Holly Taylor Coolman on Remaining a Catholic

Last updated on: April 25, 2018 at 7:33 am By Artur Rosman

Holly Taylor Coolman teaches theology at Providence College. This is a guest post. ========================================== I remember quite clearly, a number of years ago, reading R.R.Reno’s description of his experience of becoming Catholic. “It felt,” he said, “like being submerged into the ocean.” (And the ocean, he went on to note, “needs no justification.”) What I myself felt upon reading the these lines was being mad as hell. I was an Episcopalian, as Reno had been just prior to this ecclesial... Read more

Difference, Disharmony, and Drama Are the Essence of Marriage

Last updated on: June 29, 2015 at 2:31 pm By Artur Rosman

The debates around the redefinition of marriage in the United States orbit around the philosophy of love. What’s largely missing is a coherent understanding of love’s definition. The French Catholic philosopher Fabrice Hadjadj offers some pointers about the essence of love in marriage. Hadjadj starts with difference, or, as Levinas called it, alterity: Sex is the starting point of two types of relations both of which depend upon difference. There is a double difference: The difference between the sexes and... Read more

The Queer Catholic Pro-Life Logic of the Gay Marriage Majority Decision

Last updated on: June 27, 2015 at 2:08 pm By Artur Rosman

The second half of Jody Bottum’s Age of Anxiety makes a strong case for the American internalization of Catholic natural law language. One of the goals of his book is to point out the heavy Catholic presence in American public life through the public square’s adoption of this typically Catholic way of speaking. This exegesis of a kind of esoteric writing does get a little bit farcical when Bottum takes up an extended reading of George W. Bush’s statement that... Read more

Zoltan Istvan 2016: Transhumanist Anti-Nature is Now Mainstream

Last updated on: June 24, 2015 at 1:47 pm By Artur Rosman

If you think Zoloft was a HUGE breakthrough, then you haven’t seen nothing yet. Here comes Zoltan throwing down his Transhumanist Wager into an already overstocked presidential field for 2016. I’ll first have to bring you up to speed with what’s going to be news with a quick blurb summary of Houllebecq’s novel The Possibility of an Island: Having made a fortune producing comedies that skewer mankind’s consumerism, religious fundamentalism, sexual profligacy, and other affronts, Daniel is forty before... Read more

A Pixellated-Camouflage Bible for the Deus Absconditus in Your Life!

Last updated on: June 24, 2015 at 3:34 am By Artur Rosman

Not long after the pope condemned told those in the weapons industry they shouldn’t consider themselves Christians I saw a Byzantine Catholic post pictures of the Orthodox RSV Military New Testament w/Psalms. They said it was their favorite Bible edition. Coincidence? One wonders. Yet, if our God is a hidden God (deus absconditus, Pascal called Him), then what could better serve as an analogue of his presence than a camouflaged cover Bible? As expected, the presence of this Bible edition... Read more

Conservatives (Not Liberals) Planted American Catholic Dissent

Last updated on: June 23, 2015 at 3:02 pm By Artur Rosman

“I love clichés and hackneyed expressions of every kind because they’re largely true,” says Violet in Stillman’s Damsels in Distress. John F. Kennedy tilled the fields that Mario Cuomo planted with the seeds of American Catholic dissent, which were were later cultivated by inveterate liberal dissenters Charles Curran and Richard McBrien (among a legion of others) so says the commonplace you find across the ideological range between Linker and Neuhaus. This line keeps getting repeated because it is largely true.... Read more

A Catholic Worker Approach to Laudato Si’: Repent! Understand! Pray!

Last updated on: June 21, 2015 at 11:19 am By Artur Rosman

Bob Waldrop is the founder of the Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House in Oklahoma City. He holds a certificate in permaculture from Elfin Permaculture of Florida, and five diplomas in Permaculture (in Education, Community Service, Research, Media, and Finance) awarded by the Permaculture Institute of the U.S. He is one of the founders of the Oklahoma Food Coop, the first food coop in the US to only sell locally grown and made food and non-food items. He is director of... Read more

The Fatal Errors of Capitalism: Laudato Si’ & the Economy

Last updated on: June 20, 2015 at 12:33 pm By Artur Rosman

Keith Michael Estrada is the founder of Students for a Fair Society at Franciscan University of Steubenville and is a member of the International Observatory of Young Catholics (Rome). Finishing his MA in philosophy at the aforementioned institution, he writes from Seattle-land, Washington. This is a guest post. ==================================================================================== A group within a people has no claim to being favored in the distribution of goods and honors because it produces a large quantity of useful consumer goods. Max Scheler, Ressentiment... Read more

The Most Sophiological Encyclical of All: Michael Martin on Laudato Si’

Last updated on: June 19, 2015 at 1:12 pm By Artur Rosman

MICHAEL MARTIN is Assistant Professor of English and Philosophy at Marygrove College. He is the author of Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England (Ashgate, 2014), a work of literary criticism, The Submerged Reality (Angelico, 2015), and a volume of poetry, Meditations in Times of Wonder (Angelico Press, 2014). This is a guest post. =========================== I’ve been waiting for this encyclical for four-hundred years. There are some names conspicuous by their presence in Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si:... Read more

The Official Edition of Laudato Si’ is Now Available

Last updated on: June 18, 2015 at 11:18 am By Artur Rosman

The final and official edition of Laudato Si’ is now available online through the Vatican website. Earlier we reported about its leak (the real text seems shorter), had a Catholic climate expert comment on what we can expect, and played some Mad Libs with it. Later today you’ll see some commentary on the real thing. If you want to see young Catholic intellectuals totally geek out, follow their twitter feeds right about now. Before I go, a quick important passage... Read more