Sunday, April 17, 2005

Readables

* A lecture on Divine Wisdom and Christian Humanism by Father Augustine DiNoia.

* Selections from Brain Dead Person by Masahiro Morioka (hat-tip: Fido the Yak). The basic idea is summarized in the essay, Two Aspects of Brain Dead Being, and the background is presented in an essay on the brain death debate in Japanese bioethics, Reconsidering Brain Death.

* Jacobi's Open Letter to Fichte (21 March 1799):

I maintain: the human being finds God because he can only find himself simultaneously with God; and he is unfathomable to himself because the essence of God is necessarily unfathomable. Necessarily! Because otherwise a super-godly capacity would have to reside in the human being, and God would have to be able to be invented by the human being. God would then only be a thought of the finite, an imagined being, and certainly not the highest being, existing solely in itself, the free creator of all other beings, the beginning and the end. That is not the way it is, and for that reason the human being loses himself as soon as he resists finding himself in God as his creator in a manner inconceivable to his reason; as soon as he wants to base himself in himself alone. Everything then gradually dissolves before him into his own Nothingness. But a human being has this choice, a single one: Nothingness or a God.

(Hat-tip: The 4th Century)

* A consequentialist fortune cookie at "Mumblings of a Platonist"

* Theological Thursdays: Knowing God: God Unchanging at "Beyond the Rim"