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Showing posts from May, 2012

Poem of the Month: May

What more appropriate for Our Lady's month than the "May Magnificat" by Gerard Manley Hopkins? MAY is Mary’s month, and I Muse at that and wonder why: Her feasts follow reason, Dated due to season— Candlemas, Lady Day; But the Lady Month, May, Why fasten that upon her, With a feasting in her honour? Is it only its being brighter Than the most are must delight her? Is it opportunest And flowers finds soonest? Ask of her, the mighty mother: Her reply puts this other Question: What is Spring?— Growth in every thing— Flesh and fleece, fur and feather, Grass and greenworld all together; Star-eyed strawberry-breasted Throstle above her nested Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin Forms and warms the life within; And bird and blossom swell In sod or sheath or shell. All things rising, all things sizing Mary sees, sympathising With that world of good, Nature’s motherhood. Their magnifying of each its kind With delight calls to mind How she did in her stored Magnify the Lord. Well but t

On Facebook

Just found a lovely article on Yahoo Finance which sums up (in several pages) part of my usual Facebook rant!  The points they bring up are precisely my objections to using Facebook - the privacy issues, the irresponsibility and privacy invasions of Facebook, the dangers the site poses.  Especially the fact that even if you do everything right, you still aren't protected because of the connection and openness between every person - their mistakes can easily affect you even if your own profile is as secure as it can be.  Read this article, please!  These are experienced, worldly-wise people analyzing a situation from a detached, third-person viewpoint.  I'm willing to bet the authors themselves have Facebook, yet they are still able to recognize the problems with it. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/facebook-and-your-privacy.html?page=1 It focuses on the privacy issues with the site, not on the change Facebook has made to social interaction and communication.  Nonetheless, perhaps

Philosophy

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I had a thought, that it might be amusing to let my small audience of readers get a taste of what I'm studying right now - philosophy of human nature.  So here, without any explanation of terms, are a few of the basic topics that will comprise my final tomorrow! How does man come to know? -agent intellect abstracts from phantasm -abstraction produces intelligible species -possible intellect receives intelligible species -“once the possible intellect receives the intelligible species it is said to be the subject of knowledge, i.e., what performs the act of knowledge” -“the act of knowledge is an action of forming a concept” -“the possible intellect ‘speaks a word to itself’; the concept is this interior word” The proper object of the human intellect is a corporeal nature existing in an individual. The human soul is immaterial/incorporeal. The human intellect can know any body Whatever knows certain things cannot have any of them in its own nature, because that which is in it nat