The story of the real first Thanksgiving: It was bean soup. It was in Florida, and it was Catholic. Tomorrow instead of mashed sweet potato with marshmallows on top (yucchh!!) we’re going going to serve baked beans as a side dish. I suggest this should start a new Catholic American custom. Read more

This article has been drawn to my attention concerning a man who was beaten and robbed because he was bald. This is another incident in the increasing problem of persecution of bald people worldwide. One theory is that people with hair feel threatened by bald men because it is well known that bald men are more intelligent, more sensitive, more artistic, accomplished and more virile than their hirsute brothers. I’m feeling frightened, and don’t know whether I should buy a... Read more

A friend has sent me the following. “The website of the Young Women Clergy Project claims to be “powered by faith, verve, chocolate, and really great shoes.” At the Beauty Tips for Ministers blog, a telling phenomenon in its own right, one finds discussions of clergy eyeliner, lingerie, and lip gloss. At ECUSA‘s site, we find suggestions for Thirty Ways to Celebrate Thirty Years of Women’s Ordained Ministry.” Make of it what you will… I’m not going to comment in... Read more

Carl Olson has an interview with Pete Vere–author of a critique of atheist Philip Pullman’s poisonous books. Check it out Read more

On the top is the a building in Tuscany, Italy. Below it is a building in Middlesborough, England. I am running a competition to see which building readers think is a Catholic Church, and which one they think might be a dentist’s office. Here’s an article I wrote for Touchstone Magazine some time ago about ugly modern English Catholic churches. Read more

The combox on the previous post has been buzzing with a good discussion about authority in the Church, and I thought it might illuminate matters if I moved from theory to personal experience. It seems long ago and far away when I was an Anglican priest in England. Then and there in the 1980s the Anglican Church was debating the pros and cons of women’s ordination. I am conservative by nature and was inclined to be opposed. Nevertheless, one of... Read more

We Catholics are prone to point out the fissiparous nature of Protestantism, and observe that this is the result of the sixteenth century break from the unified authority structure of the Catholic Church. On this blog I have commented on the continuing disintegration of Anglican unity, and not a few times have lamented the fact that there are tens of thousands (and growing) of Protestant denominations. The much praised Charismatic movement is one of the most fissiparous of them all.... Read more

When I was an Anglican curate we had a very active sewing guild at church and they asked me to design some frontals, vestments, burse and veils. I got busy doing some super creative stuff with fish and triangles and bursts of flame and green and red and orange and sequins and so forth and so on–all tied up with symbols of the Trinity and Pentecost, and the church was dedicated to St Peter so all the fishy stuff was... Read more

Someone asked me yesterday why so many of the Catholic priests he has known have been such weak preachers. “They never seem to say much at all,” he complained. “Just watered down ‘do-gooder’ type stuff. We never hear about the real issues or hear anything red blooded about the battles that are going on in our society and in our families and what we should do about it.” I replied that it seemed to me that this was one of... Read more

If you expect the wrong thing you’ll be disappointed with reality. I think one of the main problems in Christianity today is that we expect the wrong thing and are ultimately disappointed with what we’ve got. Here’s a list of things we expect from religion, which religion might give us up to a point, but when these expectations become the only thing we expect from religion we find it all unsatisfying. We get restless and start sniffing around for something... Read more