A minor musical phenomenon has been the Korean pop (aka K-pop) song “Gangnam Style” by Psy. The video of the song features the singer using what has become a wildly popular dance step mimicking the riding of a horse, which has fascinated celebrities and music lovers in the entertainment meccas of the largely Anglophone west (as this clip from the talk-show Ellen demonstrates). The song has raced up the music charts in English-speaking countries like the US, Australia and Canada,... Read more
Students at Campion College learn in their first year about the basics of Scripture, and the Catholic understanding of the place of Scripture in the life of the Christian. A trope used to unify the various books of Scripture covered in the course is the centrality of the Jewish Covenant and the renewals of that Covenant by God when Israel time and again descend into anything less than the exclusive loyalty to the one true God. The New Testament thus could... Read more
The 11th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on 11th September 2001 and the killing of an American diplomat in Libya are again providing fodder for the secular chatterati to repeat the somewhat fatigued refrain of the need to ensure peace by keeping religion out of politics. Meanwhile, another emerging trend that goes unnoticed is the common effort by both neoconservative and progressive Christian voices to advocate a form of public religion that wants to give Christianity a public profile, but... Read more
Towards the end of Book 2 of his Confessions, Augustine of Hippo wrote that one of the fruits of original sin is multiplicity. This statement segues in a peculiar – and controversial – way into discussions arising from studies in migration concerning the necessary multiplicity of their identities. In the face of the seeming economic and social implosion of many liberal democratic and multicultural societies in the West, an oft-heard thread in our sociopolitical discourse is the ability of migrants... Read more
Fr. Robert Barron, in a recent installment of his Word on Fire series of Youtube broadcasts, made a reference to his theological hero, Hans Urs von Balthasar. In this broadcast, Barron repeated von Balthasar’s call for theology to become a “Kneeling Theology”, a theology that is not only neatly laid out in the various schemata located in the mind, but one that expresses itself in our material lives, but most particularly in our worship. This reference to von Balthasar’s call... Read more
If the Pussy Riot incident in Russia, the conviction of some its members and some of the demonstrations of support show anything, it is that the intersections of religion and politics continue to captivate the public imagination with varying levels of subtlety. The events and resources posted below also bear this out. First, those who follow this blog may have been aware of Campion College’s announcement of new project entitled Seminars in Political and Religious Life (which you can follow... Read more
Mention was previously made of Augustine’s notion of the City of God being on pilgrimage through the City of Man. In every waking moment, one City is passing through another, making the institutions of the former cut across those of the latter. At the same time however, as the Jesuit social theorist Michel de Certeau suggested in his The Practice of Everyday Life, the City of God traverses the territory of the City of Man without spatially conquering it. Instead of... Read more
A previous post suggested that Christian theology requires a more thorough exploration on the theme of running away, firstly because it remains a prominent trope within various forms of popular culture, and also because theology itself contains the template of running away properly, against which the Church can both sympathise with and critique secular notions of escape. What has not yet been explored is how running away has seeped into the texture of quotidian living in the City of Man... Read more
Aristotle once said that “the city is composed of different kinds of men” and that “similar people cannot bring the city into existence”. If he is correct, then it is quite possible that we may be witnessing in post/modernity a kind of erosion in contemporary urban living. One observation made by the sociologist Richard Sennett in his new book Together: the Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation, is that modern life has seriously eroded the ability of people to communicate... Read more
In Matthew 22:21, Jesus used a coin, minted with the face of Caesar, as a prop to his famous admonition to “render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God”. The common treatment of this Gospel passage, by Christian and non-Christian alike, is one of a division of labour. All humanity, and Christians in particular, are bound by their creator to show due submission to the secular sovereign over things that “belong to Caesar”, namely... Read more
The Divine Wedgie
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