Catholic Authenticity
Every Catholic guy I know is either dating, married, or a seminarian... I don’t even know how to get a bloody date... Read more
Every Catholic guy I know is either dating, married, or a seminarian... I don’t even know how to get a bloody date... Read more
There is a comment on my previous post that I have decided to answer in the form of a new entry because it touches on two of the biggest objections that right-wing America has to social programs. Chucky writes: And what is the penalty if someone chooses to not pay, but then donates that money to a more efficient charity? The State is always totalitarian. It is a monopoly. Read more
The use of taxes to secure justice for the poor does not deprive people of the opportunity to act virtuously. Read more
This one I haven’t done. But it’s my coolest idea for what I would do for Lent if I had the freedom to do it. The idea, basically, is to take a 40 day trip back in time. It doesn’t really matter all that much how far you want to roll the clock back. Even if you just go as far as 1999 you’ll find that a tremendous amount has changed since the end of the 20th century. Smart phones,... Read more
Giving Up Clothes for Lent No, I don’t mean that you should go naked. I mean, not unless you’re planning to spend Lent alone wandering around in the desert until your clothes rot and your skin is burned black. Clothing is a basic necessity, but if we look at the gospel Christ seems to be suggesting pretty strongly that a disciple shouldn’t be spending all that much time on it. In Luke 9:3 he sends them out telling them to... Read more
By this, I don’t mean actually giving up the Truth, but rather giving up one’s own parochial set of truths — the tendency to think that our way of viewing the world corresponds to an objective standard while the perspective of other people is basically just wrong. The standard way that human beings approach disagreements, arguments, texts, ideas, and so forth is to basically assume that we are right, and those with whom we disagree are either ignorant, stupid, deluded,... Read more
I’ve never done this specifically for Lent, but when I first converted to Catholicism I read the passage where Jesus told the disciples to sell everything they had and give it to the poor and then hit the road to preach the gospel and I figured that if I was going to take this Christianity thing seriously I should probably start with that. So the man who would later become my husband and I moved into a tent and started... Read more
Some readers may be familiar with Buy Nothing day -- a day of protest, usually celebrated on Black Friday, where you're supposed to buy nothing. One of the things that is kind of surprising is that a lot of people find it really difficult to go for 24 hours without shopping. Read more
This nifty piece does a very passable Aquinas impersonation covering two articles from the Summa Theologica on zombies: Whether the souls of those who become zombies are in hell? Whether zombies will experience the bodily resurrection? Inexplicably, it stops there and does not address a multitude of other critically important questions such as: Whether a person who becomes a zombie may be considered accountable for their actions while in that state? Whether a zombie is of the same species as... Read more
Several years back a friend of mine decided to give up furniture for Lent. The problem that she was facing was that for several years before that she had used Lent as a time to add observances like the Divine Office to her daily schedule. When Easter rolled around, she would just continue with the habits that she had established during Lent, but this created a dilemma: if you don’t go back to your usual habits after Lent, then you... Read more
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