My editor here at Patheos Catholic, Sam Rocha, has a note for all of you at The Font. The Font, as Sam says, is a repository of a lot of good writing that used to be curated by the former channel editor Elizabeth Scalia. In this post, Sam wants to publicly acknowledge the debt we owe to Elizabeth for starting this thing and how we are continuous in that vision, even though we are forging ahead. My favourite part of this... Read more
World Youth Day is now over, which means that I can now write about it. There will be much indeed to suss out in the next little bit, but as I said this morning, I’m as interested in Pope Francis for the purposes of doing geography as an academic discipline as I am in thinking through my strange relationship to the Bishop of Rome (and to the Latin Church, for that matter) as an Eastern Catholic. Today, I will begin with geography.... Read more
I’m gearing up for a series of reflections on Pope Francis and last week’s World Youth Day, and I thought that maybe I should preface them with a bit more of what I’ve said previously. I realize that this is turning into what Protestant theologian Stanley Hauerwas calls a ‘throat-clearing exercise,’ but when you’re the new kid on the block, sometimes that is what you have to do. I spoke about the Year of Mercy at least twice on a... Read more
The Feast of St Ignatius of Loyola is just winding down to a close. I thought that by the end of tonight, I would be able to publish a post about how I used to be completely deluded about the Jesuits. It’s still a post that I plan on finishing some day, but it unfortunately turned into a bit of a Protestant confession, therefore rendering it unpublishable. Perhaps one day, I will become a more mature Eastern Catholic person, and... Read more
Here’s a person that I know at World Youth Day. I was watching a video on the second day of World Youth Day that Spirit Juice Studios put out on Facebook (so, unfortunately, I don’t know how to embed it), and I saw someone that I know in there: young Catholic intellectual extraordinaire Eugenia Geisel! Speaking from the Mercy Center, her comments were: ‘It’s been a blessing to have so much access to the sacraments. It’s the perfect combination of... Read more
I dashed off my last post because following World Youth Day with a nine hour time difference between Vancouver and Kraków is a bit of a trip. It is true that I do not feel up to the task of giving my hot takes on World Youth Day, even as some excellent ones have appeared on the interwebz. It also remains true that I am much more interested in the day before and after World Youth Day. But maybe I... Read more
I said in my last post that I want to write about World Youth Day, and I still plan to do so. The problem is that I’m not on-site, and the livestreams happen way past my bedtime. Unlike some of my other colleagues here on Patheos Catholic (as well as elsewhere on the Catholic blogosphere), I’m not able to give a hot take on World Youth Day. This presents a little bit of a problem. How should I write about... Read more
I used to write about Pope Francis from the vantage point of a secular academic who was also an Anglican Christian. I had two blogs, one for the academy and another for the Anglicanism. When I started writing about Pope Francis literally the day after his election, I thought I would be able to split my thinking in half and maintain two different perspectives. At the blog where I wrote pseudonymously as ‘Chinglican at Table,’ I wrote explicitly about how I saw the movement... Read more
Some people have asked me to craft some of my reflections about why I joined an Eastern Catholic Church. Before my chrismation, I tried to write them without much success. Part of my writer’s block had to do with my needing to make a ‘general confession’ before being received. It’s tempting in a personal reflection to confess my sins to everyone (which also seems to be a modus operandi among Protestants attempting to be ‘authentic’), but entertaining as my sins would have been for... Read more
I’m still doing some housekeeping on this blog to get myself situated and organized, but I wanted to let everyone know that I am still working on the series that I had begun on ‘Growing Up Conservative,’ which is itself pending a better title. I’m writing these posts in response to our channel editor Sam Rocha’s call for those of us who have taken a critical stance toward conservative ideology to write about our process of literally growing up and out... Read more
Eastern Catholic Person
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