How carefully must the Church guard the doctrine of bodily resurrection with rules regarding Catholic burial practices? The recent death of my wife’s mother is the occasion for this question. As her urn was sitting in our living room, the bill from the funeral home arrived. We puzzled over one item: hundreds of dollars for a “vault” to surround the urn in its eventual burial place. Why a vault? We questioned the funeral home director about the need for a... Read more
Jesus was a prophet of the renewal of Israel in opposition to Israel’s Roman occupiers and obsequious Judean puppet rulers. That’s the import of Richard A. Horsley’s work, since the 1980’s, of uncovering a historical Jesus in the political, economic, and religious context of first-century Palestine. That position and its thorough defense appear in Horsley’s 2014 book Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine. Historians, sociologists, and archaeologists have opened up previously unavailable views of life in first-century Palestine. Horsley... Read more
Extreme wealth and ‘wealth extremism’ are threatening democracy and global stability. That’s the judgment of over half of the respondents to a random survey of the world’s millionaires and billionaires. The Patriotic Millionaires group conducted the survey, and Press Reader carried the story. Commenting for the article, Marlene Engelhorn said, “The superrich are buying themselves more wealth and more power while the rest of the world is living in economic fear.” She is the heiress of billionaires and of a... Read more
Nick Cave wants to die “inside this life … not halfway out the door in the hope of something better.” Thus an almost Christian rock star ends his long conversation with journalist Seán O’Hagan and with anyone lucky enough to have fall into his or her hands a book like Faith, Hope and Carnage. That book is the product of a series of phone interviews, lasting through most of the pandemic years. Cave’s ups and downs, tragedies and growth through... Read more
Sohrab Ahmari takes a long, historical view of capitalism and finds one period in the modern era when economies worked well. In the United States, this was the 40 or so years after the Great Depression and through the 1970’s – the New Deal years. In Europe, it began during the recovery from the Second World War. Ahmari calls this phase in world economies social democracy, or transatlantic “socially managed capitalism.” (p. 144) To understand Ahmari’s praise of this period,... Read more
Sohrab Ahmari shows how coercion operates in the American economy, especially in its most recent “neoliberal” phase. Neoliberalism is the economic theory that exalts market freedom and claims that market coercion does not exist as long as government stays out of the way of freely signed contracts between labor and employer and free exchange of money for goods and services. Rejecting that idealistic picture, Ahmari looks realistically at a market rife with coercion resulting from inequalities of power. In my... Read more
Tomorrow the 40 days of Lent will end. These six weeks call to our minds Jesus’ 40 days in the desert and the Israelites’ 40 years of wandering to the Promised Land. Tomorrow also begins the Church’s shortest season, the Easter Triduum, and her longest Mass. Three days, Holy Thursday night through Good Friday to Saturday night’s Easter Vigil. We go to church three times, but it’s all one Liturgy. The Easter Triduum is the summit of the Church’s year,... Read more
A Maryknoll friend of mine and Orbis Press did us a service with a condensed version of several of Pope Francis’s published writings. In under 200 pages you can get the gist of ten major works of Francis’s papacy. The book is Fr. James Kroeger’s Walking with Pope Francis: The Official Documents in Ordinary Language The works that Fr. Jim walks through, in Latin and English titles, are: Lumen Fidei, The Light of Faith Evangelii Gaudium, The Joy of the... Read more
October 4 is the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, patron of ecologists. On that day this month Pope Francis went back to a major theme of his acclaimed 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Si: On theCare for Our Common Home. In an apostolic exhortation, Laudate Deum (Praise God), the pope spoke to Catholics and the world about climate change, an issue of great concern to him. Francis is not alone among Church leaders in that concern. Previous popes, dating back... Read more
It’s common to read the New Testament for spiritual enlightenment and moral persuasion. One can also lower one’s sights and wonder about the political arena in which Jesus lived, worked, and suffered. That’s not as common, and when we do think that way, we tend to keep the two, Jesus and politics, apart from each other: “Render to Caesar Caesar’s due, and to God” … something else. Warren Carter rejects that separation and thinks a lot about politics in the... Read more
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