JohannesAcademie

Roger Scruton, an English philosopher, has recently published a book formed from the Gifford Lectures he gave at St Andrews University, Scotland, in 2010. He adresses the question of the existence of God in what I think is a highly pertinent way - the posited absence of God being not a triumph of humanity but rather modern man's most tragic crisis of meaning... a meta-crisis! He explores what most people admit to be a gradual destruction of man in our society and argues that this is, through being a destruction of man, also a gradual loss of our natural discovery of God. "Roger Scruton explores the place of God in a disenchanted world. His argument is a response to the atheist culture that is now growing around us, and also a defence of human uniqueness. He rebuts the claim there is no meaning or purpose in the natural world, and…

Another thought provoking read, this time less recent and by V. M. Axline, a child psychotherpist. Through this impressive story of a boy she names "Dibs", Axline shows clearly and beautifully how a child is an entire person just beginning to open, develop and grow in uniqueness, and what a delicate, sensitive and profound reality that is. Both heart-wrenching in its revealing of how such vulnerability can be so easily trampled, this day by day description of the steps the author took with this child also astonishes the reader with the strength and depth of even a young child's will to live, love, fight for truth in his life and even to forgive.  “He would not talk. He would not play. Judged mentally defective, he was suddenly oblivious both to other children and to his teacher; in reality he was a brilliant, lonely child trapped in a prison of fear…

The following is the author's note in a book recently published by Wanda Poltawska, friend of Pope John Paul II, and survivor of Nazi concentration camps. Throughout her life after the camps, Wanda sought for and found ways back to an understanding of man that was no longer filled with the black despair inspired by the experience of mankind within the camps and engrained in all but the very strongest of the inmates and guards. As she eloquently and powerfully expresses, such a search for the meaning of man's existence within his cohabitation with brokenness and evil, is becoming ever more pertitent in today's world where increasing numbers of young people seek out help on precisely the questions she painstakingly found answers to. May we still speak of truth about man today, or are we too living in a world that is rejecting humanity? "To the reader of today and…

Writer Robert Macfarlane, of Cambridge, Great Britain, recently published the third book in a "loose trilogy about landscape and the human heart". Through tracing the history first of man's relationship with mountains,  then with wilderness and lastly with pathways, Macfarlane finds some of the most insightful ways to uncover and explore man's own depth, height, nature and quests. Indeed, the natural world around us is not simply an object of admiration or exploitation... Man has lived with, struggled  with, discovered, used, enjoyed and ignored the physical world, the history of which is so intimately woven into his own. The author's uniquely skillful yet beautifully simple usage of English, at times humble and ordinary and often brilliantly poetic, allows him to paint true masterpieces where the deftness of expression is a quite wonderful demonstration of how words can communicate something of the deepest and most subtle of man's truest experiences. Reading these books is an essential…