Fr. James Schall writes about the “Deep Down Things” of Robert Royal’s recent book, A Deeper Vision. “The intellectual import of this book, seen in discussions of the works of Alasdair MacIntyre, Bernard Lonergan, Karol Wojtyla, Joseph Ratzinger, and others, is precisely its spelling out the way that the Catholic mind draws on its own long tradition to deal with ideas and systems that, in effect, broke the link between what men think and how they are to act in the light of what they are.”
What happens when literature is used as an expression of dictators’ egos? “Putting the lie to the myth that literature has a moral power, Stalin loved reading and discussing the Russian greats…. The resulting work should stand as a lesson in how literature always suffers when writers get too cosy with power. Kalder writes of ‘Fyodor Gladkov, whose most famous novel was the thrillingly titled Cement, and Valentin Kataev whose most famous novel Time, Forward! was about pouring cement.’”
In more practical matters, archaeologists have discovered the remains of an early medieval Italian man who replaced an amputated hand with a knife. “The man’s teeth showed extreme wear – a huge loss of enamel, and a bone lesion. He’d worn his teeth so far down on the right side of his mouth that he’d likely opened the pulp cavity, causing a bacterial infection. What’s that got to do with a prosthesis? He was probably using his teeth to tighten the straps that held it in place.”
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