This website is the home site of my criminal reformation apostolate; here you can find details about the Lampstand Foundation which I founded as a 501c (3) nonprofit corporation in Sacramento, California in 2003.
I have written ten books and each one of my books is a response to a likely objection to Catholicism that will be encountered when doing ministry to professional criminals; and for links to all of the Lampstand books which are available at Amazon, go to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=david+h+lukenbill
Lampstand also keeps track of rehabilitative programs that fail, and the one or two that appear to succeed, with the findings available at https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/evaluation-of-reentry-programs-3/
I also maintain a daily blog, The Catholic Eye, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/
The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.
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The Descent of Aquinas & Ascent of Teilhard
During the early half of the 20th Century there was a deep renewal of Thomism—the foundational and intellectual floor of Catholicism for centuries—led by the papal magisterium and lay Catholic thinkers like Jacques & Raissa Maritain, whose work had a great impact on my conversion and Catholic becoming; and during the same period, a great wave of deep, foundational shaking and mystical theology emanated from the Jesuit Father Teilhard de Chardin which so confused the Vatican that the Church restricted his writings.
Sometime after, the bottom dropped out for Thomism as noted by D.Q. McInerny (2015).
By the mid-twentieth century, Thomism could be said to be the defining philosophy — the “official” philosophy, if you will — of well-nigh all the major Catholic seminaries and Catholic colleges and universities in the U.S. While the quality of the Thomism being taught varied, sometimes widely, from institution to institution, every institution, even the smaller ones with limited resources and sparse philosophical talent, could be said to be making earnest efforts to respond productively to Aeterni Patris. On an autobiographical note, the college in this country where I did my undergraduate work — an all-male institution named after St. Thomas Aquinas with some two thousand students — had a philosophy department that was unambiguously Thomistic in orientation and commitment, a goodly portion of whose members had received their doctorates from Laval. Students who majored in philosophy there received a good grounding in Thomistic thought and were well prepared for graduates studies, should they choose to pursue them. But all students at the college, whatever their major field, got a significant taste of Thomism, for they were required to take at least four courses in philosophy: logic, philosophical psychology, metaphysics, and ethics. By comparison, students at most of the country’s twenty-eight Jesuit institutions, no matter what their major field, had as part of their academic credentials what was effectively a minor in philosophy.
The Jesuits, it should be recognized, played a major role in the Thomistic renewal, and some of the best Thomists of the twentieth century were members of the Society of Jesus. This is to take nothing away from the Dominicans, who, needless to say, also made large contributions to the cause. In addition, there were a number of individuals from various other orders and congregations who figured prominently in the movement, such as Fr. Joseph Owens, a Redemptorist, Fr. Henry Koren of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, and Br. Benignus of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. Lay philosophers, however, arguably made the greatest contribution to the Thomistic renewal, perhaps in good part simply on account of their numbers. Well-schooled and dedicated scholars, many of them were also outstanding teachers. And there were also many accomplished writers among them, to whom we credit many books of lasting quality; they published articles in reputable journals like The Thomist, The New Scholasticism, and The Modern Schoolman. A plethora of good to very good textbooks in Scholastic philosophy were readily available when the renewal was at its height, and many were published by major houses such as Macmillan, Prentice-Hall, and Harper & Brothers. This was also the heyday of Catholic publishing, led by houses like Herder in St. Louis and The Bruce Publishing Company in Milwaukee, both of which had impressive lists. Among the happier “problems” for philosophy teachers in those days was settling on a textbook for a particular course, say in ethics or metaphysics, when there were a half dozen, if not more, inviting titles from which to choose. Authors like Msgr. Paul J. Glenn and Fr. Celestine Bittle, O.F.M. Cap., produced entire series of textbooks in Scholastic philosophy. In all, it was an exciting time. Thomism seemed to be vibrantly alive, and the future looked quite bright.
And then the Thomistic renewal collapsed. To speak of a collapse is not to indulge in hyperbole, for the term is just the one needed to convey the sense of what actually happened — the astonishing suddenness with which Thomism ceased to be the governing and guiding philosophy in Catholic higher education. It was as if, overnight, the bottom had dropped out. So, we return to the question posed earlier: How to explain this extraordinary event of recent Church history? I offer the following: First, the collapse was a particular expression of a larger phenomenon of which it was but a part; second, it was the result of a pervasive mania for change; third, it was the targeted victim of a resurgent modernism.
Retrieved July 22, 2015 from http://perennis.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-rise-fall-of-thomistic-renewal-part.html
He goes on to write that though the collapse was significant, there is also, still, a percolating Thomism as represented by Thomist inspired educational institutions and books.
About a hundred years ago a French Jesuit, Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, began thinking and writing about a grand vision he had regarding Christ and Evolution; a vision so advanced that the Vatican theologians of the time could scarcely understand nor embrace it and forbade him from publishing his writing during his lifetime; he died in 1955.
Slowly however, after his death, as his work began to see the light of day, the Catholic theologians caught up and eventually even the popes realized how profound his work was and how much it would change the mind of the Church.
For a time, his actual faith was questioned through the complexity and speculative nature of his work, but as Cardinal De Lubac (1967) makes clear, this concern was unnecessary:
Pere Teilhard’s faith was as complete as it was ardent and firm. If he seemed to go beyond some positions generally adopted in the Church, he would never have been willing to lag behind any one of them. It was simply that it fell to him to explore truths which, without being new, stretched out like continents untrodden by man. “St. Paul and the Greek Fathers speak of a cosmic function of Christ: the exact content o that phrase has never been brought out.” That was precisely what he would have liked to find in the theology of his time—more light on the ‘organic and cosmic splendours contained in the Pauline doctrine of Chris gathering up all things.’ The least, then, we can do is to recognize that he will have done more than any other man of our time to open up a vast field of inquiry for theologians, and that they must make it their business to apply themselves to it. (p. 203)
Cardinal Henri De Lubac. (1967). The religion of Teilhard de Chardin. (R. Hague, Trans.) New York: Desclee Company
The ascent of Teilhardism has actually been going on for some time, sometimes even when the Catholic theologian is unaware of it, as this excerpt from Jacques Maritain’s final book:
The “ontosophic” truth at stake when it is a question of the world taken in itself, is that, in spite of the evil that is present in it—sometimes so great as to be intolerable not only to man’s sensibility but to his very mind—the good, all things considered, is there, much greater, deeper and more fundamental. The world is good in its structures and in its natural ends. As stagnant, even as regressive as the world can seem at certain times and in certain places of the earth, its historic development, seen in its entirety, advances toward better and more elevated states. In spite of everything, we ought to have confidence in the world because, if evil grows in it along with good (and in what a way!—one would have to be one of the new Pharisees intoxicated by the three “cosmological,” not theological, virtues not to see that) there is, nevertheless, in the world a greater growth of good. (p. 39)
Jacques Maritain. (1968). The Peasant of the Garonne: An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
And, then, of course, in the just published encyclical of the Jesuit Pope Francis—who mentions Teilhard in the note #53 in this passage, first time he is mentioned in an encyclical—we find:
- The ultimate destiny of the universe is in the fullness of God, which has already been attained by the risen Christ, the measure of the maturity of all things.[53] Here we can add yet another argument for rejecting every tyrannical and irresponsible domination of human beings over other creatures. The ultimate purpose of other creatures is not to be found in us. Rather, all creatures are moving forward with us and through us towards a common point of arrival, which is God, in that transcendent fullness where the risen Christ embraces and illumines all things. Human beings, endowed with intelligence and love, and drawn by the fullness of Christ, are called to lead all creatures back to their Creator.
Pope Francis. (2015). Laudato Si. #83. Retrieved July 13, 2015 from http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html
The central element in Teilhard’s thought, in my understanding of it, is the evolutionary growth, of the entire universe from the Universal Alpha Christ—spiritual and material—towards the ultimate end, the Universal Omega Christ, when the love that defines God, infuses all, and all are conscious of it, all are conscious of being part of everything, yet still singular, still individual.
Fr. Teilhard, writing in his book, Science and Christ, Chapter II, Note on the Universal Christ:
By the Universal Christ, I mean Christ the organic centre of the entire universe.
Organic Center: that is to say the centre on which every even natural development is ultimately physically dependent.
Of the entire universe: that is to say, the centre not only of the earth and mankind, but of Sirius and Andromeda, of the angels, whether in a close or a distant relationship (and that, in all probability, means the centre of all participated being.)
Of the entire universe, again, that is to say, the centre not only of moral and religious effort, but also of all that that effort implies—in other words of all physical and spiritual growth.
This Universal Christ is the Christ presented to us in the Gospels, and more particularly by St. Paul and St. John. It is the Christ by whom the great mystics lived: but nevertheless not the Christ with whom theology has been most concerned.
The purpose of this note is to bring to the notice of my friends, more skilled than I am in sacred science and better placed to exert intellectual influence, how necessary, how vitally necessary, it now is that we should make plain this eminently Catholic notion of Christ as Alpha and Omega.
- In the first place, as I have explained elsewhere, the present history of religious sentiment in man, whoever they may be, seems to me to be dominated by a sort of revelation, emerging in human consciousness, of the one great universe.
- Faced by the physical immensity that is thus revealed to our generation, some (the unbelievers) turn away from Christ a priori, because an image of him is often presented to them that is manifestly more insignificant than the world. [so, so, true and a reason criminals do not respond to traditional evangelization, DHL] Others, better informed (and this includes many believers), nevertheless feel that a fight to the death is going on within them. Which will be the greater they will have to face, and which, therefore, will command their worship—Christ or the universe? The latter is continually growing greater, beyond all measure. It is absolutely essential that the former should be officially, and explicitly, set above all measure.
If the unbelievers are to begin to believe, and the believers to continue to do so, we must hold up before men the figure of the Universal Christ. (pp. 14-15)
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. (1968). Science and Christ. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers.
Within the Church, this spiritual evolution is recorded within the magisterium, primarily that of Peter and the saints, where we see the halting—sometimes two steps backwards for each forward—progress of the Pilgrim Church as she struggles through time and space, struggles with the world and the kingdom of heaven, each joined to one another, each evolving and adding to the consciousness of humans and God, within which we grow upward towards convergence.
Teilhard’s vision first entranced me in prison over 50 years ago, and Teilhard’s Catholicism was immaterial against the solidity of his vision. When I became Catholic and studied Aquinas, it all came together, for Aquinas, in his synthesizing of the science of Aristotle with second millennium Catholicism was a necessary prelude to Teilhard and his synthesizing of evolutionary science and third millennium Catholicism.
Philip Sherrard writes in Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 4, No. 3. (Summer, 1970):
The conflict between religion and science, though it may seem to have become particularly acute during the last century, is not new in our culture. In its modern form it goes back at least to the Latin Averroists, who radically severed the connection between faith and reason, theology and philosophy, and asserted that philosophical thinking must be independent of faith and theology. It is in this secularization of thought that modern philosophy and modern science in general have their basis. Briefly, at the beginning of this process of secularization is the assumption that there are two orders or levels of knowledge…It was this split between two levels or orders of knowledge that St. Thomas Aquinas sought to heal….Teilhard de Chardin saw it as his task to embrace the new vistas of man’s history exposed by science and to seek to resolve the conflict between science and religion in terms of a new synthesis….
Retrieved July 23, 2015 from
So what appears to be a descent and ascent is just a continuation, an evolution, of Catholic consciousness.
David H Lukenbill Website 