Welcome to this section of the Collectanea Informatica

The Collectanea Informatica is a collection of materials on different subjects that I have been working on for the past years. The first Collectanea that came out on the web is a series of tutorials written for student volunteers who helped me maintain These materials were rewritten and formatted for the web and are now found at 110MB.Com. The present "Collectanea" will be the host to other articles, essays and notes that I have used at different times and for varied groups. They will be posted here as part of an exercise to test them for a wider circle of readers.

History and Philosophy

There was a time when I considered history and philosophy as my fields of interest. But along the way I was asked to change directions and do some work on a different field. First loves never die, however, and so history and philosophy will just have to be a side agenda, when work is done and there is still some energy left for the pleasures that these offer.

I am not an expert in these fields. The most recent work I've done on these subjects are the various articles I wrote in attempting to integrate education and spirituality in a Catholic school. These are now mostly referenced from this site. Of these series, the more well-known is the work I did on Augustinian Values.

History was never my favorite subject in my earlier years of schooling. It became a passion when I had to deal with texts which were incomprehensible apart from their historical context. The study of sacred literature of whatever religion gives rise to that interest. After all, religion is a historical as well as cultural reality in spite of the claim that it deals with the immaterial and the transcendent.

Philosophy became my interest in a later stage of my schooling. I was trained in Thomism but I found Kierkegaard and Sartre more engaging. This latter drew me to Feuerbach and Nietzsche. In the late 1980s when Liberation Theology was making waves among the intelligentsia, I was drawn to Marxism and to the Death of God theologies that became popular in non-Catholic circles. In the 1980s too, the novel of Umberto Eco called "In the Name of the Rose" became a best-seller that awakened me to an aspect of Medieval history that seen from the perspective of an agnostic becomes dramatic: the search for meaning in a world that was losing its sense for meaning. Wasn't Nominalism a by-product of this?

Between Then and Now

Finally, my being assigned to a teaching post that forced me to do some research on the Christianization of the Philippines made me aware of the variegated work called "evangelization". The Augustinian friars who worked within the limitations set by the Council of Trent creatively promoted a culture that at once embraced and corrected what they found in our islands. They created "Maria Clara", preserved the different languages of the Philippine islands as well as transferred the "technology" of Europe to a Malayan setting on their way to building up the only Christian nation in Asia.

All of these have found their way into my notebooks and scattered notes. These will be rewritten into essays in HTML and published here, giving me an opportunity to rethink, rewrite and re-express what I've learned and test them against the materials that are daily being made available on the information highway. The frequency of my posts will depend on the time that will be available to me after I've done my work on the Bible Workshop and other sites I consider to be integral to my web ministry. For the moment, enjoy the vision of this Joomla installation and don't forget to visit my sponsor.