TRAD PHILOSOPHER
A small place on the internet for the recovery of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Philosophy with skin on it — written in the margins of an ordinary life, for those who suspect that something real has been lost and believe it can be recovered.
RECENT ENTRIES
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- Cooper on miracles and the one true Church ↗
YOUTUBE ↗Jordan Cooper takes up the recent round of miracle-based apologetics and asks whether modern Catholic miracle claims are of the same evidential order as the New Testament sign-miracles. - ▸ MEMO · 12 September 2026
The claim goes: there are miracles in Rome, therefore Rome is the true Church. But this proves too much and too little at once. Too much, because miracles have been claimed in nearly every corner of Christendom, and outside it. Too little, because a genuine sign from God vindicates only what the sign itself declares — a healing at a shrine vindicates that God healed there; it does not, without further argument, vindicate the whole ecclesial apparatus around the shrine.
The New Testament sign-miracles were tightly bound to a public message: this Jesus, whom you crucified, God has raised. The evidential chain ran from the sign to the specific claim the sign was given to confirm. Modern shrine-miracle claims, whatever their status, are rarely of that order. To move from this happened to therefore this communion is the one true Church takes several silent premises that are doing all the work.
None of which is to be dismissive. The world is stranger than the disenchanted think. But the argument from miracles, taken by itself, is not the trump card it is often played as.
- A candle by an old book
Beeswax and vellum. The oldest reading light there is.A still-life snapshot for the desk hours — a single beeswax candle, an open folio, and the slow attention that the two together seem to require. The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908)- On the Tools at HandA typographical inventory — every formatting element used in one place, so the writer can audit them.