Open Wide the Doors for Christ!: Nature

Showing posts with label Nature. Show all posts

Yesterday was the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas (awesome dude!), and so I thought it would be apropos to post some videos on him and his thinking. The first one, from Taylor Marshall, speaks about Thomas's insight into human nature regarding how grace builds on nature - we're good, but fallen, and grace is what transforms, perfects, and strengthens us. Yesterday I posted about serving for Pope Francis and how the experience made me realize - you know - the humanness of our Holy Father, and thus that we need to pray for him, and so the video seemed to be especially fitting. The second one is from Fr. Barron and shows why Thomas's thought still is hugely important today because: (1) he shows that all truth is one - that thus faith and revelation are not only compatible with reason and science, but that they work together, and strengthen each other, (2) his proof of God based on contingency - that things rely on other things for their existence, but that at some point we have to reach some non-contingent, non-created, non-limited "thing" (which is God) or else nothing would exist at all, and (3) Thomas's explanation of us as human - and how that humanity was transformed by the incarnation of Christ, and thus makes Christian humanism, our view of the goodness of man, above that of any secular thinker. This also goes along with stuff happening in my life - especially the material I'm studying in fundamental theology regarding faith, reason, revelation, the church (and other such important things...), as well as a fascinating conversation I had yesterday with some guys about what Christ would have known (being both fully human and fully divine), and how that might "work" now that he has a glorified body (a topic that then went into the existence of matter outside of time and quantum states and stuff - it was great, science and faith together!)

Enjoy! And keep me in your prayers!

Back to paper writing (on modern biblical scholarship: specifically the last 200 years or so of work on understanding the formation of the Pentateuch) and studying (for Fundamental Theology) It's so cool, I'm studying theology!

5 Ways, Contingency, Faith, Fr. Robert Barron, Grace, Humanity, Nature, Pope Francis, Reason, Science, St. Thomas Aquinas, Video, 0 Comments

Well folks, sorry about the complete dearth of blogging. This will be a short post just to keep you updated and hopefully I'll start putting together some daily updates tomorrow (we'll see...). As you probably saw, on Monday we flew from St. Louis to San Jose California (with a few stops). We had a wonderful afternoon in San Jose, saw the ocean, had a delicious dinner, and got to sleep after a long day. On Tuesday, we went to the Monterrey Bay Aquarium, which was really, really interesting, got some calamari sandwiches for lunch (interesting), and then drove out to the house/cabin that we rented here in Mariposa (a few miles outside the West entrance to Yosemite. Yesterday, Wednesday, we woke up around 4 AM and hiked up half dome, a huge rock that juts outside of the Yosemite valley. When I say huge, I mean it. It was 18 miles long, with almost a mile of vertical ascent, and the last several hundred yards were done by pulling yourself up on cables to the top of the rock - definitely the hardest, longest, most scary, and coolest hike ever. Finally, today, we went down to the grove of giant sequoias, saw the enormous trees, visited a relative, and got some decent burgers for dinner. Obviously, there is a lot more to each of those days, and hopefully I can write up some accounts of them - if only for myself in the future - but just know that it has been an absolute blast so far.

OK, so here are a few pictures, and with that goodnight from California!