It has been busy at the office, and so I have been unable to to write a new post this week. However, it has prompted me to revisit old material that, even though it might have been produced in the recent past, would have been long since forgotten. While I have written about podcasts by the Divine Wedgie on Cradio, I also have produced a few other podcasts in my own right, in association with friends at Campion College Australia, DePaul... Read more
Almost twenty years ago, Goo Goo Dolls made a name for themselves with a song that began with “…and I’d give up forever to touch you”. The song then became synonymous with the movie City of Angels, in which the main protagonist, a disembodied angel named Seth, would give up his existence gliding through the eternal plane to become an embodied schmuck in time. His motivation, his love for another embodied schmuck in time. I do not think it would be... Read more
I have just started trawling through some old essays for tips for a potential project on faith and embodiment. One theme that is constantly jumping out is the body operating as a kind of doorway, the tactile yet liminal border between the physical and the metaphysical, the temporal and the eternal (I have written on the subject of liminality here). In art and philosophy, the body continues to be a constant theme of interest, not in and of itself, but... Read more
I had trouble sleeping last week. I would wake up in the middle of the night and find myself stricken by nostalgia, longing for the times when I was studying or working overseas. This usually resulted in me getting up in the mornings not only-sleep deprived, but having my half-waking haze peppered by feelings of angst. A chat with a friend about these past experiences over the weekend helped me realise that a very basic component of the angst was... Read more
The good folk at Wipf & Stock have just published the third volume in their “Studies in World Catholicism” series, which draw on papers presented in “World Catholicism Week”, which is organised by the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology at Depaul University in Chicago. Prof. Michael Budde of the Department of Catholic Studies at Depaul University has edited a volume entitled Scattered and Gathered: Catholics in Diaspora which as the back cover describes, looks at the Catholic faith in the context... Read more
There is a memorable scene in an episode of the American television series Judging Amy (1999-2005). In that scene Bruce van Exel, a self-confessed and somewhat devout Catholic Court Services Officer, wants to say night prayers with his daughter, Rebecca. The only problem was that Bruce left Rebecca with his sister that day, and his sister took Rebecca to a traditional bible-only black protestant Church, which she frequents. Thus, when asked to pray, Rebecca starts belting out many familiar tropes associated with... Read more
If you have been following the evolution of the Divine Wedgie over time, first up, a big thank you. More seasoned readers would remember that, for a time, I ran a podcast series in tandem with the blog. That series was in partnership with the Australian Catholic online radio station Cradio. While new work commitments have prevented me from continuing the podcast series, I still read up on folks on social media who have dipped into them and even written about them.... Read more
I remember a line used by my catechism teachers when I was a kid that made reference to the holes made in Jesus’ hands and side. My teachers told me that this was used to prove to his disciples that it really was him after the resurrection, or more specifically, prove that the Lord really did die. My teachers were onto something…that there was something really important about the resurrected Christ bearing, even in his ascended form, the scars of... Read more
In the Roman Catholic Church, there are two Marian dogmas, the celebration of which are given the status of a solemnity. The first is the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, the dogma declared by Pope Pius IX in the 1854 papal Bull entitled Ineffabilis Deus (“Ineffable God”). The second was the Assumption of Mary into Heaven, which was defined by Pope Pius XII in a 1950 apostolic constitution entitled Munificentissimus Deus (“The Most Bountiful God”). The elevation of these teachings on Mary to the status... Read more
I recently had the pleasure of being part of a symposium on Religion and the Humanitarian Challenge, organised round the arrival of my former doctoral classmate Assoc. Prof Erin Wilson, director of the Centre for Religion, Conflict and the Public Domain at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. The paper looked at the link between identity politics and the provision of humanitarian aid. More specifically it looked at the recent phenomenon where identity was deployed as a barrier to aid, and critiqued this thread... Read more
The Divine Wedgie
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In