Angelic Custody

 The scholastic theologians occasionally address the question of whether Jesus had a guardian angel. The near-consensus is that he didn't, although they rarely spend much time on it.

First, it's worth considering why they took there to be guardian angels, and what they are. Matthew 18:10, in which Jesus says that the angels of little ones are always before the face of the Father, is a big contributor, of course, and Bonaventure mentions also references in Tobit (5:16) and Acts (12:15); St. Jerome explicitly claims that each human being receives a guardian angel at birth, and notes this as an indication of the dignity of the human soul. 

Aquinas argues that one would expect this as a part of the normal working of providence (ST 1.113.1):

According to the plan of Divine Providence, we find that in all things the movable and variable are moved and regulated by the immovable and invariable; as all corporeal things by immovable spiritual substances, and the inferior bodies by the superior which are invariable in substance. We ourselves also are regulated as regards conclusions, about which we may have various opinions, by the principles which we hold in an invariable manner. It is moreover manifest that as regards things to be done human knowledge and affection can vary and fail from good in many ways; and so it was necessary that angels should be deputed for the guardianship of men, in order to regulate them and move them to good.

On Aquinas's view, everything in the perishable realm has angelic guardians. The unusual feature of human beings is that we get individual guardians, whereas other things receive guardians for the whole species. This is due to the peculiar nature of the human rational soul and its individual incorruptibility. Each human being is in a sense guarded as if he or she were a whole species. Angels come in different orders; individual guardianship is given to Angels, the lowest order, but  more general and universal guardianship (e.g., of nations) to Archangels and Principalities.

Thomas is not very explicit, but his argument seems strongly to suggest that each individual human being has a different guardian angel. However, he notes at least one definite exception: children in the womb share their mother's guardian angel [ST 1.113.5 ad 3]; I'm not sure what St. Bonaventure's view of this would be. Bonaventure has the view that through time humans being share guardian angels, but that at a given time each human being might have only one guardian angel. The general agreement is that guardian angels are only guardian angels in this life, but that's not the whole story; St. Thomas holds that each saint "will have an angel to reign with him" in heaven (ST 1.113.4).

A guardian angel is appointed for custodia (protection) or sometimes exercitium (training); St. Thomas holds that the primary aim is enlightenment and instruction (ST 1.113.5 ad 2), although in some cases, especially with children, guardian angels take a more active hand in defending against demons and physical and spiritual harm. Based on Daniel (10:13) and St. Gregory the Great's comments on it, St. Thomas holds that our guardian angels can be in a sort of indirect opposition to each other. As angels, they are in agreement that God's will may be fulfilled, but they do not necessarily have the same perspective on what that would be, because angels only know those things about God's providence that they think to consider (ST 1.113.8). St. Bonaventure has a view along the same lines, but as usual likes to put things into trinities. The primary reason we have guardian angels, he holds, is to defend against the Devil, who seduces reason by cunning, attracts the will by flattery, and oppresses the virtues by violence against the body. Thus guardian angels are there to instruct the reason, to exhort the will, and to defend the virtues. We need custody because we are outmatched without it, and this would have been true even in the state of innocence before the Fall.

Given all this, one's first impulse might be to think that Jesus also would have had a guardian angel, but as noted before, theologians are near-unanimous in thinking he did not. The fundamental problem is that of custodia. As St. Thomas puts it,

Christ as man was guided immediately by the Word of God: wherefore He needed not be guarded by an angel. Again as regards His soul, He was a comprehensor, although in regard to His passible body, He was a wayfarer. In this latter respect it was right that He should have not a guardian angel as superior to Him, but a ministering angel as inferior to Him. Whence it is written (Matthew 4:11) that "angels came and ministered to Him."

This is about almost anything anyone says on the subject, but St. Bonaventure goes a bit further in his Sentences commentary (2 d11 a1 q3) in developing the idea. He divides his argument into two components: first, Christ did not need custodia, and second, it was not in agreement with His status.

First, as to need, Christ was the Divine Word, and thus Christ's human intellect was illumined by the Word, so He had no need for angelic instruction as part of His defense and protection. Christ's human will was confirmed with the fullness of grace, so He had no need for His will to be exhorted. And Christ's body is united with the divine nature, and therefore He required no angelic defense of it against violence that could threaten His virtues.

Second, as to appropriateness, custodia implies a kind of praesidentia. This is literally true -- both custodia and praesidentia can mean 'guardianship' in Latin -- but obviously St. Bonaventure is making a tautology. It's tempting just to transliterate praesidentia as 'presidence' or 'presidency', but this is perhaps misleading. I think Bonaventure is almost certainly reading it etymologically at 'priority in sitting'; to have custodia over someone, you have to have a higher seat than someone -- to guard someone in a matter of strength, you have to have eminence over them in matters of strength; to guard someone in a matter of understanding, as a teacher might, you have to have a higher understanding; to guard someone in a matter of virtue, you have to have a higher place with respect to that virtue. And, of course, the problem with Christ being in angelic custody shows up immediately: There is no seat higher than the Divine Throne, and there is no angel who has preeminence in any matter over the King of Angels.

Thus Bonaventure says, no angel has custody of Christ, but a multitude of angels minister to Christ. This is how he (and everyone else) deals with apparent places in Scripture suggesting that angels did something guardian-like with Jesus, like the Angel that supported Him in the garden of Gethsemane. This was angelic ministry, not angelic custody. In a sense, we can say that guardian angels help those in their custodia because they are acting on an authority higher than ours (namely, the authority of God, who appointed them), whereas angels aided Christ on His own authority and at His will.

One argument that requires a bit more work to deal with is the argument from dignity. St. Jerome had explicitly linked angelic custody to the dignity of the human soul, and obviously Jesus does not have a soul with less dignity than we do. However, Bonaventure argues that we can distinguish between things that indicate dignity itself and things that indicate dignity in the midst of indignity or weakness, and guardian angels are the latter. That is to say, that was have guardian angels shows that despite our weaknesses, limitations, and defects we have a relatively greater dignity than other creatures who share our weaknesses and limitations. The saints in heaven, however, have no guardian angels because they have a dignity even greater than that, and this, of course, is also the case with Christ.

If you were to ask what most Catholics meant by 'guardian angel', both today and for the past several centuries, I suspect you would not find them making a strong distinction between custody and ministry, so if one spoke more loosely, one could perhaps say that Christ has a guardian angel -- indeed, probably many -- in that they give him ministerial service (as an armor-bearer fortifies the soldier, as Bonaventure puts it). But in the strict sense, guardian angels exercise custodia, which would not apply in the case of Christ.

There are some broader ramifications of this. In the Protestant Reformation, many Protestants became skeptical of the notion of guardian angels, despite references to 'their angels' or 'his angel' in Scripture. But what they argue against is specifically custodia; the early Calvinists (like Calvin in his commentary on Luke), for instance, hold that all the angels minister to all the elect as part of their service to Christ, so essentially the argument is that just as Christ has angelic ministry and not angelic custody, so also we. While the Counter-Reformation did involve many concessions to Protestant concerns, it also established points at which Catholics held the line despite criticism, and guardian angels were, practically speaking, one of them. The early Protestant opposition to the notion of guardian angels, however, has arguably been slowly crumbling for about half a century now, and I suspect it's for the same reason that most Catholics would not hesitate to say that Christ had a guardian angel, namely, that the rank-and-file don't really make a strong distinction between custody and ministry, nor, for that matter, between individual and collective guardianship. The common line of thought tends toward, 'Were there angels? Yes. Were they helping out? Yes. Then guardian angels.'

The Thing That Is Life's Acme, and Its Key

Stoic and Hedonist
by Archibald Lampman 

The cup of knowledge emptied to its lees,
Soft dreamers in a perfumed atmosphere,
Ye turn, and from your luminous reveries
Follow with curious eyes and biting sneer
Yon grave-eyed men, to whom alone are sweet
Strength and self-rule, who move with stately tread,
And reck not if the earth beneath your feet
With bitter herb or blossoming rose be spread.
Ye smile and frown, and yet for all your art,
Supple and shining as the ringed snake,
And all your knowledge, all your grace of heart,
Is there not one thing missing from your make
The thing that is life's acme, and its key
The stoic's grander portion Dignity.

Dashed Off XXV

This finishes the notebook that was completed June 24, 2025.

***

 "Role activities purposively undertaken are likely to have evaluative meaning not only in that some modicum of effiacy in the role is presupposed when according to the name, but also in that, as we have already seen, the name may be withheld if certain generally acknowledged obligations of the role are not observed." Dorothy Emmett

Possibility is a way we talk about actuality.

"If history is going to be scientific, if the record of human action is going to be set down with that accuracy and faithfulness of detail which will allow its use as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of nations, there must be some standard of ethics in research and interpretation." WEB Du Bois

Malebranche's watch SaT 2.1.4 sect. 3 (LO 99)

When we cannot reason directly with evidence, we reason with the best available classification.

We discover ourselves as persons in what is ours.

possession by long symbolic association

implicit modalities/functions of rights that can be actuated into new rights
right to X
(1) exercise: right to reasonable and available means to X
(2) defense 1: right to defend exercise of right to X
(3) defense 2: right to defend against development of impediments to exercise
(4) repair 1: right to reparation for violations
(5) repair 2: right to reconstitute essential conditions for right

standing reserves of signs for use

Every extant form of naturalism is a tissue of metaphysics.

To return to the things themselves is to turn to what is prior to knowledge.

The physicist sees the world through the model; this is distinct from when the physicist examines the model itself.

confirmation --> consilium et auxilium

constructive existence proof (broadly speaking; see Princeton lectures 1941 of Godel): A proof of an existential proposition that also provides a way to find an actual example of that whose existence is being asserted.

Experimental reasoning is necessarily causal because it has to assess and rule out defective causes that can interfere with the suitability of an experiment for drawing a conclusion.

The most basic fields of mathematics (e.g., arithmetic and geometry) are not explained by starting with parts and building absolutely consistent systems from them but by starting with the field, taken as consistent in its own particular terms, and educing out of it various systems, reducible to various parts, in accordance with particular purposes (e.g., proof or application of this or that aspect of the field).

ways of reasoning about consistency
(1) negation as failure of search
(2) utility for many things
(3) consturction in concrete intuition
(4) construction in abstract intuition
(5) proof by more powerful system
-- Mathematicians and logicians tend to disparage (1), but even they always begin with it.
-- Each has advantages and disadvantages. (3) is the 'safest' and most direct, but is highly limited. (2) is the everyday working one, but only gives 'consistent enough for practical purposes'. (5) gives proofs but only for relative consistency. (4) is the gold standard but has continually struggled with epistemological issues. But actual mathematics and logic require them all.
-- We can treat these as all converging on consistency simpliciter, or we can break them up into particular consistency-concepts: consistent as far as we know, consistent for practical purposes, consistent in concrete intuition, consistent in abstract intuition, consistent relative to other systems.
-- All of these are such they might work only for a domain.

Hume's three fundamental laws of nature' as actually the internal morality of property-interactions (contract-making in particular)

It is unjust for bureaucracies to impose requirements they cannot efficiently process.

Reasonable preference is always accommodated or adapted to moral principle.

transcendental distinctions (disjunctive transcendentals) as structuring explanations

Obligations may be fulfilled
(1) more or less clumsily
(2) more or less ardently
(3) more or less carefully (conscientiously, meticulously)
(4) with more or less concern for other obligations.
All of these are matters for prudence.

Etiquette as a lesser morality facilitates virtue in its social aspect, especially on points of communication and moderation.

The performative as such is purely instrumental.

Both knowledge and goodness expand the reach of power, although in different ways.

essence, interpretant, disposition

Kings create courtiers as keys to access useful social networks.

"Spirit in its purest form is pure act or pure being." Edith Stein
"Breathing is not only proper to personal spirits, for even things like a landscape and a melody radiate their own aura." [speaking of Condrad Martius; breating = Geisten = spiration]
"Soul in the widest sense is the quality-giving ground of every living being."

To have a soul is to live as from another.

Physical things reveal their inner natures. (This is what physicists sometimes actually mean when talking about 'determinism'.)

The set-theoretic paradoxes were inevitable because sets and their elements were originally conceived specifically as any objects of acts of thinking.

Every right in a context of potential injury develops a right of defense; every rigth in a context of actual injury develops a right of repair.

Actual propagandists don't usually care much about belief as such; they want to shape the *environment* for belief.

People often confuse critical thinking and obstinacy in the face of persuasion.

Propaganda that is difficult to avoid is already propaganda that is working.

rights with latent vicarious functionalities (both active and passive)

Poetic suggestions sometimes change how we think about evidence.

the commission of Jeremiah (Jer 1:10) as a type of the Petrine Commission

"First we have the home; then the city; finally the globe." Augustine (Civ Dei 19.7)

One thing I find in my own case is that one or two big problems will get me down, but add one or two more beyond that and my humor returns and mood improves -- so many major problems just start to seem ridiculous and I am less crushed by them. Subjectively, I'm more down with fewer problems than I am with more. But I would in fact still prefer to have the fewer problems rather than the more.

Necessity relations between universals can be either formal or final.

Tehre is a powerful rationality in even the residue of human reason.

Things you are allowed to do but better not do allow maneuvering room when things go very wrong.

A truck driver is not merely transporting; he is maintaining an office on the road, verifying paperwork, acting as agent, organizing security, serving as compliance officer for regulations.

Problems based on the 'causal inertness' of abstract objects or moral properties or the like are usually due simply to having no category of formal causation.

the internal morality of language

Probability requires the differentiation of posssibilities into subordinate possibilities.

States cooperate not only by treaty and official cooperation but also by personal cooperation. For instance, the cooperation of states is often affected by the personal interactions between chief executives.

The law of the New Covenant is deliberately general so that we may specify and extend it, both communally and individually.

Peace begins with the person.

Customs begin to get the force of law when they are required for common peace.

space and time as conditions of *mediation* of causation

People make themselves in the image of the gods they worship.

It takes a lot of orderly structure to make a random mutation.

Summer snow, harvest rain, foolish honor. (cf. Pr 26:1)

Pr 26:4-5 "Do not attend to the thick man in his silliness; otherwise you are also resembling him. Attend to the thick man in his silliness; otherwise he will be competent to the eye."

What you don't have in your memory is of limited value for creative thinking.

sharing preferences vs preferences fitting preferences

As time goes on, judiciaries always become less usable.

The creation of any society creates a freedom with respect to actions in that society, for which the society itself is the social infrastructure.

Existential risk discussions are always science fiction, but, as in other science fiction, bits and pieces of them sometimes get uncomfortably close.

authorization, authentication, and solemnization functions of signatures and seals

When people talk about technological progress, they often ignore ease to sustain it, despite this being a significant factor in any kind of progress.

All gifts affect the ledger of favors.

Many small economic exchanges mix money, gift, favor, gratitude-token, and barter, in various proportions; the media of exchange are often complex, and money is just the detachable and transferable part of the media.

The covert or classified is sometimes more about ambiguity or deniability than about secrecy.

What economists call 'costly signals' are actually preemptive tests. An advantage of them is tha tyou can select the kind of test you want to pass, and often get people to accept the test result; another is that they can save time and resources that would have to be spent in negotiating a test.

Economic actions are not merely a matter of preferences but also of scope of negotiability.

People's preferences are usually not satisfied; instead, they get acceptable approximations, and ventures with a probability of at least partial satisfaction.

Statistics sometimes seems to be a process of finding the falsehood most useful for calculation.

Most nonfiction should be called not-even-fiction.

Our hearts are signs of emotion even to ourselves.

"Before any systematic interpretation, the description of the *known facts* shows that the fate of an excitation is determined by its relation to the whole of the organic state and to the simultaneous or preceding excitations, and taht the relation between the organism and its milieu are not relations of linear causality but of circular causality." Merleau-Ponty

Part of reason is the impulse and initiative to reason; reasoning is active and not purely reactive.

Governance presupposes presence.

Over and over again, all over the world, people associate sunshowers and marriage (usually weird or unearthly marriage). This seems to be due to diffusion (probably out of India) but obviously also ha sa ground in the thing (which yokes together what is otherwise separate).

heresy and schism as a sort of avarice for spiritual things

"The intention of the one praying more than makes up for the defect of prayer." Augustine (on prayers consecrating baptismal waters that are theologically defective)

The sacrament begins, but only begins, with the honest intention to receive it; or perhaps more accurately, it is here that the first component of the sacrament is laid down.

sacrament as rite of process into grace (broad sense) vs sacrament as reception of grace (proper sense)

Our claims call for evidence because of their intentionality of the mind, which gives 'aboutness' to the claim.

Part of understanding is throwing oneself into the thing.

Deontic Box and epistemic Box, like alethic Box, play roles in reasoning tha tmake them par tof what we call 'real', i.e., talk of reality already presupposes them.

It belongs to every concept as concept that we ought to use it appropriately and well in matters of truth.

Antyhing real can also be treated anti-realistically for particular purposes (e.g., as guised being).

Stable public authority blooms into ceremony and pageantry.

natural vs designated agency on behalf of another

Everything we directly perceive, we perceive as diagnostic, even in false perception.

Some classifications in science are not derived directly from any experiment but are classifications convenient for organizing research. However, they can reflect reality depending on the reason for the convenience.

Locomotion is peculiar as a change because it is not actuality and potentiality in the res but in its designatable external border (contrast with diminution and growth, which is of teh natural things as  measurable by border).

Politics as an activity is necessarily both rational and irrational.

The rule of law is not a check in a system of checks and balances; it is a state of the system at which one aims.

Rule of law is not the rule of rules but specfically of law.

The effectiveness of rules is not based on 'legitimacy' but on causal means and incentives.

Respecting dignity requires upholding honor.

Every freedom posits a kind of good living.

Our salvation is reincorporation into the heavenly liturgy, which is why it involves rite; because we are physical animals, ewe need sensible signs, which is why it involves sacrament.

One common error of universalists is that they often bleed hell into heaven; trying to take seriously the sins of this life, they make the ranks of heaven depend on penalty for this life. But penalty that is known and perpetual is hell; the ranks of heaven are not based on penalty but wholly on grace and charity.

harmonious integration of attitudes as a work of prudence

Where scholarship is done shifts how it is done.

Implicit faith is an essential part of relationships between persons, which require forms of trust and deference.

The sacramentum symbolically includes the res sacramenti.

broad symbolic containment: A symbolizes B not as other than itself.
narrow symbolic containment: A symbolizes B as not other than itself.

unavoidable vs negligent defects of title

Every art and science has its tedious things that must be done, and must be done personally, because that makes the difference between good and bad results in the long run.

All human intentions are good in some respect; it is the respect that matters.

Our habitual sins usually make our lives considerably worse; we just get it into our heads that what the sin gives us is necessary for good live, and then refuse to learn otherwise.

People often attribute to a way of life they reject negative characteristics that are in fact associated with the subversion and destruction of that way of life.

Most things taht can be thought cannot be thought clearly; most things that can be said cannot be said clearly. What can be thought clearly cannot always be said clearly; what can be said clearly cannot always be thought clearly.

precision as part of the asceticism of the mind

Stable competitions build systems of courtesy and etiquette out of shared conveniences and inconveniences; these systems themselves become stable when no one can easily ignore the consequences of inconviencing everyone else.

The law is never stronger than its community. Only strong communities have the means to maintain rule of law. If communities grow weaker, eventually the community just resets to rule by the strongest members.

Laws are instruments of liberty, the self-building of free societies.

Quality of education is mostly a matter of relevance, quality, and quantity of deliberate practice with substantive material.

legal fiction as classification in advance of formulated principle

seminal reasons and the fifth & sixth days of creation

Pr 25:20 -- As a remover of garment on a cold day, vinegar on soda, so the singer of songs to wretched heart.

It is no more necessary to take contradictory descriptions of fictional objects to imply contradictory objects than to take contradictory descriptions of physical bodies to imply contradictory bodies; the difference between the two cases is that there is a 'forced completion', a saturation with respect ot which the contradiction can be sorted, whereas in the former case, the contradiction may be unresolvable due to incompleteness / unsaturatedness.

reasons why things are similar
(1) that they are caused to be
(2) that the similarity was necessary
(3) that they are similar by happenstance (the similarity is among purely combinatorial possibilities)

Boxifying: given this weak modality, what is the strong modality on which it depends?

As power becomes greater it takes on features like knowledge; as knowledge becomes greater, it takes on features like power.

Part of the difficulty in eliminating war is that war obviously solves problems -- not enough in most cases, and it causes problems of its own, but people go to war precisely because of the solutions in most cases.

Stage props are not mere make-believe items. They enter into the deontic structure of the show & have roles in that structure -- this hat to be here in this scene for this reason; this sword ought to be in this place so that this actor might make use of it; etc.

To be a prop is to be incomplete and in need of completion.

In ethics there are many general matters that are not universal matters.

the prop room of memory

"A *mechanism* is a series of instrumental causes treated *as if* it were univocal." Chastek

expressive (i.e., of what you feel, of your attitude) vs shift-expressive (i.e,. what you want to be expressive of other people's feelings and attitudes)
-- various forms of expressivism muddle those together, but despite both being in some expressive, they have different structures and work differently because of them
-- advertising is a good example of a venue in which one finds a lot of shift-expressive language

A murder case becomes a mystery through defective causes that impede full communication of essential elements of the case, through
(1) obstacle to information (e.g., noncooperative witness)
(2) obfuscation of information (e.g., planted evidence)
(3) deterioration of information (e.g., evidence erased by rain)
(4) misplacement of information (e.g., key witness cannot be found again)
(5) privation of information (e.g., relevant surface does not hold prints)
(6) explosion of information (e.g., too many things pointing to too many suspects).

A goal being measurable is a sign that it is means to another goal.

Language is not a form of human understanding.

The complexity or simplicity of the problem does not always have any relation to the complexity or simplicity of the solution.

Milton's Satan claims that the fallen angels are equal in freedom to God even if not equal in power or eminence, but as Abdiel replies, there is no meaningful sense in which Satan can be equal in freedom with someone who can create the entire universe, including Satan himself.

We communicate by traces.

Metatethics is a study of scaffolding.

Freedom is rooted in three things: power, wisdom, goodness.

St. Augustine

 Today is the feast of St. Augustine of Hippo, Doctor of the Church. From his On the Catechizing of the Uninstructed, Chapter 4:

...[W]hat greater reason is apparent for the advent of the Lord than that God might show His love in us, commending it powerfully, inasmuch as “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”? And furthermore, this is with the intent that, inasmuch as charity is “the end of the commandment,” and “the fulfilling of the law,” we also may love one another and lay down our life for the brethren, even as He laid down His life for us. And with regard to God Himself, its object is that, even if it were an irksome task to love Him, it may now at least cease to be irksome for us to return His love, seeing that “He first loved us,” and “spared not His own only Son, but delivered Him up for us all.” For there is no mightier invitation to love than to anticipate in loving; and that soul is over hard which, supposing it unwilling indeed to give love, is unwilling also to give the return of love.

Error and Pride

 Error is always ignorance. However, while one kind of ignorance is a simple negation of knowledge, error adds to this negation the force of understanding moved by the will. The aim is to fabricate a being in place of absent knowledge, and thus allow ourselves to imagine that we know. But not knowing, and telling ourselves we do know, is a hidden lie of pride. Every formal error, therefore, is a secret act of pride; every error is essentially pride.

Antiquity, in order to differentiate this negation of knowledge from simple ignorance, called it appropriately 'privation'.

[Antonio Rosmini, Certainty, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham: 1991), p. 210 (section 1362).]

Dolly Parton (1946-2026)

 Dolly Parton passed away today at the age of 80; earlier this year she was having a number of health problems. A great country music singer and an even greater songwriter, she has been one of the most important and influential people in American music in the past half century. 

Probably the most successful song written by her (although she penned so many hits, both for herself and others, that it's surprisingly difficult to decide):

"I Will Always Love You"

A song that I would say is probably her most Dolly-Parton-ish:

"Jolene"

But in some ways, I think this hit from the 1970s is still her best song:

"Coat of Many Colors"

Links of Note

 * Lorris Chevalier, When Garlic Defeated the Magnet: The Long Life of a Medieval Natural Belief, at "Medievalists.net"

* Rob Alspaugh, Deriving Ought from Fitting?, on St. Anselm's use of conveniens arguments, at "Teaching Boys Badly"

* The Oughtred Society is devoted to all things slide-rule.

* Brian A. Pavlac, Nicholas Cusanus as Prince-Bishop of Brixen (1450-64): Historians and a Conflict of Church and State, at "Medievalists.net"

* J. C. Scharl, A Giant on the Shoulders of Giants, on Petrarch, at "Public Discourse"

* Franklin Tucker Eccher, A Vital Education, on the microcollege movement, at "The Point"

* Edward Feser, Abortion and partisan politics, at "Catholic World Report"

* Encyclopedia of Catholic Theology

* Simon Fitzpatrick, Animal Normativity, at the SEP

* Jacob Mchangama, Was Frederick Douglass a Free Speech Absolutist? 

* John Peck, SJ, Aquinas on God's Free Will to Create: Replies to Kretzmann and Blankenhorn (PDF)