{"id":6973,"date":"2009-04-22T06:35:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-22T06:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2009\/04\/what-james-ella-and-fr-finigan-are-up-against\/"},"modified":"2015-01-01T15:05:03","modified_gmt":"2015-01-01T22:05:03","slug":"what-james-ella-and-fr-finigan-are-up-against","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2009\/04\/what-james-ella-and-fr-finigan-are-up-against.html","title":{"rendered":"What James, Ella, and Fr. Finigan are Up Against"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.firstthings.com\/onthesquare\/?p=1341\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">It really is quite toxic in Old Blighty.<\/a>  But the good news is that <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.siena.org\/2009\/02\/young-and-finding-jesus-in-london.html\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">things are starting to change a bit as Britons grope their way out of the post-Christian wreckage<\/a>.  Nobody can live forever in a spiritual desert.  The soul cannot feed on empty cynicism.  Once the body politic has burned up the last fat reserves from the Catholic heritage it has been living off since Henry VIII, it starts to digest it muscle tissue and get progressively weaker.  If the Brits wise up, they will attempt to reclaim their Christian heritage.  If not, well, as I\u2019ve said, in a contest between an inflamed spirituality like Islam and a thin watery spirituality like post-Christian English cynical secularism, Islam wins hands down.  Only a healthy spirituality is the answer to two diseased spirituality.  That would be the Catholic faith, rightly understood and practiced.  Catholics in England need to figure that out and reach out to the people described in the Siena article I linked above.<\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\"><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It really is quite toxic in Old Blighty. But the good news is that things are starting to change a bit as Britons grope their way out of the post-Christian wreckage. Nobody can live forever in a spiritual desert. The soul cannot feed on empty cynicism. Once the body politic has burned up the last [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>What James, Ella, and Fr. Finigan are Up Against<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It really is quite toxic in Old Blighty. 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