Yesterday morning, ten LGBT-rights activists gathered outside St. Patrick’s cathedral for Mass and found themselves, so to speak, stonewalled. They were warned — first by New York City police officers, then by a cathedral functionary — that they would face criminal trespassing charges if they tried to enter. But the ten had more than liturgy on their minds, and on their hands. As a rebuke to Cardinal Dolan for his recent statement that the Church would welcome gay people so... Read more
Military Religious Freedom Foundation head Mikey Weinstein takes pains to remind fellow Americans that he’s a Republican. There’s no need. He sounds just like one, or anyway, like some talk-radio character who thinks the GOP went soft when Reagan’s promise to outlaw Russia turned out to be a joke. Granted, his targets are a little unusual. In his own words, the MRRF aims to protect the U.S. armed forces from “Premillenial, Dispensational, Reconstructionist Dominionist, Fundamentalist Evangelical Christians” who are working... Read more
In a piece on her Sexual Authenticity blog, Melinda Selmys calls loneliness and isolation “the most common cause of sexual sin.” In many respects, Selmys’ piece is wonderful — a real breath of fresh air. Unusually for a Catholic writer, she focuses on sexual sinners’ subjective sense of well-being, their happiness. Also somewhat off-script, she finds it “unhelpful” to blame recent changes in Western society or culture. She even affirms that the “modernist” conception of the self as an “autonomous... Read more
Some people are wannabe Chechens. In actual fact, they could be Kurds, Azeris, Tajiks, Sandžak Turks, or members of almost any other group with a small or still-nascent homeland, a big diaspora, and maybe an historic chip on its shoulder. According to Robert Schaefer, a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier and author of The Insurgency in Chechnya and the North Caucasus: From Gazavat to Jihad, none of those labels enjoys the same cachet in the asymmetrical warfare community. There, Chechens... Read more
In the Boston suburb of Watertown, law-enforcement officers have killed marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and captured Dzokhar, his fellow suspect and younger brother. Following a carjacking, a “rolling gun battle” (as the Yahoo! News puts it) that left an MIT police officer dead and a transit officer wounded, and a house-by-house search of a 20-block area, this is a coup of peacekeeping. Bostonians, who saw three of their number killed and another 176 wounded, are celebrating. So what about... Read more
Mr. D. was choking. Clutching his throat and gagging, he mananged to spit out a single word in his native Urdu: Pani. I don’t speak Urdu — not even “Up yours.” But that one word was enough to trigger a literary association. As Mr. D’s face turned the color of a blood orange, I remembered these verses from Kipling’s “Gunga Din,” which I’d memorized in the sixth grade: It was “Din! Din! Din! You limping lump o’ brick-dust, Gunga Din!... Read more
Though not religious in any conventional way, Rick, my best friend, believes strongly in a personal, capital-D Devil. This Devil of Rick’s has a lot of say in world affairs. Through a loyal cadre of mortals who have made a bad trade on their souls, he runs Proctor and Gamble, Capitol Records, and even Nickelodeon. “Watch Dora carefully,” he’ll say. “I mean really watch it. Our kids are getting some seriously freaky messages. I don’t like it, bro. It’s got... Read more
On LifeNews, Jill Stanek offers a good summary of the media establishent’s recent come-to-Jesus moment. Thanks to pro-life activists and social media, a number of very high-profile journalists are lining up to admit that, yeah, they ought to have paid more attention to the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell. With prosecutors painting a mural of gore and neglect in the Philadelphia abortion clinic where Gosnell allegedly killed seven live babies and one woman, it could, and should, have been big... Read more
In 2005, Cindy Sheehan, mother of a soldier slain in Iraq, was becoming the official face of the antiwar movement. The profundity of her loss and the sincerity of her bereavement made her moral authority seem, for a time, unassailable. Then Christopher Hitchens spotted, or thought he spotted, a crack in her armor. In an e-mail to the editors of ABC’s Nightline, Hitchens alleged, Sheehan wrote: “My son joined the army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No,... Read more
On Friday morning, Matthew Warren, son of Saddleback Valley Community Church pastor and Purpose-Driven Life author Rick Warren, died from what Orange County Sheriff’s Deputies describe as a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Pastor Warren has called his son’s suicide the culmination of “mental illness resulting in deep depression.” Yesterday, Tom McDonald, of the God in the Machine blog, speaks of suicidal depression from an insider’s perspective. His family tree is “full of people who completed their short and tormented lives in... Read more
Diary of a Wimpy Catholic
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