My wife and I are doing our best to revive our practice of watching films in the evening. This is not all that easy when you try to do it with a five, a three, and a one year old. We were forced to grab something that would be relatively adequate for the whole audience. Our choice was the documentary film Bergman’s Island. We figured watching a film about an old lecherous Swedish man living out his last days on... Read more
Recent exchanges (starting with a comment on The Eviscerated Public Square piece) with a reader who describes himself as a lapsed Catholic who advocates a global spirituality spurned me to once again consider the impurity of Christianity. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time fighting the post-Reformation attempts to recover a pure Christianity shorn of papist additions. Reformation Day is only twenty-two days away, so maybe it’s time to enter the fray in the spirit of Rabelaisian Catholicism, Pagan-Folk Christianity, cocktail sipping, Greek-speaking spirituality? The notion... Read more
Cosmos previously featured a liturgical foul by the Episcopalians here. There was a striking bulletin foul by the Lutherans as well, but the link is dead. This might indicate that the true Lord God of all Creation is the God of the ELCA Lutherans and is swift to justice. Since Catholics are obviously never guilty of liturgical abuses, I’d like to point out both the plank and the sawdust of a recent Methodist church debate. The issue of the iCharist is unpacked... Read more
We were about this far from attending our first Byzantine liturgy today. Inhuman lethargy prevented our troop from mobilizing itself. As we wait to go to our neighborhood Roman liturgy I’m listening to the following lecture by Fr. John Behr, dean of St. Vladimir’s seminary: I know his work mostly through The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death. Becoming Human seems to adopt the eucharistic-liturgical-patristic sensibility of the earlier volume in a slightly more contemplative mode: “This book reflects upon various dimensions... Read more
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20neq3KGFVM “And apart from being involved at the beginning of science, systems of government, philosophy, art, schools, hospitals, the emancipation of women, the abolition of slavery, social welfare, helping form the basis of the moral code most people live by, and introducing popular notions of justice, mercy, decency and compassion what has Christianity ever really done for the world?” I mean, what’s the big deal right? The dose of sanity from Milton Jones is peppered with a little bit of... Read more
When you accumulate books there is always that one which you’ve meant to read for the longest time. For whatever reason, call it grace or luck, you pick it up one day and spend the rest of the week (month, year) kicking yourself for not reading it earlier. I’m presently kicking myself for not picking up Albert Borgmann’s Crossing the Posmodern Divide before Monday (even though I’m quite satisfied with my readings of great books by D.B. Hart, Norman Davies, and A.D.... Read more
Don’t let yourself be sandwiched between Ken Ham and Bill Nye. Their debate was a circus sideshow rather than a real debate about where the dialogue between science and religion stands. Getting involved in the false dichotomies set up by these second-rate minds is like being sandwiched between Hitler and Stalin: unenviable. It’s like being stuck in Poland during the 20th century, that is, inhabiting the worst piece of real estate around. The debate was a symptom of the homonym problem which usually haunts most science versus religion debates. That’s... Read more
I’d like to get back to the topic of ultramontanism I broached two days ago here. But before I do that, the answer to the question in the title of this post is “definitely maybe”… Now during one of my many visits to Poland, this one about a decade ago, I picked up a newspaper from my grandmother’s nightstand. She always had a menagerie of stuff ranging from the latest news from forty years ago to the latest gossip from... Read more
When I hear people say Catholic means “Here Comes Everybody” I wonder if they really mean it. Do they know what they do? I also wonder whether anyone has ever checked whether H.C.E. appears in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake directly in relation to popery. Whatever the truth might be, there’s plenty of evidence Joyce was a victim of Catholic nostalgia. He never quite shook off the Church and read Cardinal Newman and Aquinas daily for their peerless prose. In fact, Joyce said Newman... Read more
During an onslaught of boredom I once did a little bit of creative display case rearranging at Third Place Books in Seattle’s Ravenna neighborhood. You can see the results above. I can’t vouch for the quality of Frank Newport’s book God is Alive and Well (he’s the editor-in-chief of Gallup and the book is apparently based upon their research), but I do know its cover goes well in tandem with the cover of Assholes: A Theory by Aaron James (also a... Read more
Cosmos The In Lost
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