This Mob Quad group of buildings in Merton College, Oxford was constructed in three phases and concluded in c. 1378; Wikipedia, public domain
Here is the third of the five potential “dyad topics” for the projected seminar on Christian humanism (again, WordPress can’t handle the auto-numbering in Word docs. Sigh) Continued from part I:
Faith and reason
Reason and the image of God in humanity
The role of reason in the carrying out of the creation mandate (for human flourishing)
Illumination and education in early Christian soteriological understanding
The pendulum of claims for reason
Tertullian vs. Clement on the value of philosophy
Seminal Logos understanding
Augustine, reason and its limitations; the autonomy of scientific knowledge and the critique of bad Christian scientific reasoning
Anselm, “faith seeking reason” – modest claim
Aquinas – moderate claim
Late scholasticism – reason maximized, atrophied, and arrogant – seeking to bring all knowledge under reason’s command
The nominalist critique
The renaissance humanist critique
The Lutheran critique: Luther against the philosophers
The recovery of scholasticism under Melanchthon and the rise of Protestant scholasticism
Good ol' Clement of A, w/ his own quite impressive beard
And if you don’t get the chance to look at all the items from Pietist Schoolman’s blog (see my previous post), you should definitely check this one out, from Slate:
An Amish splinter group has gone on a crime spree, forcibly cutting the beards off of their rivals. Many religions, including Sikhism, Islam, and sects of Judaism, encourage or require their men to keep beards. Jesus Christ is often depicted with a beard. Why does God like facial hair so much?
Because it’s manly. Although beards appear repeatedly in religious texts, God never explicitly tells us why they’re so holy. In the absence of any divine exposition, many theologians have posited that a hairy face is a symbol of masculinity bestowed upon men by God. St. Clement of Alexandria, who was among the most emphatic proponents of this view, argued: “But for one who is a man to comb himself and shave himself with a razor, for the sake of fine effect, to arrange his hair at the looking-glass, to shave his cheeks, pluck hairs out of them, and smooth them, how womanly! And, in truth, unless you saw them naked, you would suppose them to be women.”
This blog contains over 720 posts as of Oct 2020 (also over 518,000 views from 210,000 unique visitors since inception in June 2010). If you read something you like, odds are there are at least one or two other posts dealing with similar topics. Which is why there’s a search box right below this message. :)
Francis of Assisi--part of an altarpiece by Bartolomeo Vivarini, in the Brooklyn Museum
From a mid-15th-century Dutch prayerbook: Saint James the Great; Saint Joseph; Saint Ghislain, abbot of St Ghislain, near Mons; Saint Eligius; Saint Ermes (Hermes)
Gregory the Great and St. Mamertinus, from a 14th-century French translation of Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea
Cologne Cathedral
The clocktower of the Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles church in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt (Val-d'Oise), France
Masaccio, Crucifixion, 1426 (Naples, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte); the blonde figure is Mary Magdalen
Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians
Grateful to the dead 