Not that long ago, Pope Benedict XVI visited Westminster Abbey and the then-Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. The two entered in procession, and as they did so, the Pope shook hands with the clerics there. One of the clerics was a woman, they have those in Anglicanism, and the Pope shook her hand. I watched this video on line once (can’t find it right now) and there was some journalist narrating, and they said something like “Oh, wow, the Pope shaking... Read more

A very unsettling report from Reuters. I saw this report about “churches” in Liberia blaming the Ebola outbreak on homosexuality and thought, here we go, more crazy Fundamentalists/Pentecostals/Evangelicals. But the report includes this line: In May, Archbishop Lewis Zeigler of the Catholic Church of Liberia said that “one of the major transgressions against God for which He may be punishing Liberia is the act of homosexuality,” local media reported. The local media source seems to be this story in the... Read more

The search for intelligent life in religion media coverage continues, and even though we’ve always come empty thus far, we should not lose hope. Maybe. If we find it, surely this will shake the world’s major religions to their core. This is a question of which all religious people are well aware, and one of which they’re probably tired, but this example (h/t Alan Jacobs) is astonishing both for the content and venue. This is an interview in (a) the Scientific American (which... Read more

After every new Islamist terrorist activity, there comes the same tired debate, endlessly rehearsed, as we know all so well: are groups like ISIS/Al Qaeda/Hamas/… authentic expressions of Islam, or not? Everybody is ready with an answer. The answer is always meaningless because it is almost always a form of social positioning: your answer mostly serves as a way to position yourself as one of the Good People, over and against the Bad People. And the answer is always meaningless because nobody ever... Read more

The Two Standards is one of the most well-known meditations of St Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. One is invited to imagine, in Ignatius’ 16th century Spanish military man language, two great armies, under two standards: the army of Christ and the army of the Devil, and make a choice. The Two Standards is also the title of, by many accounts, one of the masterpieces of 20th century French literature. It describes a unique kind of love triangle, in the bourgeois world... Read more

Helen Andrews is a very erudite and talented writer, and she has a great little essay contrasting present-day decadence and the decadence of the late 19th century. I really recommend the essay. At one point, she riffs off an essay I wrote, arguing that one of the motives for the current “decadence” is a disordered understanding of risk. Here is what Andrews writes: Among the anti- and post-decadents of a century ago, there was a marked tendency to swing to the other extreme, trading the effete cult... Read more

The Synod on the Family just released a working document. It is, emphatically, just a working document intended to stir discussion, not a final statement of anything. And boy, stirring discussion it is. A proleptic remark, perhaps. The Church is still reeling from the Damage of the ’70s. The fact of the matter is that there are plenty of people, including in the high ranks of the Church, who have contempt for orthodoxy and the Magisterium. The fact of the matter is that a... Read more

I’m a fan of the Irish sitcom “Father Ted,” an extremely irreverent (and yet sometimes touching) sitcom about three incredibly unholy Irish Catholic priests. One episode turns on the fact that a local relic is going to be “upgraded from a class 3 relic to a class 2 relic” which sounds like the kind of hyper-Catholic thing you might imagine. When I watched it I thought the screenwriters made up the idea of numbered classes of relic, but then I later found... Read more

Fred Clark, the Patheos Progressive Christian who delivered himself of a bizarre rant against a column I wrote on the history of Christian sexual ethics, perseveres. I responded to his rant by pointing out that nowhere in it does he actually engage with anything I actually wrote. In his followup, Clark’s point is, essentially, that he doesn’t have to, because I am a fundamentally dishonest person and, therefore, I guess, don’t deserve the basic decency and ground rules that all civilized people... Read more

I’ve stumbled upon this story: Catholic University of America banned (on the day of!) a screening of Milk, the biopic of gay rights activist and pioneer Harvey Milk. CUA cited a campus policy banning “events that advocate for positions contrary to Catholic teaching.” You can certainly argue that the screening would fall under that. But you can also certainly argue that it wouldn’t. One of the most striking Biblical themes is God’s ability to write straight in crooked lines, to take suffering or evil... Read more