Chandler's Notes

  There are a few popular Catholic writers who I just can’t get into. One is St. John Henry Newman. I’ve always found his prose too difficult to enjoy. Similarly, though I appreciate Dante, I’ve always struggled through the Divine Comedy. Obviously, this is subjective to my experience.  When I started reading Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain over two years ago, I wondered if I was going to have a repeat of the experience I’d had with Newman. I was surprised by how boring his book was. I wondered how such a long and unexciting book had inspired so many young men to join the Trappists. His early childhood story of being orphaned wasn’t even that compelling to me, nor was his toe-infection. His wanderings around the earth with his artist father had been confusing, but his college years proved the hardest to follow. I couldn’t keep up with all the names and details. None of the characters seemed to have much flesh and blood to them. The whole thing seemed fairly abstracted....

I finally read a modern-day classic and can share a few thoughts on it. First of all, it seems like the book illustrates a kind of modern mood. The mood is one of detachment and involvement in life. The main character, Toru, is connected to two characters through the stories they tell in the novel. Both of these characters are from the Japanese war and both of them illustrate well the modern preoccupation with freewill vs human predetermination. The war is a powerful means of illustrating human punniness.  There is also plenty of symbolism in the book. It's difficult to quite nail down the symbolism of the Windup Bird; it is certainly an image of mechanism and absurdity. Yet it also seems to express some kind of beauty. The windup bird is an important part of one of the war stories. It plays a role in connecting the war stories to Toru's life, suggesting to us that the same kind of determinism(lack of free will) exists in Toru's world. At the same time, the author gives u...

Wow, there must really be something wrong with a book if the author himself is stopping its publication. You would imagine that it had heresies in it or at least very damaging ideas. However, as far as I remember   I Kissed Dating Goodbye didn't have any of those things. Was it so incredibly dangerous? Funny, what I think hurt me about the book wasn't so much its ideas as the beautiful picture it presented that never quite came true. Looking at Harris' separation from Church and wife, I feel the pain all the more strongly. I Kissed Dating Goodbye and then Boy Meets Girl: Say Hello to Courtship  were so easy to read and, frankly, so exciting. However, life, or at least my life, hasn't been quite as easy or thrilling. It turns out it's a lot harder to make it work than it seems.  I thought living the lifestyle of purity would make me appreciated. I figured God would just sort of make things fall into place as long as I was chaste. Things didn't work out that way....

How do you deal with pride when you feel called by God to do something great?  This is the question asked implicitly in Dante’s Cantos 10 through 13. Pride Dante and Virgil have just entered the first terrace having left the realm of the late repentant  who are waiting for a period of time to start the ascent up the seven terraces of the mountain.  These terraces depict the seven deadly sins, Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice (and Prodigality),  Gluttony, and Lust.  Fittingly, the first terrace is pride, the vice often considered the root of all sins.  Aquinas quotes St. Gregory when he states that pride is the “queen of all vices”  because of its  “general inclination toward all vices” (Summa Theologiae Question 162. 8).  Yet for Dante who is clearly aware of his greatness as a poet, pride is a real danger.  Art that teaches What confronts Dante first are marble sculptures which we later learn w...