice”?
Our highly talented college staff have designed a new ad promoting our distance learning programs in theology and philosophy. (Click on the image to see a full-size version.)
The Dead Philosophers Society is pleased to announce its 8th annual Online Conference. The theme of this year’s conference is The Church and the Common Good.
