"Get your philosophy from a bumper sticker"

Maintaining some continuity with last week AND with my previous post, here is Green Day's Warning. I think this song and video, besides injecting some humor into the discussion, sing about and depict, at least to some degree, the alienation about which Fr. López writes.

Writing of alienation, our alienation from ourselves and from the world, brings me to one of the critical things that Karl Marx got right- alienation. If I had a lot of time, this would be interesting to explore, especially referencing his writings published under the title: Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, especially the first and second manuscripts. These are the manuscripts Marx wrote while living in Paris. These writings are largely critical, not prescriptive, like the lumbering, pseudo-scientific Das Kapital, which he wrote later while dwelling in London. It was Archbishop Helder Camara who suggested in the 1970s that theologians needed to do for Marx what Aquinas did for Aristotle.

Anyway, alienation is what Fr. López describes in the early part of his article On Restlessness. Of course, as Christians we must reject the most pseudo-scientific construct of all the dreaded material dialectic- Philosophy students reading this are ducking under their desks. Instead, we look to God acting in history, bringing it to fulfillment, admittedly in a very mysterious and often quite invisible and even imperceptible manner.