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Issue 06 – Corpus Christi 2021

Feuilleton

Feuilleton

This issue's miscellany.

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❖ This issue completes the first volume of The Lamp. We are both awed and humbled by the generosity of our readers, who took a chance on a small magazine during what turned out to be the worst imaginable year for a venture of this kind. We would like once again to thank those of you who donated to our initial GoFundMe campaign, especially Ryan Hammill, the inaugural member of our Leonine Circle, and our single most generous individual supporter. Currently we are in the process of securing long-term support for what has hitherto been a voluntary undertaking. We ask anyone interested in helping us to secure our future to contact the publisher or the editor.

❖ We were recently reminded of the phrase “non-overlapping magisteria,” which the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould used to describe the relationship between natural science and revelation. It is a memorable description of a view that is ultimately untenable. It is also a perfect illustration of how many Catholics understand political economy and the teachings of the popes. The distinguished Thomist Father Herbert McCabe, for example, believed that just as Darwinism had superseded natural history, so too had the science of Marxism obviated modern Catholic social teaching. In the United States, a group of so-called “Whig” Thomists have made largely the same argument but in reverse. The whole thing was summed up rather dreadfully some years ago when Pope Benedict XVI issued Caritas in veritate in 2009. A well-known magazine columnist and hagiographer willed into existence his view that portions of the encyclical to which he could not assent were the work of some sinister coterie, a view he summarized by suggesting that certain passages were written in gold ink, others in red.


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