Pledge to Be Vegan for Lent! TODAY's conveniences make it HARDLY seem 'religious' in the sense of self-denial

Pledge to Be Vegan for Lent! "As we do to the least, so we do to Him." Help make this world a kinder place for all God's creatures by pledging to be vegan for Lent.

 

 

This time of year, many men and women of God will choose to abstain from various foods or practices in observance of Lent, and I am giving up animal products by going vegan.

There's never been a better time to cut the meat and other animal-derived products out of your diet.

With the huge selection of delicious vegan meats and alternatives to dairy foods and eggs that are available, it's never been easier to go vegan!
To take action on this issue, click on the link below:
https://secure.peta.org/site/Advocacy?s_oo=_l878arEcQk8B0DtcJJR5w..&id=2847

You have just taken the first step toward a healthier and more compassionate life. Being vegan has never been easier, and we're here to help! For delicious recipes and nutritional information, visit our "Vegetarian Starter Kit" online.
A vegan diet is truly a lifesaver: Vegans and vegetarians are less likely to suffer from heart disease, obesity, and several types of cancer, according to the American Dietetic Association. Plus, vegan foods are delicious!
The following are our "Top Five Tips for Making the Switch":
1. Make vegan versions of your favorite meals. "Veg up" your favorite recipes simply by replacing the meat with other foods. For example, replace the beef in burritos with beans, guacamole, and grilled veggies, or try vegan beef crumbles from Morningstar Farms or Boca. Make spaghetti with marinara sauce and add roasted vegetables as well as vegan meatballs or sausage (try Nate's brand or GimmeLean).
2. Explore delicious vegan recipes.
You'll be amazed by the variety of tasty vegan options, from classic American dishes to Italian and Creole. People tell us all the time that being vegan exposed them to an array of flavors and foods they never knew existed.
3. Try tasty faux meats and dairy alternatives.
Sample the ever-growing lineup of mock meats - including vegan burgers, hot dogs, turkey deli slices, riblets, and chicken patties - and the vast array of tasty alternatives to dairy products, like vegan cream cheese, yogurt, and ice cream. Some of the most popular brands include Boca, Gardenburger, Morningstar Farms, and Silk.
4. Sample microwaveable meals and convenience foods.
Always on the run? Check out the variety of vegan microwavable meals in your local grocery store's freezer aisle, like Amy's Black Bean Enchilada With Spanish Rice, Fantastic Foods' Vegetarian 3-Bean Chili, and Yves' Thai Lemongrass Veggie Chick'n. There are many quick and easy vegan snacks, including basics like fresh fruit and PB&J and unique options like Tofurky Jerky and Silk Live! soy-yogurt smoothies.
5. Find vegan-friendly restaurants in your area.
Whatever your budget and wherever you live, you can enjoygreat vegan meals. Many national chains, like Johnny Rockets, sell tasty veggie burgers and other animal-friendly options.
Thank you again for taking the Pledge to Be Vegan for Lent, but there's no reason that your vegan diet has to last only 40 days. During and after the Lenten season, please visit VegCooking.com and GoVeg.com to find all the resources that you'll need to stick with your cruelty-free diet.
Best of luck!
Sincerely,
Jenny Lou Browning
Vegan Special Projects Coordinator

Personalism

I have long thought that personalism is an ideal conceptual or philosophical 'vehicle' for expressing per-personal (and thus pro-animal) sentiments conceptually, abstractly, philosophically.  The later Peter A. Bertocci, a well-known Personalist, taught at Boston University.  He is often cited in papers about complex moral matters, particularly about sex and love, but the moral status of the person in distributed moral obligations is a concern for principled persons of all kinds, including those of us with profound respect for personhood in every species.

Peter Anthony Bertocci

May 13, 1910-October 13, 1989

Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy, Boston University, where he taught for thirty-one years. B.A., Boston (1931); M.A., Harvard (1932); Ph.D., Boston (1935).  Dissertation: The Empirical Argument for God in Late British Thought (published in 1938 by Boston University Press; advisor: Frederick Robert Tennant - the process metaphysician).

Other books include 
The Human Venture in Sex, Love, and Marriage (1949); 
Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (1951);
Free Will, Responsibility, and Grace (1957); 
Religion as Creative Insecurity (1958);
Sex, Love, and the Person (1967); 
The Person God Is (1970); and 
The Goodness of God (1981)

On This Site:a

• The Person, Obligation, and Value [1959]
  
• Susan K. Langer’s Theory of Feeling and Mind[1970]
  

Materialism: Failing before Life’s Challenges

In 1951, Bertocci wrote:

“. . . no matter how narrow the gap between the chemical and the living becomes—and discoveries about the nature of viruses and colloids do indeed narrow that gap—we must remember that the gap is a qualitative and not a spatial one.  Suppose we consider the colloids the ‘missing link’ between living and dead matter.  This may impress our minds with the wondrous continuity of degree between one order of being and another.  But let us take a closer look.  Has the gap between life and matter really been crossed, let alone explained?  Even though a colloid may reproduce as living things do, it otherwise behaves like a chemical.  But a cell acts throughout like a living being and not like a chemical.  The fact still remains that when life appeared,life appeared. . . . This collocation of events, this close interrelation of living and nonliving beings, is an opaque fact unless we postulate a purpose which uses one order as an aid to the continuance of another.  Obviously this appeal to a broader purpose will not explain how the food enters the stomach becomes part of the living blood, bone, nerve, and brain.  Any biochemist can give us the sequence, but he is as silent before this fact of transmutation as we are.  However, we’re not trying to introduce a Purposer to describe what science has not so far described; here we seek to explain the harmony between two orders of being, the harmony between two differing and interacting qualities of existence.   We are seeking a view which, far from denying established scientific facts, will allow them to fit into a broader scheme which decreases the mystery.  What mystery?  The fact that living beings should appear and be so closely interconnected with nonliving beings—especially if all there was to begin with was the nonpurposeful, nonliving, nonthinking hustle and bustle of units of energy. . . .”

“. . . Our interest here is to emphasize the greater coherence which comes into our thinking if we consider the interrelation of the physical universe and life and the developing evolution of species as the handiwork of a creative Intelligence intent on producing a world rich in life, and, in the existence of man, rich in mind and value.  The evidence so far adduced enables us to envisage a Mind which is responsible not only for the ultimate physical preparations for life but for the first appearance of life in its many forms and for the additional mutations and variations discovered by our scientists.”

Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 1951, pp. 333-34, 337 (italics in the original).

Fifty years later, the atheist Antony Flew wrote:

“[We may now know] how—by evolution through natural selection—one or more very primitive kinds of organism evolved into the enormous variety of species now known either still to exist or to have existed during some period in the past.  But that is a very different thing from knowing the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life or even of any life.  For, so far as I know, no one has as yet contrived to produce any plausible conjecture as to how even the most primitive kind of organism with a disposition to reproduce and thus to expose itself to natural selection might have evolved from a mixture of the many kinds of complex molecule which are now known to be required for that construction.  [My italics; Flew has been dealing with these issues for over fifty years.]

“Conway sees here a threefold challenge to the materialist, of which I consider two of the elements to be much more formidable than the third.  The first of these two is to produce a materialistic explanation for ‘the very first emergence of living matter from non-living matter. In being alive, living matter possesses ateleological organization that is wholly absent from everything that preceded it.’  The second challenge . . . is to produce an equally materialist explanation for the emergence, from the very earliest life-forms which were incapable of reproducing themselves, of life-forms which a capacity for reproducing them-selves.”

Review of David Conway, The Rediscovery of Wisdom, Philosophy, January 2001, p. 161.

Posted October 13, 2007

Is God bound by rationality?

In my work at HMS and HSPH, I do a fair amount of research into previously-published work. In the course of joining ResearchGATE (the ResearchGATE Scientific Network), I bumped into a discussion on this (above-stated) topic, "Is God bound by rationality?" You can follow the preceding philosophy discussion, to which I appended my own comment:

If there's room for ontological reflection here (e.g. Anselm: God is greater than that which can be conceived, traditionally, "God IS that than which nothing greater can be conceived), mortal rationality (in any species, not merely our own speciesist species is derivative (according to theological conceptions) and, despite periodic (weekly?) times of reflection (to which some give themselves full-time or intermittently), mortal rationality is best (in the spirit of religious liberalism, but quite consistent with the canons of more 'orthodox' schools of Christian thinking) dedicated to making life better here (in the mortal domain) for everyone, beginning with our own individual and shared responsibilities.

Perhaps the question should be reframed as:

Do soul-searching humans have an obligation to bind themselves to rationality of intention and behavior?

Indeed, in that kind of care, healthcare and other costs likely would plummet and the strategic obstacles to realizing the better world for everyone could be expected to diminish significantly.

Panis Angelicus

Panis angelicus is the penultimate strophe of the hymn Sacris solemniis written by Saint Thomas Aquinas for the Feast of Corpus Christi as part of a complete liturgy of the Feast including prayers for the Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours.

The strophe of Sacris solemniis that begins with the words "Panis angelicus" (bread of angels) has often been set to music separately from the rest of the hymn. Most famously, in 1872 César Franck set this strophe for tenor, organ, harp, cello, and double bass; later arranging it for tenor, chorus, and orchestra, he incorporated it into his Messe solennelle Opus 12. The 1932 performance of that work by John McCormack in Dublin's Phoenix Park became the highlight of his career. Noteworthy renditions have also been performed by tenors Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, Richard Crooks, Donald Braswell and Roberto Alagna, as well as by the sopranos Magda Olivero, Renata Scotto, and Chloë Agnew. Singing trio The Priests give an extraordinary rendition in their debut album.

The phenomenon whereby the strophe of Sacris solemniis that begins with the words "Panis angelicus" is often treated as a separate hymn has occurred also with other hymns that Thomas Aquinas wrote for Corpus Christi: Verbum supernum prodiens (the last two strophes begin with "O salutaris Hostia") and Pange lingua gloriosi (the last two strophes begin with "Tantum ergo", in which case the word ergo ["therefore"] makes evident that this part is the continuation of a longer hymn).

Text of Panis angelicus, with doxology

Latin text	An English translation
Panis angelicus fit panis hominum; Dat panis caelicus figuris terminum: O res mirabilis! Manducat Dominum. Pauper, servus et humilis. Te trina Deitas unaque poscimus: Sic nos tu visita, sicut te colimus; Per tuas semitas duc nos quo tendimus, Ad lucem quam inhabitas. Amen.	The angelic bread becomes the bread of men; The heavenly bread ends all prefigurations: What wonder! consumes the Lord a poor and humble servant. Triune God, We beg of You, that you visit us, as we worship You. By your ways, lead us who seek the light in which You dwell. Amen.

The article Sacris Solemniis in the Catholic Encyclopedia discusses the merits of a number of different translations.

• Better translation and historical explanation of the text
• full text of Sacris Solemniis, with an English translation
• Gregorian Chants
• "Panis Angelicus" sung by Saint Philips Boys Choir (soloists Jaymi Bandtock & Sam Harper)
• "Panis Angelicus" sung by Chloë Agnew (includes Latin subtitles)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panis_Angelicus"

Eucharist (Catholic Church) | Latin hymns