No works. Faith. No good. Or so goes the conventional Catholic understanding of justification in my untrained eyes. We are justified by faith, but if we don’t respond with works, guided by grace, well, who cares? Two Catholic Epistles, will help illustrate the point: What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister has nothing to wear and has no food… Read more
February 21, 2016
Pope Francis: “Donald Trump is a Protestant”
February 21, 2016 By Chase Padusniak
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February 20, 2016
Forgotten Catholics: Dom Léonce Crenier
February 20, 2016 By Chase Padusniak
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“Léonce Crenier was as righteous and sincere, as forthright and generous during his youth with the anarchist utopians as he was in later years in his fervor as a monk.” – Monsignor Varin de la Brunellière, the Bishop of Martinique I only consider it half-a-good-thing, but I am undeniably a contrarian. George Grant, a little-known Canadian moral philosopher helped me to see my Christianity as something critical of the normal order; Piers Plowman and “Wulf and Eadwacer” are my two favorite poems,… Read more
February 20, 2016
Embracing Our Pagan Heritage
February 20, 2016 By Chase Padusniak
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Most of the time Catholics recoil when they’re called pagans. This line, popular among fundamentalist Protestants is, of course, offensive and wrong. At the same time, there is a certain sense in which I find it important to celebrate our “pagan” heritage. After all, lumping us in that camp puts us alongside Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and (why not) Odysseus. Why think about this now? Earlier today I read a relatively reasonable defense of why Catholics aren’t Christians. I call it “reasonable,”… Read more
February 18, 2016
Hypocrisy: A Christian Virtue
February 18, 2016 By Chase Padusniak
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(EDIT: A friend of mine has published a response here. I actually don’t think much separates us, but I would like to include his objections). What follows is exploratory and suggestive. I don’t consider myself an ethicist, nor do I have a wholly transparent and satisfactory resolution to the problem interrogated in this blog post. I ask you, dear reader, to please read it in that spirit. Hypocrisy is supposed to be a bad thing; Christ denounces it in the… Read more
February 17, 2016
St. Perpetua, Young Thug, and the Christian Counter-Culture
February 17, 2016 By Chase Padusniak
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Christianity has always been radical. That sound trite, but it is indeed true. Love your enemy? Pray for your persecutors? Give away everything and follow a 1st-century Jewish God-Man? Nothing in that is either easy or normal. Christianity not only draws the outsider in but also pushes the insider out. Just ask St. Peter, bumpkin-fisherman, and Abba Moses the Ethiopian, former bandit turned desert hermit, how they feel about the “normal.” And so, in this “post-Christian” age, we actually have… Read more
February 16, 2016
On the Erotics of Lent
February 16, 2016 By Chase Padusniak
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At the heart of Lent lies desire—the desire for unity with God, the desire to serve him even to the point of virtual self-abnegation. Purgation is itself a side-effect of this eros, an erosus, a corroding of ourselves so that we may fall, broken and holy, at the foot of the Cross. Though I imagine the Greek and the Latin are not actually etymologically related (and I am a medievalist, so faux- or folk-etymology really is my field), there’s a truth embedded… Read more
February 15, 2016
Alone in the Humanities
February 15, 2016 By Chase Padusniak
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Painfully aware of my otherness, I sat in my weekly seminar on Being and Time, ashes smeared on my forehead, knowingly alone. The next day, Thursday, it was time for “Mysticism and Modernity,” a course exploring the intersection between Christian mystical thought and critical theory. Surely someone else bothering to read Meister Eckhart must care about the transcendent. And yet, when my professor implied that we students might know of the sermon-form from church, he was met with snickers and… Read more
February 14, 2016
Charity, the Environment, and Papal Faux Pas
February 14, 2016 By Chase Padusniak
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Today, I’d like to take a Lenten look back at an issue that has been with us for some time: opposition to the current pope. Over the course of his pontificate, Pope Francis has become an increasingly contentious figure, a fact only underscored by his recent work with the World Bank (a projection on the Vatican to raise awareness about the need for environmental stewardship). To some, this move represented the most aggressive assault on traditional values yet, because it… Read more
February 13, 2016
Are Bernie and Hillary Really the Same in Catholic Eyes?
February 13, 2016 By Chase Padusniak
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Just today, my fellow Patheos Catholic blogger, Fr. Dwight Longenecker published a piece entitled “Is Health Care a Pro Life Issue?,” which contains much good; it acknowledges that the death penalty, euthanasia, and unjust war are life issues. But it blurs distinctions between different types of “Liberals” in a problematic way, and that calls for a response. Fr. Longenecker outlines his position in this way: For this to be equivalent the Republican party should have as part… Read more
February 12, 2016
Leave Mount Saint Mary’s Alone
February 12, 2016 By Chase Padusniak
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Well I ask you to consider: if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something—the faculty are a bunch of employees and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be…have any process upon us. Don’t mean to be made into any product! Don’t mean…don’t mean to end up being bought by… Read more
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