It’s a quiet Saturday afternoon and I had sat down at the computer to put together some thoughts on the recent killing of Wadea Al-Fayoume, a 6 year old boy of Palestinian ethnicity in the Chicago exurbs, when I came across a new report in my twitter feed, a second stabbing death.  More on this later, but first things first. A week ago, as reported by the Chicago Sun Times on October 16, As the war between Hamas and Israel... Read more

A follow-up from my prior post, again referencing James Martin’s article: Now, I cannot speak for my fellow synod members, but I doubt that any members wish to change the essentials of the faith. (I don’t.) But anyone who knows any church history also knows that church teaching has developed dramatically on a variety of topics, including slavery, women’s roles, ecumenical relations, the liturgy, limbo, capital punishment and so on. As Pope Francis said in a conversation with Portuguese Jesuits during World... Read more

Yes, I spend too much time on twitter.  Among other things, this means that each morning I see Cardinal Cupich’s pro-synod tweets, mostly incomprehensible, to be sure, and seemingly directed at a wholly different audience than his actual twitter followers.  (Unlike everything else that he tweets, he/his social media manager does not tweet a Spanish translation of these tweets.)  It feels like he is engaged in a propaganda effort to get his “flock” to accept whatever happens at the synod,... Read more