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The Bible is a Catholic book, but it’s 1000 pages thick and infinitely profound.  As families get ready to get back to school, one of the most common questions I’m asked is, “How should we study the Bible?” Catholic writers and conference speakers say alot on the subject, but the fact that almost no Catholics study the Bible regularly proves that their advice isn’t working too well.  It doesn’t help to send people to papal encyclicals or try and sell books about how to read the Bible.  What Catholic families need is practical help actually reading the Bible, consistently and … Continue

In his book “On the Evolution of Physics”, Einstein says: “In our endeavor to understand reality, we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case.” Upon reading this, we might initially feel that it provides a clever illustration of the challenge of the work that scientists seek to do.  However, if we think a little more about the illustration, we find that this isn’t anything at all like man’s actual situation. First of … Continue

“You have been wishing to know my views with regard to liberal studies. My answer is this: I respect no study, and deem no study good, which results in money-making.  Such studies are profit-bringing occupations, useful only in so far as they give the mind a preparation and do not engage it permanently. One should linger upon them only so long as the mind can occupy itself with nothing greater; they are our apprenticeship, not our real work. Hence you see why “liberal studies” are so called; it is because they are studies worthy of a free-born gentleman. But there … Continue

An early 13th century treatise on astronomy, by Iohannes de Sacrobosco. Translated by Lynn Thorndike, 1949. PROEMIUMCONTENTS OF THE FOUR CHAPTERS. — The treatise on the sphere we divide into four chapters, telling, first, what a sphere is, what its center is, what the axis of a sphere is, what the pole of the world is, how many spheres there are, and what the shape of the world is.In the second we give information concerning the circles of which this material sphere is composed and that supercelestial one, of which this is the image, is understood to be composed.In the … Continue