A homily at Sunday Mass drew attention to the link between sacramentality and food (a previous post has also similarly broached this link). The homily made particular reference to the 1987 Danish film Babette’s Feast. In the movie the erotic dimension of French Catholicism unexpectedly visits a pious Protestant town in the form of opera and food. These seemingly carnal pursuits, far from leading to the downfall of the town, end up stirring and reviving emotions and bonds that were... Read more
Dr. Paul Tyson, who is Honorary Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham has recently published an important essay on ABC Religion and Ethics Online on what the recent Greek financial crisis exposes about the state of political power and the place finance plays in those power plays. He has closely followed the Greek crisis and provided his own breakdown of the chain of events. What seems to be at the... Read more
A recent Spirit in the City day conference at the Queensland University of Technology featured the editor of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Religion and Ethics portal, Scott Stephens. In a highly informative segment on faith and journalism, Stephens mentioned how the omnipresent rush to get news content out and the imperative to generate as many opinions as possible has woefully undermined the ability to actually be informed about anything. Substantial thought, reflection and analysis has given way to a tsunami of manufactured... Read more
The release of Pope Francis’ new encyclical has elicited a higher than usual volume of hostile blogosphere traffic. This was the case even in the leadup to its release, when nobody actually knew the content. Indeed, it is questionable as to whether any hostile commentators had even given the document a meaningful perusal following its release. Putting that to one side, what is interesting is the fact that the heart of the hostile response is the subsuming of whole... Read more
A previous post mentioned how we now live in a world where possibilities trump realities, and endless possibility becomes the secular equivalent of immortality. To put it in more medieval Thomist parlance, we now live in a world where potency trumps act, thereby inverting the medieval emphasis on actuality as the realisation of potency. In a culture of infinite possibility, realisation of possibilities is tantamount to death. In a world carried by such a metaphysics, one victim of this is... Read more
In The Coming of the Body, Herve Juvin spoke of the production of the endless variety of options that the human body can become as a result of the proliferation of medical technologies from cosmetics to accessories to surgical procedures. In a way, this production of possibility upon possibility – possible choices, possible products, possible lifestyles – constitutes a kind of immortality in postmodernity, whereby an urban heaven is available to those with the credit lines to attain it. Possibility... Read more
Justice, Unity and the Hidden Christ, written by the Divine Wedgie’s blogger at large, was recently the subject of an interview with Ann Schneible of Catholic New Agency, under the title of “Doctrine Divides while Justice Unites?“. The interview centred around this claim, which presumed that social justice naturally united those of different confessions. The question that needed to be raised here was not so much whether social justice united Christians. Rather, following Graham Ward, the real question centres on what... Read more
Readers may remember an old post from 2012 where suggestions were made on the construction of a theology of escape or running away. There it was suggested that the desire for escape operating within popular culture, that in turn operated upon an impulse that the Christian tradition could and should affirm. This was developed further in a conference paper for the Centre for Theology and Philosophy at Oxford University in 2013. Whilst the Oxford version might have been a bit... Read more
“Crunchy-conservatives” in the United States have started organising against the neoliberal and faux-conservative status-quo, and one outlet for this organisation is the online thinkerspace known as Solidarity Hall. Whilst having run a website for a number of years, the Folk at Solidarity Hall have launched their publishing arm, Solidarity Hall Press, with the release of their first book Radically Catholic in the Age of Francis, edited by Daniel Schwindt. This book is an edited text with a number... Read more
If there is one thing that the Justine Sacco AIDS tweet fiasco has proven, is that there is a marked erosion of the clear border between the private and public spheres. This blurring was put most succinctly by the media theorist Clay Shirky, who said that the internet was “not a public sphere” but a “private sphere that tolerates public speech”. But this blurring of the Public-Private divide, and very often the invasion of the latter by the former, was... Read more
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