Thank You, O Lord For my exceeding weakness My selfishness, my moods, my failures; For when you come to me again and again in the holes I dig You show me, tenderly how much I need You. Read more
Thank You, O Lord For my exceeding weakness My selfishness, my moods, my failures; For when you come to me again and again in the holes I dig You show me, tenderly how much I need You. Read more
Kudos to Nick Neal, a board member for the Consistent Life network, for combating the nonsensical and utterly counterproductive notion that to defend life in one arena requires opposing it in another. He previously did so in response to David Pakman’s hasty claims of correlation between maternal death rates and the outlawing of abortion, as well as his general skepticism of the political cohesiveness of the consistent life movement. (He has since noted that his description of the America First Committee... Read more
Julia’s recent post calling for an ecclesiology which can account for fallibility engendered much discussion and raised some important questions. Since I am both on vacation and preparing for comprehensives, I didn’t see the post until it was too late to fruitfully comment. I hope now to offer a few brief remarks which might suggest an approach but which will necessarily be insufficient in themselves. Belief in the holiness of the Church is part of the creed we profess every... Read more
Voting in any election is, so to speak, a matter of choosing “the lesser of two evils”, or as one Mennonite author put it four years ago, “preferring one fox over another”. Especially when considering beyond one’s own demographic self-interest to the common good and concern for all the vulnerable, as all Christians should, there are no ideal candidates. But this year in particular, I find myself faced with the sobering question of whether there is any presidential candidate I... Read more
Wikipedia is a useful but occasionally time wasting tool. Go on line to check the birth date of a 19th century German author and two hours later you find yourself reading about Chinese pottery, Greek mythology, or West Ham United. A few days ago I went on to check something (I truthfully no longer remember what) and ended up reading about Emo. For those who have managed to miss this trend, it is a musical style “characterized by melodic musicianship... Read more
In his zeal for what he would call “traditional” Catholicism, Michael Voris has recently made a video series from Trent, Italy, home of the Council of Trent. As part of that series, he has produced this video, titled “Heresy and the Eucharist”: Unfortunately, Voris’s zeal is not always matched by historical and theological accuracy. This inaccuracy, coupled with Voris’s sneering and sarcastic tone, virtually ensures that the Catholic message he wishes to promote to Protestants will fall on deaf ears. ... Read more
From The Gospel Of Barack Hussein Obama According to Mark, available now at Amazon.com: And from the heart of the Power of Life, when the time was expedient and the time was right, about 2000 years after the birth of Jesus, praises be upon him, over seventy years after His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie I, the Lion of Judah, praises be upon him, there came the fulfillment of the hopes and dreams of centuries: Barack Hussein Obama, born of a... Read more
In light of Indiana’s continued attempt to ban funding to Planned Parenthood for women’s health services under Medicaid, I found this blog post by Christine Scheller of UrbanFaith very timely. Here is a precis of her questions: What is it, I wonder, about my free-market loving friends that makes them willing to suggest, even by default, that entrepreneurs and small business owners like me will be a drain on our national resources or that we have some sort of moral... Read more
It’s not. But… Jeff Daniels’ character, news anchor Will McAvoy, comes off as something of a pompous jerk and a sellout to lucrative journalistic mediocrity in the pilot episode of The Newsroom. And his response to this question from a college student isn’t perfect: it’s profanity-ridden and blunt to the point of rudeness, and when he suddenly waxes nostalgic about a golden age when we purportedly were the greatest country in the world, it’s outright naive. But for all that, with the... Read more
This is a guest post I wrote for U.S. Catholic a year ago. The title they gave it was not of my choosing; the above title is the one I had given it. The orthodoxy and catholicity of the Eucharistic liturgy is profoundly subversive of any idolatrous forms of nationalism. We American Catholics need constant reminders of this, even on Independence Day – or rather, especially on Independence Day. Read more
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