Remembering Benedict a year after his death The death of Pope Benedict XVI a year ago prompted a wide range of responses, reflecting his decidedly mixed legacy and reputation.  I began writing my own reflections but never finished or  published them. The one-year anniversary of his death seemed like  a good time to revisit that unfinished post, so that’s what I’ve done here. And while I won’t be directly addressing Fiducia Supplicans, I’m well aware that I’m talking about... Read more

  In the shadow of Lent Advent has always stood in the shadow of Lent. As the “other” season of fasting and solemnity and “paring back,” it has often been treated as a milder version of the Great Fast. In the Byzantine tradition, it is practiced for forty days like Lent, and Lent is often referred to as “Great Lent” with the implication that Advent (and the two other fasting periods of the Byzantine tradition) are lesser examples of the... Read more

Anyone who belongs to a liturgical Christian tradition (and perhaps many who don’t) has heard Psalm 22 a lot in the past week. So I decided to share publicly a translation of the Psalm that I made some months ago as part of my ongoing project of reading through the Bible in Hebrew. I was so struck by the imagery of this well-known Psalm in particular that I wanted to try my hand at translating it myself. This is not... Read more

  In my ongoing project of reading through the Hebrew Bible in the original, I’m currently in the Psalms (Psalm 43 at the moment). The repetition, almost monotony, of their vocabulary strikes me a lot more when I read them in Hebrew than when I read them in English. Over and over again the Psalmist complains about his enemies and his troubles in almost exactly the same language, begs God for help in the same stock phrases, and promises praise... Read more

One of the phrases that conservative Protestants like to use about the Reformation is that it “restored the Biblical Gospel.” Or, with more nuance, that it restored it to “full clarity.” Whatever the Reformation is, that’s the one thing it quite clearly didn’t do. It didn’t take Christians back to a more authentically first-century way of thinking about the faith, at least if we are speaking of the “magisterial Reformation” exemplified above all in Martin Luther. (The Anabaptists could make... Read more

When I was about nine years old, a few years after having moved to the United States from England, I was at a meeting of AWANA. (AWANA is a fundamentalist imitation of Scouts and mostly consists of learning Bible verses, but that’s not important right now.) A girl at a table near mine was looking at a Canadian coin with her friends and I heard her exclaim, “Who is that girl?” I marched right over, looked at the coin, and... Read more

  August 28, the feast of St. Augustine, was of course superseded by Sunday this year. The Gospel reading for this past Sunday gave many priests, including the one who filled in at my parish last Sunday morning, the occasion to talk about humility and pride. It’s appropriate to speak of this subject on St. Augustine’s memorial, because he shaped how we think about humility and pride in Western Christianity. It is in part thanks to Augustine that we think... Read more

This is part of a series responding to the 100 most common questions people have about various religious traditions. In the case of Catholicism, naturally one of the things people want to know about is our belief regarding what we call the Eucharist and the question calls “communion.” The terminology is important to clarify at the start. Most Protestants refer to the ceremony of praying over and sharing in bread and wine as “communion,” and there’s a reason for this... Read more