blackshama's commentary on Philippine issues

John Henry Cardinal Newman The Catholic Church is probably the only religion which raises reason together with faith as a standard for thinking and with it, life. And just for that as a way to praising the Divine, she invented the university, made sure this flourished to the present day, nurtured the arts and gave birth to science, the social sciences and modern mathematics. The Church has always had a space for thinkers and that space sometimes was the Papal throne or at least the seat of the local diocese. Two of the recent popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI are major contributors to philosophy and theology and in J ohn Paul II, even environmental ethics . Benedict is known to follow developments in science. Traditionally, the Catholic universities are the spaces for thinking with or even against the Church. Ah yes! The University, the alma mater studiorum as the University in Bologna, the world's oldest in existence has for its motto. The University is semper liberi...

The Geography of the Internet (from Wikipedia Commons) This year the cyberworld marked the 100th birthday of Alan Turing, whose formalization of the algorithm for computable numbers made possible the machine that bears his name. This provided the basis for how computers work and eventually how the Internet operates. This year too computer scientists marked the lamentable suicide of Turing after he was prosecuted as being gay, in a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence. This post is not about gay rights but another right just as important, the right to free expression and speech in whatever the environment and locale. Freedom of expression is a universal human right as declared by the United Nations and is "beyond frontiers". What then is this frontier? The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights was made in 1948 just when Turing's machines were just being applied to military and civilian use . Now the world is vastly different, with information being ...