Hi subscribers, and visitors to The Forge! Since launching Firebranded.fm I ordinarily don’t post these Post Show notes to The Forge, I only post episodes here. But today I wanted to share the latest Post Show article, because I think The Forge readership will really enjoy it.

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If you’d like to watch/listen to the episode itself, you can find it at The Forge. Prefer another network/app? The episode page at FireBranded.fm has those alternative links.

On episode 49 of Fire Branded, I promised to share an ontological/anthropological argument for the objective value of praying in your native language. This is not an academic article in the least. It’s just a brief but substantial rundown of the most important points to the argument.

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There’s no explicit Catholic doctrine saying “native language is spiritually superior.” There’s none that says praying in Latin is superior or more potent either, but what does exist is a very rich Catholic understanding of the unity of body, intellect, memory, affection, imagination, speech, and language. From that, we begin to see a strong anthropological argument for the value of praying in one’s native language as opposed to praying in Latin.

The cleanest path forward is through an application of the incarnation, habit, and the Thomistic understanding of how humans know, love, and experience reality.

Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Human beings are not pure intellects like angels. We come to know through our senses, imagination, memory, images, sounds, habits, and embodied experience. The intellect works through phantasms — meaning our thinking is tied to lived, sensory, experiential reality.

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What's a "Phantasm"?
For Aquinas, Phantasms are the mental images we form from our senses—basically, the pictures in our mind that help us think about the world we experience.

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