The Arrow's Path

Due to some unforeseen changed in my personal life (you know, little things like career change and going back to graduate school), I have fallen woefully behind on continuing my reflections on Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas . This is also partly due to the fact that I found Chapter 4 to be a bit of a slog to read through and mentally process. So, I have taken some weeks to got through it and collect my thoughts. While I would quibble a bit over various sections in the preceding chapters and prologue, I was generally on the same page of where he was going (or at least where I thought he was going) with this encyclical. His overviews and recaps of Catholic Social Teaching since Rerum Novarum in the late 1800s have been solid. He took a few liberties in his summations of Catholic Social Teaching, but, for the most part, I was in general agreement with where he started and where he landed in those chapters.  Chapter 4 was a bit of a different bird. I was a bit surp...

I apologize for being woefully behind on my continued reflections on Pope Leo XIV's latest encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.  I have been meaning to sit down and write my thoughts on Chapter 3 for a few weeks now, but real life has taken over.  There is one thing I would clarify before continuing. I have noticed particularly in Chapter 3, but beginning in previous chapters of this encyclical, the Pope Leo has started using the terms "technocrat" and "technocracy" quite a bit. As someone who understands what he is referring to, this does not bother me. Unless I missed it, he never clearly defines what he means by those terms; he alludes to (dare I say heehaws around) definitions, sometimes imprecisely. As I do not believe these terms are common English parlance outside certain political science and techno-babble circles, I feel the need to try to define the terms, or at least my understand of them, as it becomes a very central concept in Chapter 3.  As I understan...