I’m a philosopher at heart. If I had to label myself as a philosopher — “What are you, a Thomist, Platonist, Kantian, Heideggarian…?” — I’d end up like this guy:

Liturgical Logic

Biltirix has become kind of a mashup. (And this is a restart, as of 12/16/2019). What began as “Cultural Apologitics for the New Evangelization” became a thelological-scriptural-philosophical-liturgical-logical… blog.

To simplify, we’re calling it “liturgical logic” and here is what we mean by that.

My first love in Philosophy was Aristotle, the Father of Logic. The logic of Aristotle, however, is not the logic of liturgy. The logic of liturgy is the logic of analogy, and that’s a messy field, but if you’re really in the mood for some Medieval pedantry, here’s a dose of it for you: Medieval Theories of Analogy, @ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (only the best!). Finally, the kind of logical analogy we’re interested in is the type you are probably most familiar with, i.e., the simile/metaphor or the extended version of the analogy commonly called allegory.

My approach to interpreting, understanding, and living the life of the Church, is to dive in and meditate on the allegory of Scripture presented in the readings for the Mass throughout the liturgical year.

As I mentioned, this is a restart (as of 12/16/2019). I plan to build up numerous examples in my blog posts to make it very clear what we mean by liturgical logic. In the meantime, I’ll share a couple of my favorite sources I’ve used and recommended to teach Sacred Scripture, Liturgy, and Sacraments to high school and college students as well as Adults wanting to learn more about or grow deeper in their knowledge of the Catholic Faith.

• Understanding the Scriptures, a Complete Course, Scott Hahn,
• The Bible Project Video Series (also on YouTube)

In Understanding the Scriptures, Scott Hahn does an excellent job engaging the reader and providing the tools to interpret the story of Salvation History in the Bible. It’s masterfully written so that young and adult students can grasp and put to use the key concepts he teaches for understanding the Scriptures. For our purposes, we would like to draw attention to his presentation on the senses of Scripture, which are the literal sense and the spiritual sense. The spiritual sense is subdivided into three distinct aspects: the moral, allegorical, and anagogic (a big fancy word meaning “the eternal perspective”). So all together we can treat them as “the four senses of Scripture.” Hahn emphasizes that while we must try to understand the literal sense first, the moral, allegorical, and anagogic senses are indispensable keys to unlocking the full meaning of the text. Here, we will give due consideration to all of these aspects when presenting the connections between liturgical readings on any given Sunday. The one we will spend more time unpacking will usually be the allegorical sense.

The Bible Project videos present a range of topics related to reading and interpreting the Scriptures. They cover every book of the Bible in picture board format and also treat various groups of books in the Bible thematically. My favorite videos deal with word studies that delve deeper into the Hebrew philology. Clear and simple, yet deep and enriching, each video is aimed at enabling the layperson to study and pray with the Scriptures with confidence. Videos are short enough to watch in under 10 minutes. CAVEAT: they are binge worthy. You could spend hours watching these videos, though in my opinion, it would be time well spent leaning about the word of God. Here’s a sample of what I’m talking about.

My desire is to cover the readings for Sundays and Solemnities throughout the liturgical year and share some insights based on the four senses of Scripture, focusing mainly on the allegorical sense, to make some connections between the Gospel and the other readings for that day, within the context of their respective Liturgical Season.

And because I know myself well enough to know that I can’t help myself, I might as well just say it now. Every once and a while, I might get off topic and show a bit of my quirky side, like this guy…

Yep, We’re Back.