Joshua McManaway

Notre Dame is hiring in New Testament: apply.interfolio.com/170876

If you are interested and want to talk to someone who's at ND, please reach out to me!

Just submitted a paper proposal for PMR titled, "It Takes Two to Make a Thing Go Right: The Pedagogical and Polemical Strategies of John of Damascus’ Contra Nestorianos and De Fide Contra Nestorianos"

I hate to do the Lonergan thing, but it really seems to me that universities are rolling over on AI so quickly because few academics have given much thought to their own cognition and to what learning and knowing actually are.

I think Peter totally counts! And Evaristus is supposed to have been Jewish as well (per the Liber Pontificalis).

I teach History of the Papacy here at
@notredame.bsky.social and there's one thing I know for sure: nobody knows who the next Pope will be. The history of conclaves is a history of surprises and unintended consequences.

"If a teacher settles a question simply by an appeal to authorities, the students will have their certitude that the facts are indeed as stated; but they will acquire no knowledge or understanding, and they will go away empty." Aquinas, Quaestiones Quodlibetales 4, q. 9, a. 3.

The 2024 movie “Conclave” dares to ask the bold question: what if we made cardinals out of people who failed their 6th grade religion class?

On Nazi salutes, I'll quote Aquinas:
It belongs to the virtue of truth to show oneself outwardly by outward signs to be such as one is. Now outward signs are not only words, but also deeds....it is contrary to truth to employ signs of deeds or things to signify the contrary of what is in oneself.

Deus', he must not in any way have held orthodox beliefs about Mary. This seems like special pleading to me.

We read with this generosity because we understand what Augustine is getting at, though he lacks the precise language of later insights. Yet, some will then turn to his statements on Mary and, because he does not write them with the same language used in Pius IX's 'Ineffabilis

Thinking about Augustine and Mary a little more after a convo on X - there's a necessary generosity in reading Augustine's Christology because he uses phrases that, after Neo-Chalcedonianism or Scholasticism, are infelicitous. "Homo Assumptus" caused no small problem among Carolingian authors.

Teaching for Intellectual Conversion: Introductory Theology at the Level of Our Times Roberto De La Noval on students.

"...plurality without epistemological foundations nearly inevitably produces relativism in the untrained mind."

This remains one of my favorite CLJ essays to date.

churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/tea...

TASL is a program that addresses reaffiliation in the Catholic Church, teaching theology and answering theological questions at the level of our times at the University of Notre Dame. The tremendous good that this program is doing is the work of the grace of God.

Another Take a Second Look class sponsored by ⁦
the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame taught by William Mattison on CS Lewis and the problem of evil. This is 7pm on a Monday night and the room is full to bursting.

I take it to be a mark of a learned person that they can entertain ideas with which they disagree, even presenting the very best arguments on the other side. How do we cultivate that in people?

Preaching Mary // McGrath Institute for Church Life // University of Notre Dame Tap into Notre Dame's intellectual resources and join other Catholic leaders in addressing today's pastoral challenges.

My institute at Notre Dame is hosting a homiletic competition, focused on preaching about Mary. Check it out here:
mcgrath.nd.edu/about/center...

While writing my book on the Apostles' Creed, I'm thinking about the role of error in forcing the orthodox to articulate and clarify what had been previously felt and lived.

"But the errors of heretics and blasphemers force us to deal with unlawful matters, to scale perilous heights, to speak unutterable words, to trespass on forbidden ground. Faith ought in silence to fulfil the commandments..."

Hilary, De Trinitate, 2.2

In addition to reading the minor prophets, I would recommend people take a look at Augustine's De Civitate Dei as a critique of empire and the sorts of distorted loves that arise in it.

The more relevant Latin theological phrase is not ordo amoris, but libido dominandi - the lust for domination, a favorite phrase of St. Augustine's. Political spite, glee over the despair of others, "owning" others, trolling others, etc, are all born out of this impulse.

Without the humanities, how are people expected to have the concepts and grammar to sort through moral claims? It seems like all you're left with are preferences and what feels immediately satisfying, not values that would cause you to act with a higher purpose.

As an educator, I have been thinking a lot about how little prepared for moral reasoning a lot of folks are. I am not sure what there is to do about it, especially because one of the major solvents of that has been pushing a STEM only model of education.

Did everyone else already know that Jerry Orbach was the voice of Lumiere in the 91 Beauty and the Beast?!

This book is so good so far. A Lonerganian NT book is right up my alley.

I do not think of fundamentalism as someone believing something too much, but rather as a misappropriation of the faith in an ahistorical mode. The solution to this is not less doctrine, but doctrine understood and appropriated well.

ANNOUNCEMENT:
In cooperation with Paul Axton's Forging Ploughshares, I'm offering an 8-week online Lonergan course this Spring.
"Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method"
From the week of February 16 to April 6
Cost: $150
Enrollment now live:
pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings

Going outside this time of year at ND is the best way to get my students to be sympathetic readers of Gnostic texts. "Who made this place?!"

That style is hardly what I'd prefer, but I would study in that room every day, if it were anywhere near me.

Yes! Make a choice that says something instead of one that shows a total lack of creativity (and inspires the same!). Meanwhile, I was just in Rome and this is one of the reading rooms in the Vatican library:

The students study instead in the lobby of the hotel on campus because it is dark, decorated with pictures and books, and has a fireplace. Maybe we should invest more in that and less in places that look like fertile ground for another dot com bust.