Fifty years ago today, on the morning after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy channeled Catholic Social Teaching in a speech before the Cleveland City Club. Read the second half of his speech and listen to the entire thing below. Think about how frighteningly appropriate these words are for us today. Read more
Babylon is indeed falling. But then, Babylon is always falling, which is to say that there has always been a Babylon and the Christian people have always been exiles within it. Read more
Yesterday morning I picked up my friend, Issa Umi, at the suburban train stop. He was wearing a soft hat, mismatched women’s earrings, and a peculiar shirt and vest combination. (He later told me a lady in his new apartment building exclaimed “You look like art!”, as she strolled past him.) Issa had taken the train down from Chicago in order to pick up some belongings he had left in storage from a previous stay in my NW Indiana town.... Read more
How to understand Pope Francis? Despite the apparent dyspepsia his arrival has caused among some of the unafflictedly comfortable, it really shouldn’t be that difficult to get him right, wouldn’t you think? Here’s a tip: I recently watched a DVD of The Francis Effect, which I suspect is probably the best single video introduction to the life, ideas and mission of Pope Francis currently available. Produced by Salt + Light, the Toronto/Montreal-based Catholic television network, the film is a skillful blending of both... Read more
Art, says Michael Martin, has the potential to create a new Gospel every day. “Not a different one,” he adds, “but a new one, and this through the incarnational possible.” In the summer of 2016, Martin, a farmer and author of The Submerged Reality and The Incarnation of the Poetic Word, invited a number of friends to a rural Michigan weekend of reflection on the arts and culture. This was an arty, literate bunch but we shared a dissatisfaction at... Read more
On the surface, it would seem so; in Scripture, there are nearly 3,000 verses concerned with justice for the lowly, the oppressed, and the stranger. Read more
Not long after Pope Francis’ election in 2013, we friends around Solidarity Hall began to sense that some of our fellow Catholics were just not getting this new Argentinian guy. We decided to collect some essays, partly “translating” Francis for an American audience and also speculating on how we saw the coming years of his papacy. Somewhere I had heard of a youngish but talented Patheos Channel blogger, Sam Rocha, and we asked him to contribute something. Sam obligingly sent us... Read more
Like some hack sportswriter who skips the game but writes his piece by listening on the radio at home, I offer here a report on last week’s Trying to Say God conference at the University of Notre Dame, despite the fact I couldn’t make it there. (Family unexpectedly came in from out of town.) Happily, I was able to listen to some of the presentations posted as audio files on SoundCloud, courtesy of that estimable Patheos blog, Sick Pilgrim, whose proprietors... Read more
Raymond Sickinger, a professor of history at Providence College, has written an impressive new biography of Blessed Frédéric Ozanam, the mid-19th Century French layman who Pope St. John Paul II called an "apostle of charity" and "a precursor of the social doctrine of the Church." Read more
It’s sadly become somewhat de rigueur, particularly but not exclusively on the American political right, to proof-text or misread this passage or to read into it things that were not intended, to prove an ideological point or – as I rather more strongly suspect – to put a religious gloss on an ideological position (that of libertarianism, or anarcho-capitalism) which is, according to the social teaching of the Church, fundamentally godless. Read more
The Dorothy Option
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