Professor of Philosophy and Religion @CIIS_SF • Currently working on Contemplation and the Book of Nature • I mostly post what I’m reading
Joined June 2013
- Tweets 6,109
- Following 1,033
- Followers 4,261
- Likes 11,761
2,527 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
7 Dec 2020
Philosophy, the study of wisdom, is not one thing & religion another... What is the exercise of philosophy but the exposition of the rules of true religion by which the supreme & principal cause of all things, God, is worshipped with humility & rationally searched for?
— Eriugena
11
62
283
Jun 9
Lol…. Anyone who was older than 25 when their kids were born knows this is pseudoscience at best.
Jun 9
Your brain basically stopped recording your life around age 25. Everything since then is a blur for a reason.
Neuroscientists measured this so many times they named it: the reminiscence bump. Ask anyone over 60 to recall their strongest memories and almost every answer clusters between ages 15 and 25. The decade where everything was new. First job, first apartment, first real relationship. Your brain encoded each day because nothing had a template yet.
After that window closes, most people enter a repetition loop. Same commute, same office, same weekend rhythm. The brain stops recording repeated experiences as distinct events. A year with 300 novel days leaves 300 memory anchors. A year with 10 leaves 10. Both took 365 days to live. Only one of them will exist when you look back.
This is why people at 50 say "where did the time go." The time went into routine that felt like living but left almost nothing behind.
Your remaining years are fixed. How many your brain bothers to remember is entirely up to you.
1
9
766
Jun 3
There is no distinction between Poetry and Science, as kinds of knowing, at all. There is only a distinction between bad poetry and bad science.
– Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction 139
32
873
Jacob Sherman retweeted
I saw it. Now you have to see it. His name is Samuel. And he…is a king.
1,617
8,553
88,652
17,759,738
May 30
What philosophy is need not be ascertained by talking about philosophy discursively; it can, and must, be determined by entering into the speculative process in which the thinker explicates his experience of order.
—Eric Voegelin, Order and History II: The World of the Polis, 170
5
378
May 28
Oh isplendor di Dio!
Summer’s going to be lit.
May 28
BREAKING: Netflix just dropped the first trailer for In the Hand of Dante, featuring Oscar Isaac, Jason Momoa, Al Pacino and Martin Scorsese. This film has been on my radar for such a long time- I can’t believe we’re finally getting the release on June 24th. This looks excellent.
2
264
Jacob Sherman retweeted
May 26
Never forget that you are the main data center. Drink water, and consume as much literature as possible.
132
38,425
232,057
2,243,721
Jacob Sherman retweeted
May 27
Old Melchizedek is a numinous man,
Gleaming gold his tunic is, and his sandals they are tan.
None has ever known him yet, for Mel, he is the Prefiguration:
His works are stranger works, and his food is true libation.
May 27
Melchizedek is the Tom Bombadil of the Bible.
23
92
856
26,973
Jacob Sherman retweeted
May 26
The great Ivan Illich and AI compactmag.com/article/the-t…
1
24
102
7,485
May 26
How angels make their concepts manifest to others must be understood by analogy with natural things, for the reason that natural forms are, as it were, images of immaterial things, as Boethius says.
— St Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate 9.4.c
3
8
444
May 25
You really should have read it first
May 25
I used AI to process the "Magnifica Humanitas" encyclical letter from @Pontifex about AI, turning 37,000 words into a 7 minute video
1
10
598
Jacob Sherman retweeted
“Pope Leo was a math major? I wonder what his encyclicals will be like”
Like this
127
4,085
43,027
836,847
Jacob Sherman retweeted
May 25
The first step on the way to the eventual declaration of Tolkien as a Doctor of the Church
the Pope quoting The Lord of the Rings!!!!!!! I feel so alive!!!!
9
40
352
15,257
May 25
Pope Leo citing Plato’s Seventh Letter for the win: “As Plato wrote, the deepest and most important things are learned only… by engaging in discussion with others, "striking upon" ideas and experiences together like flint until the spark of understanding is kindled within us.”
3
16
440
May 23
When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 65
12
55
361
12,599
Jacob Sherman retweeted
May 23
Humanae naturae sensus experimur noctem, sicuti technologiae effrenatus profectus cum humanae dignitatis damno ostendit. Oportet ergo novum acquiramus intellectum verae significationis veraeque humani generis magnificentiae, secundum Dei sapientiam. Cum his diebus certamen non autem technologicum, sed anthropologicum adeamus, Litteras encyclicas intra paucos dies edituras conferre posse ad hanc provocationem explendam speramus.
30
81
466
49,292
May 21
The ashtree growing in the corner of the garden was felled. It was lopped first: I heard the sound and looking out and seeing it maimed there came at that moment a great pang and I wished to die and not see the inscapes of the world destroyed any more.
— Gerard Manley Hopkins
3
9
379
May 21
Even though it has forgotten the secret of the contemplative life, the literature of our time remains shaped by how the practice of writing weaves together ethics, metaphysics and theology.
— Olivier-Thomas Venard, A Poetic Christ, 184
2
6
26
2,069
May 20
Sometimes, we go into a man’s study and find his books and papers all over the place, and can say without hesitation: “What a mess! We really must clear this room up.” Yet, at other times, we may go into a room which looks very like the first; but after looking round we decide that we must leave it just as it is, recognizing that, in this case, even the dust has its place.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
4
26
136
8,778
May 20
Knowledge — of any sort — is never just about facts… real knowledge is always a kind of wisdom. To understand reality, we not only have to search it out; we must refine, strengthen, and clarify the instrument with which we search. This is what practice is for.
—Jan Zwicky, EM 53
4
251