I would like to piggy back on an excellent article written by my friend Anthony on Girard and the passion of Christ. Particularly in our hyper consumeristic culture, Girard’s reading of the passion is needed to restore our true selves and to help us properly meditate on the mysteries of this week. According to Girard, with the arrival of self consciousness, another’s desire replaces instinct as the main determinant of human behavior. In other words, I no longer act out... Read more
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“Words are very unnecessary / They can only do harm Enjoy the silence” (Depeche Mode) German political theologian Fr. Johann Baptist Metz famously wrote on many occasions that the challenge for theologians in the second half of the twentieth century would be to learn how to write theology that places the world’s victims at the center of its reflection. In particular, Metz insisted that theologians could no longer do their work with their backs turned to Auschwitz. In his most... Read more
Despite the question of whether or not John Wain was an Inklings,[1] he shows himself sharing common ground with its major members by his dislike of technology: Naturally I think that human life is tragic. No shallow optimism, no easy faith that humanity will be happy when this or that piece of social engineering has been completed, or when we have finished our conquest of Nature. What difference would it have made if my wife and I had met each... Read more
Catholic theology has often found that one way to get clarity on a difficult question is by looking at extreme situations and seeing how the principles under scrutiny apply in such cases. In my own area (the theology of Eucharistic presence), the most famous of these questions was “Quid Sumus Sumit Mus?” That is, “What happens to the Body of Christ if a mouse eats the host?” The answer to this (that the mouse does not access the substance of... Read more
Ellul is a fascinating thinker — I hope you enjoy! It’s in French, but the subtitles do a good job translating what he says. (more…) Read more
[March 24]’s front-page story in the New York Times suggests that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), under the direction of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, failed to act against a Wisconsin priest who was accused of molesting scores of boys at a school for the deaf. Is the story damaging? Yes. Should the Vatican have acted faster? Yes. Should the accused priest have been laicized? In all probability, Yes again. Lawler’s story is here. He goes on to... Read more
Anyone familiar with a Gene Wolfe novel knows his stories are filled with puzzles leading to at least two different stories being told in the midst of his text. The first is the primary one which is usually written in first person, written from the perspective of one of the main characters of the novel. The second is the story of what is left out from the first, the real sequence of events, which has gotten distorted or misunderstood by... Read more
For several months, several of us on Vox Nova have pointed out the belligerent, violent developments spreading across the United States. There has been an effort to incite hate, and with that hate, violence. It continues. Not only have we seen death threats being given to senators for passing health care reform, Sarah Palin seems to be fueling such a sentiment. It is one thing to say “let’s get our people in charge,” it’s another to do this: (more…) Read more
Earlier this month in his regular NCR column, John Allen described Archbishop Charles Chaput as a “twenty-first century” bishop, not so much for his ideas and viewpoints but for the way he “compete[s] in [the] secular marketplace of ideas.” Today in NCR’s story on the sainthood cause of Archbishop Oscar Romero, whose anniversary of martyrdom we celebrate today, Fr. Dean Brackley SJ notes that the hesitancy with which the church seems to be moving toward “Saint Oscar” is in part... Read more
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