Gratitude

It's been a tough year, but there are still many reasons to be grateful. Actually there are reasons to be grateful no matter how bad things get.

Gratitude is the most important virtue, and our most important duty, both to God and to other people, as you can read in more depth thanks to "Reading Cicero on Thanksgiving " by Jim Tonkowich.

Here's a short (under 7 minutes) video on the beauty of the world and all we have to be grateful for:

Gratitude: The Short Film by Louie Schwartzberg from ecodads on Vimeo.

The magic is back!

Existential Comics had a funny and funnily true Facebook post a couple years ago that's worth remembering:

Science has been the slow process of showing that the exciting magical world we believed in doesn't exist, and there is nothing but boring reality. Well, except for quantum mechanics, which showed boring reality doesn't exist, and everything is basically magic. (December 13, 2018)

That's actually a strong theme among Thomistic-Aristotelian philosophers these days: the vindication of Aristotle's natural philosophy in quantum mechanics. The world needn't be the disenchanted drudge modernity has made it. Instead we have back the world of possibility and meaning.

Some references:

Edward Feser, Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science (Editiones Scholasticae, 2019).

Robert C. Koons, “Hylomorphic Escalation: An Aristotelian Interpretation of Quantum Thermodynamics and Chemistry,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (2018) 92:159-78.

Adam Schulman, Quantum and Aristotelian Physics (Harvard University dissertation, 1989).