“I had my doubts, from the moment I read the headline, ‘The evangelicals who believe they can raise the dead’,” begins my latest column for Aleteia, Raising the Dead? In it I try to explain why Catholics who believe in the miraculous react to some group’s claims to miraculous powers by rolling our eyes or backing slowly towards the door. The thirty-one-year-old head of the Dead Raising Team claims to have raised thirteen people himself, though when questioned by the Daily... Read more
“I’m sorry I’m late, but my house sank.” So explained Penelope Fitzgerald to her students at the cramming school where she taught in the early sixties, after her family’s houseboat on the Thames went down.. She led a very peculiar life, according to a new biography reviewed by James Wood in The New Yorker. Early academic and journalistic success was followed by failure that got worse and worse, reaching its lowest point when she, her husband (an alcoholic and disbarred lawyer),... Read more
The Atlantic’s fairyland view of Obama: From today’s “This Week on TheAtlantic.com” email, the description of the story on the president’s new immigration policy: The president has long been tugged between his bipartisan urges and his activist roots. With his executive order and speech Thursday, he chose activism. “Bipartisan urges”? When has he ever shown those? Since his first presidential campaign he’s used the rhetoric of unity and common purpose and the like, but the way he operated and spoke about... Read more
To believe that Francis is now suddenly maneuvering the Church into acceptance of homosexual “marriage” requires believing that the man who a few years ago called it a work of “the Father of Lies” to “destroy God’s plan . . . and deceive the children of God” has since moving to Rome become an ally of the Father of lies, writes Paul Kengor in The American Spectator. And that’s not true, as he shows with several quotations, the latest from Francis’ address to... Read more
A friend responds to my story about the Southern Baptist evangelist James Robison, High Fivin’ the Pope, with a story of her own. Several months ago I happened to see an interview Robison had with a prominent Protestant minister who lives in Argentina. He told Robison that Pope Francis had been his spiritual director in Argentina before he became pope. This minister saw him regularly for spiritual direction — I think once a month. Anyway, when Francis became Pope Francis, the Protestant minister told Robison, “I... Read more
The name of gold-plated conservative Jay Sekulow appears on the petition to spare from execution a severely mentally ill man named Scott Panetti. The founder and director of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ, a counter to the ACLU), Sekulow is a strong defender of religious liberty, Israel, and other conservative causes, and a professor at Regent University Law School. And so on. As I say, gold-plated. Those who might be inclined to react to any defense of... Read more
Meet the Southern Baptist evangelist who high-fived the pope and feels a surprising, and encouraging, passion for Christian unity. Today’s Aleteia column, High-Fivin’ the Pope, begins: He is probably known among Catholics almost entirely as the man who last July gave the Holy Father a high five. I happened to meet the Evangelical evangelist James Robison recently at a gathering to discuss a common project, and was surprised when he said, to a group mixing conservative Evangelicals and Catholics (two of us converts),... Read more
TV Helped Change the Country’s View of LGBT Life, as I wrote a few days ago, reporting a press release from the Paley Center for the Media. Revealing was the list of supporters of the center’s exhibit celebrating television’s contribution to “this journey and those whose pioneering work has reshaped the hearts and minds of the American public.” It included several movie and television companies (Paramount, 21st Century Fox, CBS, Disney/ABC, A+E, HBO, NBC, and Lionsgate) and several talent agencies, as well as AARP,... Read more
An essay by the philosopher Rachel Lu taking up the subject of Friday’s The Grave Not Taken, from her Aleteia column: Is cremation any way to honor our dead? Only rarely, she argues: Neither cremation nor burial is a Sacrament, so the significance of the choice is mainly symbolic and not metaphysical. Nevertheless, as Christians, we should when possible choose burial as a more fitting way of honoring our loved ones in keeping with our faith. Among the reasons for the... Read more
A discussion with a friend reminded me of one of the best essays I ever published, Amanda Witt’s Distant Neighbors. Also very good is her longer essay Remember Who You Are and the shorter essay Life Worth Giving. “Distant Neighbors” begins: Early one Saturday morning the doorbell rang. It was a young girl — taller than I am, heavily built, but still a young girl. “Last night we moved in across the street,” she said. “And I’ve heard you have... Read more
David Mills
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