Brett Fawcett

Teacher/writer/quasi-theologian. All my best tweet ideas occur to me when I’m far from technology.

[Dutchman_the_Agent @Dutch_Agent]

This is a way, WAY bigger deal than anyone is making it out to be

[Brett Fawcett @PapistWitness]

@SteveSkojec This was not at all what the Galileo affair was about. If you know Aristotle’s physics, the center of the universe was the worst place to be (that’s why Dante puts Hell there); Copernicus was accused of *demoting* the sun by putting it at the center.

[Brett Fawcett @PapistWitness]

@venthepope Have you read it? Cause this looks more like Sean Connery than the canonical William of Baskerville

[Bret van den Brink @BretVDB]

“The half-baked Rousseauism in which most of us have been brought up has given us a subconscious notion that the free act is the untrained act. But of course freedom has nothing to do with lack of training. We are not free to move until we have learned to walk; we are not free to express ourselves musically until we have learned music; we are not capable of free thought unless we can think. Similarly, free speech cannot have anything to do with the mumbling and grousing of the ego. Free speech is cultivated and precise speech, which means that there are far too many people who are neither capable of it nor would know if they lost it.
A group of individuals, who retain the power and desire of genuine communication, is a society. An aggregate of egos is a mob. A mob can only respond to reflex and cliché; it can only express itself, directly or through a spokesman, in reflex and cliché. A mob always implies some object of resentment, and political leaders who speak for the mob aspect of their society develop a special kind of tantrum style, a style constructed almost entirely out of unexamined clichés.”

—Northrop Frye, The Well-Tempered Critic

[Sebastian Milbank @SebMilbank]

It's worth noting that Bloom openly embraced the politicised reading of texts he raged against elsewhere when it came to TS Eliot, despite his being a profoundly respected modernist writer, describing Eliot as "daemonic"

[MRJB 🇬🇧🇨🇦 @DrMichaelBonner]

Versions of this very question were posed and debated at the University of Paris in the 13th century, and the thesis that God could NOT create multiple worlds was condemned in 1277. It was Aristotle (and Averroists, I guess), not ecclesiastical authorities, who insisted that there could only be one world.

[Brett Fawcett @PapistWitness]

@GeoffRuss3 People forget that, for all it mourns his defeat, the entire second chapter of Grant’s Lament is just one critique after another of everything Diefenbaker did wrong or failed to do.

[Bret van den Brink @BretVDB]

It amuses me that Milton’s line “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” is itself an allusion to Ariosto’s “A tale in prose ne verse yet sung or sayd.”

[Brett Fawcett @PapistWitness]

@julienries13 Who is this quoting?

[Otto Von Tweetmarck @OVTweetmarck]

A full time Twitch streamer describing anyone else as a drain on society is truly something else

[Peter Hitchens @ClarkeMicah]

Even in the Bronze Age they could probably have spotted that WMD were a fake.

[Cole Hogan @colewhogan]

Here's Diefenbaker taking the train through Saskatchewan, saying that he would have liked to defend Louis Riel in court.

[Diogo Rosas G. @diogo76]

“O Velho e o Mar” sempre me pareceu uma obra-prima, das melhores novelas que existem. Ao longo dos anos, fiquei satisfeito em ver que Evelyn Waugh e Nabokov, que foi convidado a traduzir “the wonderful fish story” para o russo, compartilhavam essa admiração.

[Parsifal Books @ParsifalBooks]

William Faulkner on The Old Man and The Sea:

“His best. Time may show it to be the best single piece by any of us. I mean his and my contemporaries. This time, he discovered God, a Creator. Until now, his men and women had made themselves, shaped themselves out of their own clay; their victories and defeats were at the hands of each other, just to prove to themselves or one another how tough they could be. But this time, he wrote about pity: about something somewhere that made them all: the old man who had to catch the fish and then lose it, the fish that had to be caught and then lost, the sharks which had to rob the old man of his fish; made them all and loved them all and pitied them all. It's all right. Praise God that whatever made and loves and pities Hemingway and me kept him from touching it any further.”

[Brett Fawcett @PapistWitness]

@BretVDB Daily reminder: Bloom thought that Macbeth would have been better without the witches.

[Ryan Haecker @RyanHaecker]

God createth harmony out of sublime contraries; and [the universe owes] existence to the strife of the concordant and the love of the opposed.

- Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite, Third Dialogue

[Brett Fawcett @PapistWitness]

@curpenter Getting a lot of Boss Baby vibes

[Hans Fiene 🦬 @HansFiene]

And the king of Israel said to Jehoshaphat, “There is yet one man by whom we may inquire of the Lord, Micaiah the son of Imlah, but I hate him, for he never prophesies good concerning me, but evil.”

I love this verse so much. I don't think it was meant to be funny but it is so funny.

[Italian 🚅🇮🇹🇻🇦 @Italian347]

In the beginning was the.... Word, you say?