The man in a modest dark suit and grey shirt could be mistaken, save for the presence of his wife of 33 years, for an off-duty Benedictine abbot. We’re dining in the elegant ambience of the Cambridge Catholic university chaplaincy; the conversation is animated, but the man, an 81-year-old philosopher, contents himself with a glass of water, leaving the dishes and vintage claret untouched. Self-effacing, a trifle austere, he nevertheless exudes a benign humanity from the top of his monkish haircut to his scuffed toe-caps. Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the world’s most influential living moral philosophers. He has written 30 books on ethics and held a variety of professorial chairs over the past four decades in North America. Blending ideas from ancient Greece and medieval Christendom (with an admixture of Marxism), MacIntyre writes and lectures on the failings and discontents of “advanced modernity.” This summer he accepted an invitation from Prospect and Jesus College, Cambridge to talk to a group of academics on the economic disaster that capitalism has inflicted on itself and the world.

...

MacIntyre’s key moral and political idea is that to be human is to be an Aristotelian goal-driven, social animal. Being good, according to Aristotle, consists in a creature (whether plant, animal, or human) acting according to its nature—its telos, or purpose. The telos for human beings is to generate a communal life with others; and the good society is composed of many independent, self-reliant groups.

via Prospect Magazine.

Fascinating read.

On the financial markets:

When it comes to the money-men, MacIntyre applies his metaphysical approach with unrelenting rigour. There are skills, he argues, like being a good burglar, that are inimical to the virtues. Those engaged in finance—particularly money trading—are, in MacIntyre’s view, like good burglars. Teaching ethics to traders is as pointless as reading Aristotle to your dog. The better the trader, the more morally despicable.

At this point, MacIntyre appeals to the classical golden mean: “The courageous human being,” he cites Aristotle as saying, “strikes a mean between rashness and cowardice… and if things go wrong she or he will be among those who lose out.” But skilful money-men, MacIntyre argues, want to transfer as much risk as possible to others without informing them of its nature. This leads to a failure to “distinguish adequately between rashness, cowardice and courage.” Successful money-men do not—and cannot—take into account the human victims of the collateral damage resulting from market crises. Hence the financial sector is in essence an environment of “bad character” despite the fact that it appears to many a benevolent engine of growth.

This rift between economics and ethics, says MacIntyre, stems from the failure of our culture “to think coherently about money.” Instead, we should think like Aristotle and Aquinas, who saw the value of money “to be no more, no less than the value of the goods which can be exchanged, so there’s no reason for anyone to want money other than for the goods they buy.” Money affords more choices and choice is good. But when they are imposed by others whose interest is in getting us to spend, then money becomes the sole measure of human flourishing. “Goods are to be made and supplied, insofar as they can be turned into money… ultimately, money becomes the measure of all things, including itself.” Money can now be made “from the exchange of money for money… and trading in derivatives and in derivatives of derivatives.” And so those who work in the financial sector have become dislocated from the uses of money in everyday life. One symptom of this, MacIntyre contends, is gross inequality. In 2009, for instance, the chief executives of Britain’s 100 largest companies earned on average 81 times more than the average pay of a full-time worker.

Rowan Williams believes an illuminating new survey of Christianity will have few, if any, rivals.  From his' review of "A History of Christianity" by Diarmaid MacCulloch:

This book is a landmark in its field, astonishing in its range, compulsively readable, full of insight even for the most jaded professional and of illumination for the interested general reader. It will have few, if any, rivals in the English language. The story is told with unobtrusive stylishness as well as clarity. And at a time when Christianity's profile in our culture is neither as positive nor as extensive as it has been, this book is crucial testimony to the resilience of the Christian community in a remarkable diversity of social settings. The first three thousand years do not seem likely to be also the last.

via The Guardian.

At the age of seven, Jeremy Sassoon was the youngest student at Britain's newly opened Royal Northern College of Music, as gifted at trumpet and piano as he was at math, football, and anything else he set his mind to. The boy prodigy was sent out, in front of the assembled press of Manchester, to hand a bouquet of flowers to the Duchess of Kent, who presided over the opening. Over the next two decades, his rocketing accomplishments appeared to keep pace with his gifts: At 17, wooed by both science and music schools, he made a wrenching choice and decided on medicine over music. By 23, he was a doctor. By 30, a practising child psychiatrist. But then Dr. Sassoon left medicine and spent the next eight years suffering from bipolar disorder. He now can be found on most weekends in Manchester playing piano in restaurants, at weddings, or at nightclubs with his band, Dr. Sassoon's Jazz Prescription.

The trajectory for gifted children is not simply onward and upward; they are as likely to be plagued by crises of confidence as anyone. Perhaps more so: Their intellectual gifts mean they are even more aware of the flaws in their clay, of how short they fall from self-imposed goals.

“People are forever telling me the achievements of my life,” Dr. Sassoon says, “and yet I feel I've accomplished nothing – nothing compared to what I might achieve.” He has put his finger on a thorny issue: Is a gifted child destined to become an exceptional adult?

via The Globe and Mail.

Psalm 84:1 How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts! My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.

Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, at your altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God. Blessed are those who dwell in your house, ever singing your praise! Selah

lectio divina.

To anyone who met him in his prime, Friedrich Nietzsche looked like a genial old-style man of letters: a quiet, dapper, unworldly bachelor, kind to children and exceedingly polite. But those who kept up with his prodigious output of books – he wrote more than one a year once he hit his stride in the 1880s – knew that the mild manner concealed incandescent ambition. The gentle professor liked to think of himself as a wild beast on the rampage, an intellectual terrorist who was going to “divide history into two halves”. His mission: to destroy the last vestiges of Christianity by means of a free-spirited “philosophy of the future” – a brave new pagan philosophy heralding a brave new pagan world. “I am no man,” he said. “I am dynamite.”

via New Humanist.

When Zarathustra and Twilight first appeared, they attracted little interest and Nietzsche’s name remained obscure. During the 1890s, however, they caught the public imagination and Nietzsche became the celebrity of world literature he had always wanted to be. He was admired not as a venerable old philosopher in the high tradition of Plato or Kant, but an outrageous and irreconcilable enemy to religion and morality, especially when they deck themselves in the robes of philosophical reason. By that time, however, he was in no condition to savour his success: back in December 1888, at the age of 44, he had collapsed in a square in Turin, and the remaining twelve years of his life were to be passed in a state of serene insanity.

The calamity of madness did no harm to Nietzsche’s burgeoning reputation: he came to fame as the philosopher who denounced the demands of reason so effectively that at last he lost his own. Twilight could now be seen as foreshadowing the eclipse of an intellect of such power that no one could stand it, even himself, and Zarathustra became a record of insights too deep to be expressed in the ordinary discourse of reason...

They are the rarest of the rarest of the rare. Tatiana and Krista are not just conjoined, but they are craniopagus, sharing a skull and also a bridge between each girl’s thalamus, a part of the brain that processes and relays sensory information to other parts of the brain. Or perhaps in this case, to both brains. There is evidence that they can see through each other’s eyes and perhaps share each other’s unspoken thoughts. And if that proves true, it will be the rarest thing of all. They will be unique in the world.

They have been drawing international attention, both public and scientific, since before their birth. Dr. Douglas Cochrane, a neurosurgeon at Children’s Hospital, is part of the team that has been watching over them since they were in the womb. Last year he conducted tests in which one twin looked at an object while he measured the brain activity in the other. “Their brains are recording signals from the other twin’s visual field,” he cautiously concluded. “One might be seeing what the other one is seeing.”

via Macleans.ca.

Adding to the conundrum, of course, are their linked brains, and the mysterious hints of what passes between them. The family regularly sees evidence of it. The way their heads are joined, they have markedly different fields of view. One child will look at a toy or a cup. The other can reach across and grab it, even though her own eyes couldn’t possibly see its location. “They share thoughts, too,” says Louise. “Nobody will be saying anything,” adds Simms, “and Tati will just pipe up and say, ‘Stop that!’ And she’ll smack her sister.” While their verbal development is delayed, it continues to get better. Their sentences are two or three words at most so far, and their enunciation is at first difficult to understand. Both the family, and researchers, anxiously await the children’s explanation for what they are experiencing.