Today, we are celebrating the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God and the passage will be taken from the Gospel according to St Luke. So they hurried away and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in the manger. When they saw the child they repeated what they have been told about him, and everyone who heard it was astonished at what the shepherds said to them. As for Mary, she treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart. And the shepherds went back glorifying and praising God for all they have heard and seen, just as they have been told. When the eighth day came and the child was circumcized, they gave him the name Jesus, the name the angel had given him before his conception. During January 1, New Year's Day, we complete the octave celebration of Christmas Day. It's an often a overlooked liturgical fact that we celebrate Christmas Day for eight straight days. We do this also with Easter Day, which concludes with the great celebration of Divine Mercy Sunday. On t...

 There are four Masses that are celebrated for the feast of Christmas and each is given its own set of readings to help us contemplate Christ's birth. The Gospel for the Vigil Mass on Christmas Eve is taken from the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew. The Mass at midnight proclaims the birth of Jesus through the Gospel of Luke. The Mass at dawn on Christmas morning continues the story of the birth of Jesus as found in Luke's Gospel, ending with the shepherd's visit to the infant Jesus. In each of these Gospel readings, we hear portions of the infancy narratives with which we are familiar. We will now proceed to the Gospel for the day. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. The...

 In Section Three, Kant argues that we have a free will and are thus morally self-legislating. The fact of freedom means that we are bound by the moral law. In the course of his discussion, Kant establishes two viewpoints from which we can consider ourselves; we can view ourselves: as a member of the world of appearances, which operates according to the laws of nature; or as members of the intellectual world, which is how we view ourselves when we think of ourselves as having free wills and when we think about how to act. These two different viewpoints allow Kant to make sense of how we can have free wills, despite the fact that the world of appearances follows laws of nature deterministically. Finally, Kant remarks that whilst he would like to be able to explain how morality ends up motivating us, his theory is unable to do so. This is because the intellectual world--in which morality is grounded--is something that we cannot make positive claims about. Freedom and Willing Kant ope...

 In Section Two, Kant starts from scratch and attempts to move from popular moral philosophy to a metaphysics of morals. Kant begins Section Two of the Groundwork by criticizing attempts to begin moral evaluation with empirical observation. He states that even when we take ourselves to be behaving morally, we cannot be at all certain that we are purely motivated by duty and not by inclinations. Kant observes that humans are quite good at deceiving themselves when it comes to evaluating their motivations for acting, and therefore even in circumstances where individuals believe themselves to be acting from duty, it is possible they are acting merely in accordance with duty and are motivated by some contingent desire. However, the fact that we see ourselves as often falling short of what morality demands of us indicates we have some functional concept of the moral law. Kant begins his new argument in this Section with some observations about rational willing. All things in nature must...

 In section one, Kant argues from common-sense morality to the supreme principle of morality, which he calls the categorical imperative. Kant thinks that uncontroversial premises from our shared common-sense morality, and analysis of common sense concepts such as "the good," "duty," and "moral worth," will yield the supreme principle of morality (i.e., the categorical imperative). Kant's discussion on section one can be roughly divided into four parts: the good will; the teleological argument; the three propositions regarding duty; and the categorical imperative. The Good Will Kant thinks that, with the exception of good will, all goods are qualified. By qualified, Kant means that those goods are good insofar as they presuppose or derive their goodness from something else. For example, wealth can be extremely good if it is used for human welfare, but it can be disastrous if a corrupt mind is behind it. In a similar vein, we often desire intelligence an...