A few points, some of them which will be necessarily polemical, en vrac: 1. We’ll never understand predestination (or lack thereof). If one subject begs for a healthy humility with regard to the divine mysteries, this is the one. Men are totally embedded within time, and only experience it as a forward arrow. God transcends time. It is simply impossible for us to understand what is going on. This, not laziness, is why this post is so brief. 2. If men... Read more

Perhaps instead of writing a full “Summa Contra Sola Scriptura” (the first draft of which has already swelled to 17000 words and shows no sign of completion) I should write a series of vignettes. In that spirit, here’s a stray thought on a key Sola Scriptura proof-text, 2 Tim 3:16-17: All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.... Read more

The Jesuit Post’s Jeff Sullivan, SJ has written a nice post on the changing cultural understanding of manhood in post-Sexual Revolution America. In doing so, he connects this with the noted fact of higher attendance of women at church and higher general religiosity, and cites authors as saying that there is a “problem”: “American churches have adopted primarily feminine language and ways of interacting and exploring spirituality.” This is a theme that we sometimes hear from Traditionalists: the pre-Vatican II Church was... Read more

I had a discussion on Twitter about Christian burials. Expecting the resurrection of the dead, I don’t much care what happens to my body after I fall asleep–yes, I expect a bodily resurrection, but those saints whose bodies were eaten by wild beasts will also get glorious bodies. You can say it’s gnosticism to not have a fetish of the burial, and I’m sure the neo-gnosticism which is so much in vogue these days accounts for a large part of the new popularity of... Read more

From The Guardian‘s quite good (!) obituary of Elizabeth Anscombe: She was notorious for a forthright foulmouthedness which was only enhanced by the beauty of her voice. When presenting a paper on pleasure, she distinguished extrinsic pleasures – things we enjoy because of the description they fall under – and intrinsic pleasures – things we enjoy regardless of how they are described; and she cited, as an example of the latter, “shitting”, strongly pronouncing the double “t”, and with such... Read more

Sometimes I feel like a fossil. My wife informs me I’m 28. Let me tell you kids–back in my day, internet porn was different. We didn’t have smartphones. We didn’t have streaming video. You had to download low-def 30 second clips. Getting around paywalls was work. All of which is to say that I take very seriously the absolutely unprecedented, and frankly terrifying, fact of the ubiquity of hardcore porn on all our devices. There is no doubt that porn is dehumanizing, addicting and damaging... Read more

Today is the feast of Blessed Augustine, as our Eastern brethren call him. Whatever you know about Augustine’s theology (and what most know is that it makes up thousands upon thousands of dense pages), it’s impossible not to be inspired by Augustine’s life. His long spiritual and moral wandering, his conversion, his life as a great bishop (and, for my part, the sheer quantity of his output as a writer). There’s a reason why quotes like “Lord, give me chastity, but not yet” and... Read more

Christianity is “a set of contradictions held together by grace.” The history of orthodoxy is the history of trying to hold together, and even of sharpening, seemingly contradictory truths of faith; the history of heresy, meanwhile, is the history of trying to resolve those seeming contradictions by overemphasizing one pole at the extent of the other. Thus, the Scriptures describe Jesus as both man and God; heresies have overemphasized one at the expense of the other; orthodoxy proclaims that Jesus is... Read more

At the tail end of an excellent post explaining why it’s perfectly consistent for pro-lifers to say “abortion is murder” and not want to guillotine anyone who procures abortions, my good friend Noah Millman makes the frequently-heard point that the American pro-life movement is corrupted by its coeval relationship with the Republican Party: To me, the story [Noah’s post riffs off of] says little about the sincerity of the beliefs of those who oppose abortion. It says a great deal, though, about... Read more

The FT has a good piece from Martin Amis pondering the mystery of the Holocaust. As Amis notes, history has recorded in painstaking detail the how of the Holocaust, but the why is still a mystery. Amis, after looking for the answer, ends up agreeing with Primo Levi: Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify. Let me explain: ‘understanding’ a proposal or human behaviour means to ‘contain’ it, contain its... Read more