Intro; Part One Every life is sacred. The only reason the Church can even consider violence done in self-defense is that your own life is sacred, too; because of this, the amount of violence it takes to defend yourself can be permitted, (1) when only violence will stop an attacker from killing or injuring you. The same principle is applied to countries by extension, and this is essentially what Just War Theory consists in. The conditions laid down by JWT... Read more
Intro Violence is a bad thing. This basic truth—intuitive enough to most people that I don’t propose to attempt to prove it—is one of the essential elements of Just War Theory. Many people, including a lot of JWT advocates, think of it as a way of seeing how violent we’re allowed to be; but from a properly Catholic perspective, its function is to throw as many obstacles as possible in the way of the human impulse to resort to violence.... Read more
A nice easy set of topics to cover, but don’t worry, I’ll be 100% objective. The assassination of Qasem Soleimani, a major military leader of Iran, has gotten a lot of social media discussing Just War Theory, a branch of philosophy pioneered by St Augustine and which forms a part of the mainstream of Catholic political thought. It has gotten a lot of non-American social media pointing out the self-centeredness of American social media, which has been largely full of... Read more
Every New Year’s Eve, I do an arts review—good stuff that came out (or that I happened to discover) this year in film, music, books, TV, et cetera. 2019 has been kinda hit and miss, but I do have a few things I am quite excited about. First of all, Eve Tushnet has released her second novel! Punishment: A Love Story is set in DC in 2016, and explores the personal and spiritual lives of several members of a kinksters’... Read more
One rarely sees a film whose principal message to its audience appears to be “So you bought a ticket to this, huh? Fuck you”, but when one does,—well, truth be told I don’t know what happens next. But I sat through this wretched film unasked, and now I am going to make you all suffer with me. Merry Christmas. In defense of Tom Hooper (who directed the film) and Andrew Lloyd Weber (who created the Broadway musical the film is... Read more
I haven’t been able to write much for the blog of late. For the last few years, Advent has tended to be a season of spiritual and emotional doldrums: worry about January (consistently a bad month for me financially) and trying to get gifts taken care of tend to dampen my mood. Much more than that, the long series of holiday gatherings from Thanksgiving to New Year’s involves a lot of time spent with families with children, and, well, I... Read more
Part One Content warning: descriptions of sexual maturation, queerphobic slurs Honestly, this part was hard to write. To articulate this, you have to be really raw with the pain most queer people grow up with, something that affects a lot of us almost continually (1); for me personally, it’s a pain that has been almost physically oppressive lately. But, this is kinda what I do, so here goes. I said that imagination is an intellectual exercise, and it is. Imaginative... Read more
There’s a real gap in understanding, I find, between most straight Catholics’ experience of Catholic attitudes toward LGBTQ people, and queer Catholics’ own experiences of the same thing. And it has very little to do with deliberate prejudice, I think. It’s a disconnect caused by a failure of imagination. Imagination tends to be thought of as a gooey sort of thing. Artists, poets, authors, fans of fantasy and sci-fi—in a word, nerds—imagine stuff. Nerds and children. But I’m not talking... Read more
Part One; Part Two; Part Three And now we come to the salacious part, the part about moral reform. This is directed principally, though not solely, toward transgressions of celibacy and the attendant coverups. A few words are in order first, though. To begin with, a lot of Catholics have been trying to scapegoat gay priests, and LGBTQ people in general, for the abuse crisis. It is quite true that a majority of the abuse, around four-fifths, has been homosexual... Read more
Financial corruption is another major element that runs throughout the Church’s scandals. It takes money to cover things up, spin them when they get out, fight lengthy court battles, and pay for victims’ compensation. It overlaps with some of the sexual scandals in themselves, too: in not a few cases of sexual predation on young people, the grooming of the victims involved expensive gifts and vacations. And then there’s the good old-fashioned brazen self-centeredness of men like the recently disgraced... Read more
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