As the congressional battle lines over health care are drawn yet again, Republicans have been awkwardly coming to grips with the second half of their “repeal and replace” mantra. Especially to the most right-liberal wing of the GOP, any replacement of Obamacare will look too much like it, simply by being a health care bill. This can’t be a good starting point. To be sure, it takes blind partisanship on the Democratic side to avoid noticing the ACA’s own serious flaws. I... Read more
Hello readers (and listeners), After my promise to post this podcast weekly, I had an insanely busy week and then we moved. I apologize for my negligence. Today I got my act together (after some gentle prompting) and with my new username and password managed to get this up for you. It’s our podcast from Easter week. Warning: I get a little het up near the end and involuntarily go into preacher mode. This week the Christian world rejoices in... Read more
Today is the International Day of the Worker, the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker, and the 84th birthday of the Catholic Worker Movement. Two years ago at this time I’d barely heard of Catholic Worker. Today, I’m kind of a Catholic Worker groupie (there will probably be more on this in future posts). I encountered my local CW community just over a year ago – not to give help, but to receive it. Although I did not need the... Read more
So…I normally do not indulge in shameless self-promotion on Vox Nova, but I am going to take the liberty of doing so this time. However, my hope is that this announcement will be of general interest to our readership. I am delighted to report that I have a poem published in the inaugural issue of Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, edited by Mary Ann Miller and featuring work by Marilyn Nelson, Dana Gioia and many others. It is an... Read more
During last week’s Masses we heard the story of the apostle Thomas, whom we might recall as an early religious skeptic. When the other apostles joyfully inform him that they have seen the risen Jesus, he shakes his head, obstinately affirming that until he can touch Jesus’ wounds, he will not believe. When Jesus reappears, he grants Thomas his wish, but nevertheless responds with a certain amount of reproach: ¨Because you have seen Me, you have believed; blessed are those... Read more
Following last November’s election, I wrote a piece at Christian Democracy in which I tried to step back and look at the U.S. political situation in a global context. An excerpt: To try to retrace the steps of these phenomena, in admittedly broad strokes: a noticeable number of opportunistic individuals are being propelled to power by sociopolitical groundswells of what would have previously been seen as fringe movements. Behind the mainstreaming of these movements are widespread indignities felt by increasing numbers of people... Read more
Vox Nova is pleased to publish the following guest post from Rhonda Miska. This post was originally published at Daily Theology. “Consider the birds of the air and the lilies of the field.” This is just one of many analogies drawn from the natural world in the Gospels. Jesus opts for fig trees, mustard seeds, and big catches of fish over abstract philosophical concepts when speaking of God’s reign. Similarly, Job directs us to seek wisdom from nature: “ask the... Read more
Vox Nova is pleased to share the following guest post by Tom Johnson, a Catholic Worker from Dubuque, Iowa, USA. I have been torn during this presidential election year. As a Catholic Worker, I agree in principle with the movement’s aims and means that the vast size of the U.S. Federal Government makes it “government by nobody”i and, its function as “an effective political forum for redressing grievances, next to impossible.”ii Then came Bernie Sanders, whose message of economic equality and... Read more
I first posted this ditty 6 years ago, shortly after I joined Vox Nova; now that we have a new audience, I want to share it with you. I wrote it when the kids were little and today, my son (who is 24!) asked me to sing this in the car on the way to Church. It is sung to the tune of “What do you do with a drunken sailor?”. Enjoy! He is Risen! (Chorus) Hooray! Up he rises!... Read more
For the first few years since I started attending Mass, I hesitated to participate in the veneration of the cross on Good Friday. Despite my growing fascination with liturgical symbolism, it somehow seemed a bridge too far for my more austere Protestant sensitivities, so that on first observation I could only see the kissing of an object. And then one year – my last as a non-Catholic, as it turned out – something changed. What first got me to the front of... Read more
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