Okay, guys. I’m going to be vulnerable for a moment. Trump’s ascent in American politics has me really rattled. Not because a narcissistic bully is within reach of the highest office in the US of A, or because real atrocities could happen as a result of this. I study history for fun. The fact that blatantly bad men can achieve power by appealing to the crudest human passions is no surprise to me. Nor should the fact that religious leaders... Read more
On a recent post, 3vil5triker asked whether all ideas of God are not a form of idolatry that leads us to accept authority in defiance of reason and conscience. I like this question, mostly because it illustrates the very important sense in which atheism is a kind of faithfulness to God. I don’t mean this as an appropriation of atheists into my own belief structure, but rather as a nod of respect to my atheist siblings and to the good... Read more
Twice in my life I have had what I would call mystical experiences of truth. The first was shortly before my conversion, and it was prompted by a Zen koan. The second was several years ago, when I was doing the research for a book that I intended to write as a refutation of postmodernism. I was reading an essay on religion by Jacques Derrida in which he skillfully and eloquently deconstructed God. In both of these cases what I... Read more
It’s NFP awareness week. So let’s talk about the Pill. Specifically, I want to talk about people who are struggling with NFP hard cases, people who are profoundly frustrated and in some cases on the edge of despairing about their faith, who actually have legitimate reasons for going on the Pill: “On the other hand, the Church does not consider at all illicit the use of those therapeutic means necessary to cure bodily diseases, even if a foreseeable impediment to... Read more
A lot of the responses that I get in my combox seem to assume that there are basically only two ways to think about gay sex. Either it is a total abomination that must be opposed with every fibre of your being, a hideous atrocity that will result in gay people suffering improbable torments for forever…or the doctrine doesn’t make any sense (with the implication that we should just get over it and embrace a liberal sexual ethic.) Understandably, people... Read more
I want to touch on a delicate subject, one that I write about frequently in private correspondence but don’t generally talk about in public: the question of what traditionally-minded Catholic or Christian parents should do when their child comes out as LGBTQ. Most of the advice that I’ve seen out there falls cleanly into the standard ideological divide on LGBTQ issues. On the one hand, there’s advice for how to fix your gay kid, how to prevent your kid from... Read more
I’ve been mostly avoiding commenting on the presidential circus in the US: it’s not my country, and for the most part it’s not my business who Americans elect. It is, however, the business of every Christian to care about the misuse of God’s name, so I feel there is one aspect of the Republican National Congress that I can comment on. Usually, when we think about the second commandment, we think about relatively trivial transgressions: people thoughtlessly saying things like... Read more
Recently, I was writing about the difference between rational faith and irrational forms of fundamentalism. Naturally, some of my atheist commentariat concluded that I was either an atheist in Christian clothing, or else that I’m on the quick and slippery slope that leads to atheism. So I want to talk about why I’m not an atheist. First, the practical side of it. One of the things that I often hear from dedicated atheists is that they tried really hard to... Read more
Dan Mattson just published an answer in Crisis to my natural law articles, and I want to talk a little about his arguments and why, ultimately, I still don’t think a natural law approach is going to be effective in achieving cultural change on issues of sexual morality. I want to start by noting that I don’t think we should jettison the natural law in moral theology – but there’s a significant difference between moral theology and popular ethics. Moral... Read more
Previously, I criticized the traditional natural law approach to promoting Catholic sexual ethics. Today, I’m going to talk about ten of the alternative approaches that I think are much more effective. Infrastructure of Love – The Gospel didn’t just spread because the Apostles were courageous and willing to tell the truth even under persecution. It also spread because Christianity offered real community, support and solidarity to those who were marginalized in Roman society. Today, we have a massive crisis of... Read more
Catholic Authenticity
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