Pope Francis caused a storm of controversy with the tweet, “Inequality is the root of social evil.” This sent some scrambling to set up a genealogy. From the looks of it Thomas Piketty author of Capital in the 21st Century seems to be the prime suspect. I know next to nothing about this book, so all I can offer you is the following publisher blurb: “What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the... Read more
“Ode for the Eightieth Birthday of Pope John Paul II” by Czeslaw Milosz in New and Collected Poems We come to you, men of weak faith,So that you might fortify us with the example of your lifeAnd liberate us from anxietyAbout tomorrow and next year. Your twentieth centuryWas made famous by the names of powerful tyrantsAnd by the annihilation of their rapacious states.You knew it must happen. You taught hope:For only Christ is the lord and master of history.Foreigners could... Read more
“I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers,” says atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel in his book The Last Word. You might uncharitably think to yourself that this is an exception to the rule. You’d, of course, be wrong. Encouraged by Stephen Bullivant’s Faith and Unbelief, I came up (really quickly) with a list of ten atheists who engage religion intelligently, without... Read more
Isn’t it strange how life seems to offer almost as many connections as a Kieslowski film? I went to a lecture by my friend Justin Tse and met someone there with a Charles Taylor connection just hours after I wrote a post about Taylor yesterday. The things you learn when you get out of the house! The great news is that the Graduate Christian Fellowship at the University of Washington will be hosting a premiere theologian, James K.A. Smith. Smith... Read more
If you’ve missed the discussions surrounding Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, then you’ve been living an intellectual rock. Taylor is only the most widely discussed philosopher of the last 20 years or so. His wider influence in the world of philosophy coincided with him coming out… coming out as a Catholic. He did this after he wrote the groundbreaking Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. The basic premise of the story he tells in Sources of the... Read more
“Christ is risen.” Whoever believes thatShould not behave as we do,Who have lost the up, the down, the right, the left, heavens, abysses,And try somehow to muddle on, in cars, in beds,Men clutching at women, women clutching at men,Falling, rising, putting coffee on the table,Buttering bread, for here’s another day.And another year. Time to exchange presents.Christmas trees aglow, music,All of us, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Catholics,Like to sit in the pew, sing with others,Give thanks for being here together still,For the gift... Read more
Yesterday I happened upon a PBS interview with the poet Christian Wiman author of the acclaimed memoir My Bright Abyss. Wiman suffers from an incurable cancer, but it is that very cancer that has brought him back to organized Christianity (as if there can be anything like a disorganized Christianity!). At some point in the interview he says, “Death is here to teach us something.” This struck me as a thought appropriate for Holy Saturday. Similar sentiments about suffering are captured well... Read more
I’m usually a few days (or a few months behind) on almost everything I do. I never seem to catch up to life, but life catches up to me, like a cross. I can’t find my copy of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Way of the Cross. It contains the best description of taking up one’s cross I’ve ever seen, but now I can’t share it with you. Because I couldn’t find that text, I’d like to give you something to... Read more
Maundy Thursday usually has people twittering about whose carefully cultivated stinky feet will get washed and what canons might or might not get violated. This is all well and good, but as we gear up for Good Friday, we should start honing in on the absurd act of gratuitously inflicting violence on a God who graciously, even foolishly, empties himself out. You might not be aware of this, but thinking, reacting, and rectifying the act of needlessly inflicted violence upon... Read more
There are papacies and there are radical papacies. Nobody notices the really radical papacies, because too many things off their radar change and are absorbed into the mainstream. Decades later people are like, “Haven’t we always done it this way?” As a counterexample of a radical papacy I’d like to present the tenure of the soon to be St. John XXIII (see: Faggioli’s new biography). He was quite conservative. He went through all the proper channels in convening Vatican II.... Read more
Cosmos The In Lost
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