Over the weekend, the Roman Catholic Church celebrated the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, the dogma of which was declared by Pope Pius IX in an 1854 papal Bull entitled Ineffabilis Deus. The elevation of this teaching to the status of dogma has often been decried as a Catholic attempt to recentre the economy of Divine grace away from Christ towards Mary, and indeed many Catholics have been guilty of regarding this and other Marian attributes as the... Read more
The 2011 Spanish thriller The Skin I Live In (La Piel Que Habito), starring Antonio Banderas, begins with Banderas’ character, a surgeon named Robert Ledgard, inventing a revolutionary burn-resistent artificial skin. As the film progresses, however, it becomes apparent that the acts of plastic surgery that drive the invention of this skin is driven by an attempt by Robert to either bury or immortalise a series of very dark, tragic and potentially incriminating moments from his past. The film is... Read more
A famous stanza of The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats reads: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned “The centre” here can be defined by what Aristotle calls a common telos or end. For the ancients and medievals, societies function well when they have a conception of the good to pursue, even when how it is pursued may legitimately... Read more
This week, the Australian government announced the establishment of a Royal Commission into institutional child abuse across religious, state, sporting and community groups. Whilst the scope of the Royal Commission is wide, attention by the media has been strangely focused on abuse within institutions run by the Catholic Church. The most recent development in this vein have been calls by politicians, both progressive and conservative, (including a number of prominent politicians who try to pass off as the “staunchly Catholic”... Read more
Matthew Taylor of the BBC’s Radio 4 has today provided a nuanced analysis of a recent resurgence within British political circles of Catholic Social Teaching. This resurgence has been driven by the advocacy of Philip Blond’s “Red Tory” and Maurice Glasman’s “Blue Labour” campaigns, and given further intellectual traction by Adrian Pabst’s The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Pope Benedict XVIs Social Encyclical and the Future of Political Economy. As a result, Catholic Social Teaching is gradually being given another... Read more
The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday reported on the Australian government’s proposal to excise all of the Australian mainland from the migration map, as a means to curb asylum seekers who arrive onto the mainland by boat (and for some reason, only by boat) to apply for refugee status. The measure effectively makes all irregular migrants that arrive by boat illegible to automatically apply for refugee status under the United Nation’s Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and mandates their... Read more
As an attempt to reduce smoking and its associated health costs, the Australian government will later this year mandate that all tobacco products be sold in uniformly plain green packaging, with the most prominent aspect of the packaging being a series of graphic health warnings. Debates have raged for months on the wisdom of this measure, but this debate ignores a much subtler, more powerful, cultural dynamic underpinning the consumption of cigarettes. In volume one of his Das Kapital, Karl... Read more
There is a question hanging over the Church on what to do with New Media. This was discussed in a recent conference in Sydney on New Media, organised by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference. To give some idea on the difficulties posed by new media to an ecclesial form, one could refer to Felicia Wu Song Virtual Communities: Bowling Alone, Online Together, in an interview with Ken Myers in volume 108 of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, spoke of a... Read more
The smartphone has become the sacrament (James KA Smith calls it the “liturgical instrument”) of the postmodern city. More specifically, it is the one concrete site where one has a concentrated experience of the forces circulating through contemporary urban life. One thing that the smartphone demonstrates about the contemporary city, it is that our social context is hostile to memory. Indeed, the postmodern city is proactively destructive of memory. Looking at one’s emails on a smartphone, for instance, one notices... Read more
Today the Church celebrates the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, arguably the most well loved Saint in the Church, a person admired by Christian and non-Christian alike. The stereotypcial Francis is that of a anti-urbanite hippie who traipsed through the countryside as a proto-environmentalist, communing with all of nature, flora and fauna alike. The stereotype of Francis the nature-lover often prevents us from inquiring as to the rationale behind this seeming unique trait. Such an inquiry would actually deepen... Read more
The Divine Wedgie
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