St Francis de Sales, take it away: “The elephant, not only the largest but the most intelligent of animals, provides us with an excellent example. It is faithful and tenderly loving to the female of its choice, mating only every third year and then for no more than five days, and so secretly as never to be seen, until, on the sixth day, it appears and goes at once to wash its whole body in the river, unwilling to return... Read more

The great and lovely James K. A. Smith has what I must call a frankly bizarre review of Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One. A philosophically well-grounded Christian, and an innovative thinker, Thiel provides much grist to the mill of Christian thinkers. Smith’s accusation against Thiel is that he is a proponent of an ideology or heresy called “startupism.” According to Smith, this has four planks, and Thiel exhibits them. Frankly, I don’t see how else to get that other than from an uncharitable... Read more

A fellow Patheos blogger in the Progressive Christian Channel, Fred Clark, writes that I am being “sleazy” (and “passive-aggressive”, after passively-aggressively accusing me of racist innuendo) in a column I wrote for The Week on the historic understanding of Christianity. Am I a sleazeball? Well, I am certainly marred by concupiscence and a disordered will as a result of original sin, so I can’t exclude the possibility. Just how sleazy am I? Let’s try to find out. In the piece, I... Read more

Christianity went screaming into the Ancient World proclaiming not an ethic, not a philosophy, nor even really a religion, not even first a person, but simply a fact: that Jesus of Nazareth had risen from the dead. That Christianity rests entirely on a purely empirical claim–the person named Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead–is very important. It is an epistemological roll of the dice. It is also an assertion that something is the case. What Christianity asks is not that you evaluate the... Read more

The Synod on the Family is starting, and within that there is the drama of the question of communion for divorced-remarried Catholics, and within that there is the drama of the fight between cardinals Burke and Kasper. Balthasar was right: we are always in the theodrama! I join my Patheos co-bloggers in expressing astonishment at the utterly biased presentation of the issue by the Catholic(!) News Service. And I’ve already written about my views on the substance of the issue. I... Read more

It is common to the religious mind and, indeed, to the human mind, to harken back to some lost Golden Age, a past time of perfection, from which everything is a story of decline. Christians are not exempt. It is a common temptation of all Christians to try to set a Year 0 somewhere and view their religious mission as restoring this lost Paradise. Traditionalist Catholics put this Year 0 in 1955, or perhaps 1655 or 1255. Protestant Christians put... Read more

In French Catholicism, every year, there is a thing called the Pilgrimage of the Family Fathers. It’s exclusively for, well, fathers. Each participating parish puts a group together and they converge on a church in Paris, and then we all do a procession towards the Sacré Coeur. This year was the year after the massive French protests against same-sex marriage. The next bête noire of this movement was a plan by France’s Socialist government to teach “gender studies” in school. Before we set out... Read more

As frequent readers will know, I am a follower of René Girard and his mimetic theory. (For the uninitiated, good summary by Joe Carter here.) Girard’s theory starts with the concept of mimesis or mimetic desire: humans imitate each other (like animals, we are mimetic), and in particular we desire what others desire, and we learn to desire by imitating others. A question mark I’ve always had was what comes “behind” mimetic desire or, in other words, what is it that makes... Read more

In our icons and stained glass windows and statues and portraits, Paul is always portrayed as an old man, with that famous bald plate and long beard. But when Paul was called on the road to Damascus, he was in his mid-twenties. We have almost no iconography of young Paul. I don’t think it’s unfair to say, speaking neutrally, that the Church hierarchy at present is a gerontocracy. Pope Francis is 77. Cardinal Maradiaga, head of the Pope’s “G8” council... Read more