In the Beginning there were the waters. Every mythology agrees on this. Before the God of light and fire, of sky and spirit comes to impose order on the world there is the uncreated void. Inanimate matter. Water and stone. Here’s how I think it happened in that time. The world had not yet been made. In the eye of the Creator, the fields were filling with animals and men. The dews of the first waters were washing across the... Read more
What is it about current right-wing Catholic culture that makes it acceptable for a man to go around calling a member of the clergy a “pansy” and a “beta male”? Read more
Back when I was in school, one of the routine features of our social sciences courses was a unit on Canadian identity. The assignment was always basically the same: you were supposed to do a presentation where you introduced the other students in the class to your cultural background. Multiculturalism, we were told, is the Canadian identity. I always found these units interesting in-so-far as I got to learn about other cultures, and irksome in-so-far as I had basically nothing... Read more
So apparently right-wing Christianity learned its lesson from the complete pastoral debacle of the ex-gay movement. You know, the scapegoating of parents of gay kids, the insistence on treating homosexuality as a mental illness, the belief that same-sex attraction is transmitted like a disease and that you get the gayz through indoctrination. This time they’ve resolved to do better, to look for more responsible narratives, and to reach out in more positive ways to members of the trans community rather... Read more
The poor of America are living large off the public purse: they own plasma TVs and personal computers. They aren’t going hungry: in fact they eat more protein than the middle class. They own homes, and their living space is larger than that of non-poor people in Europe. The War Against Poverty has been an expensive failure, and it always will be because when it comes right down to it poverty is not caused by a lack of financial resources... Read more
I mentioned yesterday that I see the relationship between the Catholic laity and the hierarchy as being like a marriage…and that it is this relationship between myself and the Church that is the most conflicted. I’m hardly alone in this. Over the past hundred years or so we’ve seen a massive drop-off in Church attendance in Western countries. Last Sunday, an elderly Priest who used to serve our parish thirty or forty years ago visited and performed the Mass. In... Read more
I promised that I would talk about the difference between infallibility and authority, and why I’ve decided to work on rebuilding trust in and with the Church rather than simply abandoning my faith in favour of another (ideally less fraught) relationship. To explain this, I need to begin by explaining how I see humanity and human history. Basically, I conceive of the human world as fundamentally fractal in nature. So if you look at an individual human being, a sub-culture,... Read more
Last time I talked about the backdrop for my concerns about infallibility. Today, I want to talk about where I’m at right now. Before I do that, I want to emphasize that this is something I’ve been pretty hesitant to address directly. I’ve had my doubts going back a long time, but I was afraid that I might be wrong, and I was concerned about disturbing other people’s faith. I’m still concerned about that. I realize that there are those... Read more
I mentioned earlier that one of the issues I’ve been grappling with is the question of how reliable that teaching authority of the Church is. The central question, obviously, is whether the teaching on Papal infallibility is actually true. This is a crucial issue because if the Pope is not infallible, or if particular teachings that are often considered to be infallible actually are not, then conscientious dissent may in some cases be a moral necessity if one is to... Read more
Catholic Authenticity
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Mommy Wars vs. Culture Wars Fight
There are a large number of people who avoid church for exactly the same reason that I avoid mommy groups. Read more