St Ephrem was known as one of the great hymn writers of the early church. In what might seem scandalous to many today, his popularity came, in part, from the way he adapted popular music. Music became sacred as it was infused with grace, but it remained attractive to its listeners because it followed the melodious tunes they had come to love and expect. He wrote music which fit the likes and tastes of his time. He shows us how... Read more
Getting out the door with two young boys is full of trials, frustrations, and insight. Just the other day, while telling my youngest son to come put his shoes on (for the fourth or fifth time) so that we could leave, he asked me to tell him why. I replied, “Because the car is running!” He laughed—a true, genuine laugh. Of course: Car don’t ‘run’. Especially not when they are parked. Read more
What kind of God do Catholics worship? “When you stand in front of the just judge, mercy has come to an end. Now is the time of justice.” Michael Voris “Eternal suffering? Yeah. Because it’s this eternal “no” to the love that God is. Now I think in light of this clarification we can see how all the language of God sending people to hell, God condemning people to hell, because of their mistakes and so on, is problematic. God... Read more
The public sector, after saving the world from a crisis the size of the Great Depression, gets punished. The financial sector, after causing a crisis that led to 30 million lost jobs and came close to another Great Depression, goes back to business-as-usual and bonus bonanzas. What’s up with that? Simon Johnson is looking more right by the day. Read more
Answer: In terms of policy, they don’t cover many people and they are not very cost-effective. In terms of Catholic social teaching, they violate both solidarity (taking care of the less fortunate directly) and subsidiarity (removing impediments to furthering human dignity in the private domain). There are many different ideas floating around, often with little coherence between them, but they do share a common trait – the desire to move healthcare away from a communal to an individual concern. Just... Read more
I have watched two movies recently that I have to recommend to you. If you have Netflix these are all on the instant watch or you can get them on dvd if you like it the old fashioned way. The first movie I just happened to place in my queue not knowing too much about it. I was absolutely surprised by its depth and its art and by its message. It is a beautiful movie. German movie The Lives of... Read more
This is interesting. The pope is actually tackling the thorny subject of incivility in the Catholic blogosphere! He asked bloggers to adapt a “Christian-style presence” online, and said that “we must be aware that the truth which we long to share does not derive its worth from its ‘popularity’ or from the amount of attention it receives”. This is a message that all of us who blog need to take to heart. The follow-up comments from Archbishop Claudio Celli, president... Read more
Fathers and teachers, I ponder, “What is hell?” I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love. (Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov) It’s hard to argue against the position of Dosoevsky’s saintly Father Zosima, and yet this raises the question: what does it mean, then, to be able to love? I’ve noticed that the orthodox Catholic circles I began traveling in since my reversion in 2002 provide, among other things, a harbor for people who seem... Read more
A common abuse was restriction of the use of hospital facilities to residents of a particular locality or region. This was probably a measure intended to exclude false beggars and vagabonds. The result, however, was that hospitals were no longer open to all victims of misfortune and served only fixed ‘quotas’ of certified paupers. In Valencia hospitality turned into hostility against foreigners, who were accused of stealing bread from the mouths of the city’s poor. Michel Mollat, The Poor in... Read more
Brad DeLong: Perhaps Washington is simply too disconnected [from the economic hardship of most Americans]: my brother-in-law observes that the only place in America where it is hard to get a table at dinner time in a good restaurant right now is within two miles of Capitol Hill. Sometime in the late seventies, the Dems started dumping their traditional “party of labor and the common man/woman” role, and became the party of the social-libertarian/technocratic faction of the top 20% of... Read more
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