My elder siblings are all much older than I, and they grew up with Dick Clark. There is a famous family story about a squabble that developed between my sister — who came home from school ready to dance to American Bandstand — and one of my brothers who probably wanted to watch cartoons. The donnybrook apparently involved black eyes and clothes being thrown out a second story bedroom window. Good times, good times! I’m sure my sister will be... Read more
We talk about it, and it’s a serious issue, but how much do we really know about the reality of Christian persecution, and how we folks in the pews need to be prepared to help each other as people are “paying blood for their fidelity to the Gospel”? Watch this masterful, balanced, stunningly-well done presentation by the great and knowledgeable journalist John Allen, delivered to the 2012 Los Angeles Religious Education Congress. Mark Shea has linked to it and so... Read more
“When a man sets himself against God,” said Pope Benedict, “he sets himself against his own truth, and therefore does not become free, but alienated from himself.” The pope is so prolific, it’s hard to keep up. Only just read this from Holy Thursday. You can read the whole homily, here Read more
Last year, the book I spent more time urging you to read than any other was Robert Barron’s Catholicism, which I called a “course in revolution”, arguing that a better-understanding of who we Catholics are, where we came from and what we embody in the world can be a social and political game-changer like nothing else. This year, I believe I am going to be nagging you to read Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics... Read more
Today is the 85 birthday of our dear Pope Benedict XVI, and he speaks very plainly to the day: “I find myself on the last stretch of my journey in life, and I don’t know what is awaiting me.” “I know, however, that the light of God exists, that he is risen, that his light is stronger than any darkness and that God’s goodness is stronger than any evil in this world, and this helps me go forward with certainty.”... Read more
Today is the feastday of Saint Bernadette Soubirous, the visionary of Lourdes — a woman brought up in such mean poverty that her whole family lived in the equivalent of a jail cell. She was a shepherdess; a poor student who could barely learn her catechism, yet was able to burst into her pastor’s office with the words “Immaculate Conception” pouring forth; a visionary who faced public ridicule for digging with her hands, until the healing spring showed forth the... Read more
Interesting and well-done story at the WaPo, which profiles a young woman who actually took the time to learn the Catholic position on our bodies and birth control and “fell in love with it”: Ashley McGuire fell in love with the Catholic Church five years ago, after reading its teaching against artificial birth control. McGuire, then a skeptical Protestant college student, initially saw the ban as a mandatory march to “domestic slavery.” But the more she read, the more she... Read more
Testing…testing… Patheos 3.0 is live online. I feel fine. Read more
Patheos is going to be launching a whole-site redesign, very soon. Long in the works, we expect to flip the switch sometime this weekend. What does it mean to you? Well . . .hopefully, not much. All redesigns have to shake out some bugs, but hopefully this process will be fairly painless. On my end, though, it’s keeping me pretty busy and feeling a little changed to the desk. After calling it a night at about 2:00 AM, I realized... Read more
Today Father James Martin and our own Max Lindenman have created some biting satire (I might call Fr. Martin’s piece more of a parody) and I think both of them will tickle your funnybone while also biting the ankle — all with the result of getting you thinking, as they certainly did me. First up, Fr. Martin does a brilliant (and brilliantly balanced) job of recreating the sort of exchanges all-too common to the combox, the FB page, the Direct... Read more
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