book review · literature · poetry · sex · the soul · verse · writing

Rebecca Bratten Weiss and The Gods We Have Eaten

It’s hard not to envy the experience and the deep reading of philosophy and literature which writer-farmer Rebecca Bratten Weiss brings to bear in the marvelous poems she’s been composing for almost a decade. A former adjunct professor of literature, Rebecca is the digital editor of U.S. Catholic (for whom I’ve written). Her articles and… Continue reading Rebecca Bratten Weiss and The Gods We Have Eaten

Augustine · philosophy · the soul · theology

Augustine and the Evolution of the Soul

By the term ‘soul’ (anima) Augustine meant the highest immaterial element in man, the art of man to which mind (mens, more rarely animus) is but a function. Exactly what ‘soul’ is and how God creates souls he regarded as beyond human knowledge. It would make for simplicity, he once remarked apropos of infant baptism,… Continue reading Augustine and the Evolution of the Soul

Aquinas · Aristotle · Bible · brain science · Christianity · the soul · theistic evolution

The Problem of the Soul

A similar uneasiness with this kind of distinction has appeared more recently within Roman Catholic theology, due no doubt in part to a sense that the notion of a self-subsistent soul is non-scriptural and/or that the notion of God’s immediately creating each human soul does not fit easily into the continuum of living beings that… Continue reading The Problem of the Soul