Melinda Tankard Reist: Right-Wing Fundamentalist Feminist or Just Plain Feminist?

January 27, 2012 By Matthew Tan

Readers in Australia (and no doubt a few overseas) may be aware of an ongoing story concerning anti-sexploitation campaigner Melinda Tankard Reist, known also as MTR. Tankard Reist has engaged in a public awareness campaign, through her community group Collective Shout, about the encroachments of the sex industry into various elements of popular culture, with a special focus on its impact on the formation of the thought and behavioural patterns of adolescents. Whilst receiving a lot of grassroots support, Tankard... Read more

Secular Cathedrals, Darth Vader and Other Guest Posts

January 24, 2012 By Matthew Tan

Below are a set of links to a number of guest posts written in the blog of the Australian Catholic news service CathNews. The most recent of these touches on the issue of ecclesiastical architecture, with a particular focus on the original cathedral of the diocese of Parramatta vis a vis the new cathedrals of secular culture, skyscrapers, which are becoming more prominent as the city of Parramatta develops into a western satellite of Sydney. The second begins from a... Read more

Does Big Business Oppose the State?

January 20, 2012 By Matthew Tan

The most recent corporate internet protests (which implicated or was supported by the likes of Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, and Facebook) against the Stop Online Piracy Act (known colloquially as SOPA), and the sweeping powers it would allegedly grant to the US, may strike some observers as another piece of empirical evidence for the argument that business by its very nature is opposed to big government. A contrasting viewpoint to this has been given by G.K. Chesterton in The Outline... Read more

Reverence is Rebellion

January 17, 2012 By Matthew Tan

Bad Catholic recently put up a post regarding the posture of prayer, or more specifically, providing a response to the notion that the reverent Christian attentive to one’s posturing or gesticulations in prayer is one that either cowers before an authoritarian God or underestimates God’s love for his creature. Admittedly, there are many Christians who deign to use attention to gesture or posture in prayer as a substitute to the practice of virtue. That is not the focus of this... Read more

“How to be Oppressed by a Thermostat” and Other Future Events

January 13, 2012 By Matthew Tan

Today marks the last day that the city of Las Vegas hosts the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show, probably the most significant display of gadgetry under one roof anywhere in the world. Among the starts of the show was the Nest Learning Thermostat, which records the times and temperatures set by the user over time to generate an automatic schedule of adjustments to the temperature of one’s heaters or air conditioners, ostensibly to save energy. In Christ and Pop Culture,... Read more

Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of Capitalism

January 10, 2012 By Matthew Tan

Adrian Pabst, Lecturer in Politics at the University of Kent has edited a book in response in Benedict XVI’s addition to the corpus of Catholic Social Teaching, Caritas in Veritate. The book is entitled The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Pope Benedict XVI’s Social Encyclical and the Future of Political Economy, and features essays from a number of eminent writers, including Adrian Pabst himself (a very astute observer in political affairs as evinced by some of his articles in The Guardian... Read more

Beyond 12 Days of Christmas: Feasts of the Epiphany and Mary the Mother of God

January 7, 2012 By Matthew Tan

The combination of a well entrenched secularism and the intensification of consumer culture has led many to forget that the 12 days of Christmas, made famous by the old carol, originally denoted the period in the Christian liturgical calendar between Christmas and the Epiphany, the manifestation of Jesus to the Magi. Many might even forget about the festive cheer of Christmas altogether with the arrival of the New Year and the subsequent collective moan as party-goers return to their workstations.... Read more

Sayings of the Saints: Basil of Caesarea

January 3, 2012 By Matthew Tan

New Year’s Day in the Eastern Liturgical Calendar is the Feast of Ss. Basil of Caesarea and Gregory Nazianzen, two of the great 4th century Cappadocian Fathers, who sowed the seeds of early Monasticism and drove some of the great developments of ancient Christian theology, such as the doctrine of the Trinity. Touching on the extent to which Christian virtue must be exercised, Basil is noted to have said: The bread which you do not use is the bread... Read more

The Problematique of “Relevant” Liturgical Music (And Happy New Year)

December 31, 2011 By Matthew Tan

Liturgists are often keen to make liturgical music “relevant” for the people, and this attitude has led to the jettisoning of many aspects of traditional hymnody, be it wordcraft, music or instrumentalisation. This jettisoning is often paralleled by an uncritical adoption of many aspects of popular culture. The blessings this new-found relevance was alleged to bring to the Church are far from obvious. At one level, just how the Church acts as a witness to the world when it, to... Read more

After Christmas, Small is STILL Beautiful: An Interview with Fritz Schumacher

December 27, 2011 By Matthew Tan

As we consumers begin the annual scramble to get the latest instalment of the post-Christmas bargain, which more often than not will take place in the massive centralised shopping temples that we are slowly being funnelled into, readers of a distributist bend might be interested to watch an interview with one of the major thinkers in this area, Fritz Schumacher, whose Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered remains a staple in post-war distributist thought. It is an enlightening interview... Read more