The highly symbolic angels of Church teaching and lore give us a clue to the meaning of that abundant reality that the Creed refers to with its “things visible and invisible.” But people have taken angels literally and the result is that angels no longer challenge us with the mystery of one reality. We too easily imagine another, invisible world when this one seems too much for us. We’ve domesticated angels into themes for country western songs. Our angel stories are... Read more
Angels and devils don’t usually figure in our calculations about how to solve our problems. We live in a largely disenchanted world, as my last post described. But to settle for that disenchanted world is to give away too much. This post takes a cue from a 1960’s civil rights activist. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Fannie Lou Hamer spoke up against racism in American politics. She described a struggle that was not so much against flesh and blood... Read more
‘As stewards of God’s creation, we are called to make the earth a beautiful garden for the human family.’ – Minnesota Catholic Conference Publication Catholics at the Capitol saw over two thousand lobbying in St. Paul, Minnesota, for state house and senate bills that the Minnesota Catholic Conference deemed important. It was the second Catholics at the Capitol. The first was in February 2017. We lobbied on two issues.... Read more
This post is an introduction to a series about angels, and it says approximately nothing about angels. Instead, it looks at a world from which angels, or anything spiritual below God, seem to have been removed. It sets the stage for a re-entrance of angels in a more biblical, and more relevant, sense than we usually imagine. If you have fallen out of love with angels in the course of your grown-up years, you might find yourselves, like me, liking... Read more
God Made All Things, Visible and Invisible – and the Visible Might be the Hard Part Once I thought that the first paragraph of the Creed, which ends with the words “visible and invisible,” was something you could go along with if you believed in God at all. No Jesus incarnating God, no Holy Spirit, no Blessed Trinity, no Church, only God and, of course, the world. But even among Christians there was an early movement that objected to an... Read more
Reading a recent Patheos post by Russell Saltzman on artificial intelligence got me thinking. I’d been reading Karl Rahner again and imagining that I understood some of it. What he says about subjectivity can raise discussions on artificial intelligence to a new level: Does my robot know that it knows? Can there ever be such a thing as artificial self-consciousness? Can we ever know it if there is? Rahner gives the empirical sciences their full due, including when they probe... Read more
From the Jews we inherit their one God of History and the accompanying worldview of history as a story that is going somewhere. The worldview of the Pagans with their nature gods is with us as well. It shows up in notions of cycles repeating and pendulums swinging back and forth. More positively, it’s in the ideas of balance and sustainability, so difficult and so necessary. After the excesses of modernism, our task is to live in the tension of these two worldviews. ... Read more
The story the Bible tells is a story of monotheism from beginning to end. But that does not reflect the real history of the Jewish people. For them monotheism only gradually became the general rule. The process started with the novel idea of a god of history, then developed into a whole new mindset about history and reality. This is the eighth in a series on the Creed of Christians. An introduction consists of my retelling of the Creed’s story.... Read more
In what ways and how much should the Church should get involved in politics? Presumably the sanctity of life is an issue where the Church has both interest and competence. Catholic sources have approved Trump’s defense of unborn life in his State of the Union address. Not many know that in recent decades the Church has also developed competency on global warming. The esteemed Pontifical Academy of Science has done groundbreaking work on the warming-caused shrinking of glaciers. Pope Francis insists that climate change is a moral and... Read more
Among my crowd of acquaintances and friends are some Pagans. Present-day Pagans believe in a number of gods and goddesses, but I do not think they hold the cyclical worldview that lay under ancient Pagan beliefs, a world that depends on always going back to a sacred beginning, never forward to something new.. Between ancient Pagans and the modern world came the Jews, who could not long abide the thought of a world going nowhere. The take on reality that they... Read more
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