Today is the Feast Day of Saint Bonaventure, one of the Doctors of the Church I’m very interested in at the moment. Pope Benedict XVI was a fan of Bonaventure; his habilitation (the diploma that qualified him for full professorship) was on Bonaventure. I am still looking for good reading material on Bonaventure (feel free to chime in in the comments). Benedict did three great homilies on Bonaventure (one, two, three). Today News.va did a very relaxing musical podcast... Read more

  Did you hear the Church of England is going to ordain women bishops? This is something the Catholic Church will not and indeed cannot do. This is not the place for an examination of the many, many theological and canonical reasons that the Church has found in support of the male-only character of the priesthood. Right now, I want to focus on one tiny subset of the whole tapestry, which is the fact that Jesus only appointed males to... Read more

Dear Rob Bell, I love you, man. I mean it. Not in a mellifluous way. Not in a sanctimonious way. Not in a Christian-default-setting perfunctory way, or “I love you you poor sinner” way. Not in a “Yes, but” way. Ok, kinda in a “Yes, but” way, but really, truly, lingering on the “yes.” You are incredibly talented. Whenever I watch you or read you I learn something. You are very talented at both thinking and doing, which is very... Read more

Here’s a dispatch from the New York Daily Planet (no, that’s not a real newspaper): Pope Francis, the new Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, has many issues on his place, such as doctrinal change and personnel issues. The Catholic Pope, who is also known as the Bishop of Italy, will have to discuss a number of issues at the upcoming Synod of the Family, such as the question of allowing communion for never-married Catholics, and whether the dogma of the Immaculate... Read more

(via; h/t @TaigOHerron) Read more

Short meditation today, inspired by the rancor of our culture wars. One of the striking phrases from the description of the prelapsarian world of the Garden of Eden is that Adam lived in “easy fellowship” with God. What a rich phrase. Easy fellowship. Indeed, the Fall didn’t just make fellowship with God “hard”, it made fellowship hard everywhere. We have hard fellowship with each other. We even have hard fellowship with our own, fractured selves. Easy fellowship with other people... Read more

  Here’s an excellent post from the excellent Leah Libresco, my Patheos co-blogger who is much smarter than me, on the tension inherent in the idea of Universal Salvation (everyone goes to Heaven), or Apocatastasis, and the idea of human freedom. You can’t have Universal Salvation and human freedom, a typical argument goes, and God wants us to be free; if God just puts everyone in Heaven by fiat, the freedom of those who would rebel is negated. Leah tries... Read more