Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

Peter Dale Scott: The meeting of poetry, prose and politics -- by Ron Dart

Peter Dale Scott comes from a worthy Canadian line and lineage.  His grandfather, Frederick Scott, was a contemporary of Stephen Leacock, an important Canadian poet, an Anglican priest and padre to many soldiers and at the forefront of the Winnipeg strike in 1919. Frederick Scott embodied, in thought, word and deed, a vision of responsible citizenship, but he was very English. Peter’s father, Frank Scott, was one of the best known Canadian poets, constitutional lawyers and founder of the League for Social Reconstruction (LSR) and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). The LSR-CCF were the forerunners of the New Democratic Party (NDP). Frank Scott was a student of Stephen Leacock. As the English empire waned and the American empire waxed, Frank opposed the English colonial way of his father, but he tended to genuflect, in a subtle way, to the New Romans to the south.  Peter’s mother, Marian Dale, was an accomplished Canadian painter. The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott (1987), by Sandra Djwa, recounts, as an authorized biography, the life of Frank and Marian Scott.

Thomas Merton and the Mountains: Contemplative Cartographer

         Great things are done when men and mountains meet.
                                                                        William Blake

         He has not learned to think like a mountain
                                                                         Aldo Leopold
                                                              A Sand County Almanac 

         Can Aldo Leopold’s ecological conscience become
         effective in America today?
                                                                        Thomas Merton
                                                                      ‘The Wild Places’

There is a long line and lineage of contemplatives in the West and East that have turned to the mountains, white peaks and ancient spires as places to slake a deeper thirst and find a site for the soul to know a more meaningful quies. This reality has been well tracked and traced in evocative and visual mountaineering classics such as The Mountaineering Spirit (1979) and Sacred Mountains of the World (1990). Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen & Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades (2002) makes these connections, also, and we know Merton had an affinity with the Beats. My missive, Thomas Merton and the Beats of the North Cascades (2005), connects the dots between Merton, the Beats and mountains. Even the most casual read through these books make it most clear that there is a connection between mountains and the contemplative quest for meaning and depth.

Thomas Merton: the Contemplative Dilemma by Ron Dart

The time will come when the pursuit of contemplation will be a subversive activity. Daniel Berrigan - America is Hard to Find

1 Merton and the Contemplative Quest    

Thomas Merton turned to the Roman Catholic Tradition, and to the monastic and Cistercian way within such a Tradition, in search of an older and forgotten contemplative path. The vita activa had come to dominate the modern world, and the vita contemplativa had been banished or subordinated to the active life. In short, Martha had trumped Mary, and there were serious consequences to be faced in both soul and society as a result of this inversion of the ancient and time tried way.

Michael Azkoul's Ye Are Gods -- Review by Ron Dart

Both the Scriptures and the Fathers attest to the truth of deification as the teaching of the church from the beginning, universally confessed even if not universally expounded. Michael Azkoul, Ye Are Gods (p.2)

I have had an abiding interest in Orthodoxy since the 1970s. I did an MA thesis at Regent College (Vancouver, BC) on ‘The Spirituality of John Cassian’, and did another MA thesis at the University of British Columbia (UBC) on ‘Origen and Anthony’. I also had the opportunity to read, in a guided study, Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses in the Patristic Greek of the Late Antique Era. I was quite drawn, at the time, to the academic, intellectual and publishing work that was emerging from St. Vladimir’s Seminary and Press. I used Jaroslav Pelikan’s The Christian Tradition for my comprehensives, and I enjoyed a correspondence with both Jaroslav Pelikan and John Meyendorff when both men were alive.

Reviewing Lazar by Ron Dart

Book Reviews (books available through http://www.new-ostrog.org/synaxis/):

Archbishop Lazar Puhalo, Freedom To Believe: Personhood and Freedom in Orthodox Christian Ontology (Dewdney, B.C.: Synaxis Press, Second Edition, 2007).  

Archbishop Lazar Puhalo, The Impact of Orthodox Christian Thought on Medicine (Dewdney: Synaxis Press, 2006)

Preface:

Archbishop Lazar Puhalo has ventured faithfully and steadfastly, into intellectual and political terrain that few Orthodox theologians in North America have dared enter. The journey into such deep and demanding places has done much to reveal the splendour and motherlode of the Orthodox Tradition.   

L’Abri, William Farel and Erasmus by Ron Dart

L’Abri, William Farel and Erasmus:
Different Paths Hiked, Different Destinations                

Erasmus is a chameleon and a pernicious enemy of
the gospel.                                       William Farel

He who destroys Erasmus will destroy a bug which
will stink worse dead than alive.       Martin Luther

I will put it in my Testament and I take you all as
witnesses that I consider Erasmus the greatest enemy
of Christ, greater than all those who have been born
in the last thousand years.              Martin Luther

I order you, at the command of God, to be enemies
of Erasmus and to be on guard against his books. I
will write against him, even if he should die and perish
from it.                                          Martin Luther

The name of Erasmus will never perish.
                                                         John Colet

Erasmus has published volumes more full of wisdom
than any which Europe has seen for ages.
                                                        Thomas More

Stephen Leacock and George Grant: Faith and Politics by Ron Dart

Stephen Leacock was perhaps the greatest English Canadian intellectual of his generation.
Damien-Claude Belanger

George Grant was Canada's most significant public philosopher.
Graeme Nicholson

Stephen Leacock (1869-1944) and George Grant (1918-1988) were men of deep religious faith and passionate about politics. Both men were firmly rooted and grounded in the Anglican tradition, were committed to the classical Canadian conservative political vision and were prominent professors at public universities and in public life. These men did not retreat into private institutions to protect a fragile faith that could not stand up to the challenges of serious and substantive intellectual thought.

THOMAS MERTON: The Contemplative Dilemma by Ron Dart

The time will come when the pursuit of contemplation will be a subversive activity.     Daniel Berrigan,

America is Hard to Find 

1. Merton and the Contemplative Quest

Thomas Merton turned to the Roman Catholic Tradition, and to the monastic and Cistercian way within such a Tradition, in search of an older and forgotten contemplative path. The vita activa had come to dominate the modern world, and the vita contemplativa had been banished or subordinated to the active life. In short, Martha had trumped Mary, and there were serious consequences to be faced in both soul and society as a result of this inversion of the ancient and time tried way.

THE ENGLISH REFORMATION: A TALE FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS by Ron S. Dart

But there are remnants left around me… very strange remnants… in this case the Anglican Church which has in it some of the ancient truth and therefore I will live within it. - George Grant

The English Reformation took more than a century from beginning to end, and when the end was reached, the Anglican Tradition had both a solid and sane Prayer Book, and a sensible and sound theological grounding. The Anglican Church of Canada and the Anglican Communion, I suspect, can learn much from the English Reformation.

The 1st phase of the English Reformation began when John Colet lectured on Romans in 1496 at Oxford University. The Oxford Reformers (Colet, Erasmus, More) saw deeper than most the need for reform, and how a wise notion of reform could and would take place. The publication of the Enchiridion (1501), by Erasmus, pointed the way, in both a theological and political sense, to the meaning of reform. The Oxford Reformers were, in many ways, the morning stars of the English Reformation.

Charles Taylor and the Hegelian Eden Tree: Canadian Compradorisim by Ron Dart

The fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom. Genesis 3:6 Canada

may produce more original work on Hegel than any other nation.   
David MacGregor, Literary Review of Canada (February 1994)

 

The fact that the well known Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, won the enviable Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities in 2007 has been noted and noticed by many. There are few that have won this prestigious award, and fewer Canadians have taken the trophy home.Taylor did so, and did so in a way that has made many a Canadian proud of their native born boy. But, philosophy is about asking critical questions, and critical questions keep us from slipping into
hagiography. Why did Taylor win the Templeton Prize, what questions need to be asked of Taylor, what intellectual agenda does he serve and are there other Canadians of equal worth and merit that might have won the Templeton Prize but did not?