We open this week’s selection with a brief article by Fr Patrick Reardon, “What Is Man?”:

If we adhere to the full anthropology of divine revelation, it is strictly speaking not true that “human nature does not change.” Indeed, it is the very business of divine revelation to cause human nature to change.

• “Music as Therapy: the analogy between music and medicine in Neoplatonism”, by our new collaborator Sebastián Moro-Tornese:

Instead of thinking in terms of attaining harmony as a “result” or “possession”, we can understand music as a work of disinterested love and knowledge that prepares us for the reception of inner Silence and harmony as an intuition or re-enactment of Unity, which liberates the soul from its multiple sense perceptions, passions and possessions…

• And finally by John Wu, Jr, an article on “Thomas Merton and Confucian Rites”, clearing some misconceptions about the Confucian tradition:

Disharmony and alienation occur when no one quite knows for certain who he or she is supposed to be; that is, when we have lost our identity or when, in the case of ideas, a concept such as love, for example, becomes for all practical purposes the dominant province of soap operas, ad agencies, and, most absurd and tragic of all, appropriated by totalitarian governments.