Catholic and Enjoying It!
Here’s something you don’t see everyday: Read more
Here’s something you don’t see everyday: Read more
There are, in this world, two ways in which the tragedy of Alfie Evans is approached. The first is to ask “What is the best way Alfie Evans can be helped in the remaining days of his life on earth?” That is, I believe, the only question that matters and the guiding principle that should be at work in giving him care. Those with expertise and responsibility for that care should busy themselves with it. Those who know nothing about... Read more
Part 4 of the Creed series over at The Catholic Weekly: Last time, in this space, I mentioned that, so far from “being spiritual, not religious”, I discovered that religion is not a bad thing but a good thing and even a biblical thing. James, for instance, remarks: If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, his religion is vain. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to... Read more
Reader: What do you think about Alfie Evans? Me: I don’t know anything about the medical or legal issues. So I haven’t commented. Reader: No. But really. What do you think? Me: I just told you. Reader; But don’t you think the doctors are all evil? Me. I don’t think anything because I don’t have any facts. Reader: No, but really. What do you think? Surely you have an opinion. Why don’t you want... Read more
And so it came to pass that, lo, we did awake in the rest area of Rifle, Colorado (named because some mapmaker in the 19th century made a temporary note on his cartography material that a member of the surveying party had lost his gun and the note was mistaken for the name of the spot). It is, ironically, in Garfield County, named for one of the American Presidential beneficiaries of our rich tradition of second amendment rights exercised by... Read more
In Part 3 of my series for the Catholic Weekly, we encounter the problem with being “spiritual, not religious”: namely that virtually everything wrong with the modern conception of the Christian life is demonstrated by those who do so. Because “religion” means doing the stuff we say we believe and not just gassing on about it while ignoring the poor, the sick, the old, the refugee and the least of these as Christianists constantly do. Religion says “If you do... Read more
The biggest consumers of Fake News are the Christianists and true believers who constitute the legion of FOX News and Talk Radio and Right Wing Noise Machine BS-spreaders. It is the faithful of the Party of Trump who are perpetually stampeded by panics du jour that are visible from space lies and fakery. Also, not coincidentally, Christianists spread and perpetuate a host of lies about the Holy Father. Read more
…and more than 200,000 students have experienced gun violence since then. Meanwhile, the only thing that has changed about the Gun Cult’s response to such slaughter is that it has perfected the art of smearing the victims with filthy lies that they are hoaxers who either never had children massacred at their schools, or that they willingly offered their children to be massacred so that Obama could Take Our Guns, or that the children themselves are “crisis actors” and liars,... Read more
In part two of my series at the Catholic Weekly, we take a look at the danger, to which even the apostles sometimes succumbed, of turning the Church into a club: Last time, we discussed my old Evangelical church’s attempt to create a Statement of Faith and my inadvertent discovery that we were a club, not a church. We didn’t have a coherent belief. We had clubbableness. The temptation to make Christianity a club is nothing new. Indeed, it is... Read more
Fun fact: Hemoglobin has 200 times the affinity for carbon monoxide that it has for oxygen. That’s why giving oxygen to victims of carbon monoxide poison does nothing to help them. Under the right circumstances, hemoglobin gives up oxygen to your tissues and takes on carbon dioxide, which it in turn gives up in your lungs as you exhale and then inhale oxygen. But once it gloms on to carbon monoxide, it never lets go. That red blood cell is... Read more
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