Dear Abortion Supporters: When you spend decades repeating the mantra “blob of tissue” and somebody with some science shows up to point out you are full of crap, you should face the fact that you made a mistake relying on woolly rhetoric instead of science. I have watched for years as abortion supporters have offered woolly philosophical nonsense (“When, precisely, does the soul enter the body?”) in defense of abortion while Christians have been the ones pointing to hard facts... Read more
News item from last summer that just washed up in my feed: OXFORD, England – A 16-year-old peasant girl will be beatified as a martyr in Slovakia, seven decades after she was shot in front of her family for resisting rape by a drunken Soviet soldier. Anna Kolaserova “embodies the faithful layperson living in their family, regularly receiving sacraments, praying the rosary and approaching God through good works. Her heroic testimony, drawn from a sincere spiritual life, is something every... Read more
My friend John Medaille chews over what a really consistent prolife ethos means: Hence the “pro-life” movement, by tying itself to the Republican Party, ties itself to the aggressive support of capitalism and to the party least likely to impose any controls or obligations on the system. Like the Fox channels, they have bracketed off the moral and cultural issues, so that they support with one hand what they oppose with the other. They oppose the culture of abortion while... Read more
…is very Chestertonian. He would have loved the whole concept of finding magic in everyday stuff. That is one of the great gifts Chesterton gave us: his love of seen the miraculous in the everyday. He remarked that the world would never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder. Wonder is the mother of philosophy, science, art, and religion. All of them are ways of exploring Wonder. I once tried to capture something of that in a... Read more
Catholic and Enjoying It will be on the air live at 7 PM Pacific (10 PM Eastern) starting Monday, June 17 and running every Monday night at that hour. We will be discussing life, the universe, and everything from a Catholic perspective and giving ourselves up to general jollification for the hour. You can listen here and you can call into the show at 1-866-333-6279 while we are on the air to yak, argue, demand I sing, or sing yourself. My... Read more
Catholic and Enjoying It will be on the air live at 7 PM Pacific (10 PM Eastern) starting Monday, June 17 and running every Monday night at that hour. We will be discussing life, the universe, and everything from a Catholic perspective and giving ourselves up to general jollification for the hour. You can listen here and you can call into the show at 1-866-333-6279 while we are on the air to yak, argue, demand I sing, or sing yourself. Read more
The trial of Scott Warren ended in a hung jury. For those not following the news, this was a guy who left water out in the desert so that desperate refugees would not die of thirst. This is literally what Jesus says spells the difference between heaven and hell: “When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations,... Read more
So the other day, on Facebook, I praised Dawn Eden Goldstein for her fine piece in America rebutting James Carroll’s demand for the abolition of the priesthood. Dawn is simply right about the necessity of the priesthood in the New Covenant. For some reason, people have the notion that the priesthood is an accretion on the “pure gospel”: “religion” that has replaced “spirituality”. In reality, the mission of Jesus is absolutely unintelligible without a) recognizing that he sees himself in terms... Read more
For as long as I have been Catholic (and of course the phenomenon is much older than that, traceable back to Tertullian and his fascination with Montanism) people who have not liked what the Magisterium has to say have latched on to some claim of private revelation and tried to weaponize it against the Church’s teaching. Usually the private revelation is false or even fake. Sometimes the private revelation is approved by the Church. (False and fake private revelations are... Read more
I get mysteriously signed up for a lot of spam mail from various orgs who seem to think I am what (I have recently been informed) is known as an “social media Influencer”. I’m not altogether persuaded that this is a judgment of me that is in contact with Reality, but given the volume of mail I get from various people, it appears that lots of people disagree with my assessment. As a result, I have a regular ritual of... Read more
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