One of my favorite cartoons is a two-panel piece featuring (on the left panel) a dog looking up in wonder at the little old lady who is scraping table scraps into his bowl. The dog contemplates the face of his mistress in reverential awe thinking, “She feeds me and cares
Many of my Protestant friends are uncomfortable with Lent. “It’s all about mortification and self-discipline when we know that the Risen Jesus is joyful and alive!” they say. “We don’t need to mortify ourselves to please God. That’s why Jesus died for us, so we don’t have be ‘good enough’.
It is customary this time of year for the Human Toothache Brigade to break out the ol’ secular humanist signs and try to dampen Christmas spirit while over-sensitive culture warriors over-react with War on Christmas!!!! hyperventilation. It’s all good fun, but I find myself less and less moved by either side of it. If
A few hours ago, a friend called me from her job at a clinic downtown. She was deeply shaken and in tears. A mother had come in to use some of the exercise equipment for her therapy and had brought her little three-year-old boy in with her. While her back
A culture of death is a culture of fear, because sin knows it invites judgment. Who does not feel that fear these days? It’s in our very air and water. Puritans set out on this continent as a City on a Hill in the attempt to escape the Old World
Here’s a really cool site called Paleo-Future, devoted to chronicling the History of the Future. I’ve often thought such a subject would make a great book. After all, people have been making predictions forever. So, it would really be fun to see how the Assured Prophecies of Yesterday have panned out.
The other day I was talking to a friend about the witness of the laity in the postmodern world. In the course of the conversation, my friend remarked, “I’d recommend Jacques Maritain’s books to you, but you may have trouble getting hold of some of his work.” “Why?” I asked.
By now, most of the civilized world has seen the film adaptations of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and The Fellowship of the Ring, the first installment of Peter Jackson’s magnificent three-part screen adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. This leaves Catholic parents puzzled by how to navigate
You know the drill: The Church is a prison that shackles the hearts and minds of people who yearn for the freedom to think and act as they please. It is a stifling cell in which the best and the brightest are not allowed to be free due to the
Evangelicals, like all orthodox Christians, vigorously affirm the Doctrine of the Incarnation—the faith of all Christians that God the Son, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary and became Man. Evangelicals, like Catholics, believe this doctrine with
She married just out of high school and never managed to get to college. She lived in relative poverty with her husband, and had four children with him through the 80s. They pursued a counter-culture life, avoiding American materialism and seeking to live as a couple committed to the values
In my last column, we looked at a few of the most popular excuses devised by us Christians for avoiding the command to forgive enemies. But there are still others. One common dodge is to say, “God does not forgive impenitent sinners. Why should we be held to a higher
In my last column I re-asserted the most radical and offensive teaching in the entire Christian tradition. It’s not about contraception, gay marriage, abortion, divorce or war. It is the command of Christ to forgive unconditionally. Not surprisingly, we Christians have worked out various strategies for avoiding that command. Perhaps
A common question that arises, in times of scandal, personal crisis and war is this: “Jesus commands us to forgive, but are we supposed to do that in the absence of repentance?” Here’s the short answer: Yes. Here’s the slightly longer answer, given by our Lord himself: “And whenever you
Every age has certain difficulties with the Christian faith. Our present culture’s complaints about the Church center on sex because, of course, our present culture can think of practically nothing but sex and so keeps bumping into the same issues as it stupidly keeps returning to the Church’s teaching in
Many modern people have the notion that the principal mission of the Catholic Church is to impose belief on unbelievers. The reality is that most its time is spent trying to restrain belief in everything from spoon-bending to the aliens who allegedly speak to us through a cat in Poughkeepsie. The riptides
A while back, I mentioned some of the kooky apocalyptic theories that swirl around Evangelicalism and involve various interpretations of Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelation, and some of Jesus’ more obscure sayings, all coupled with various predictions about Russia, Israel, the EU, red heifers, Islam, and the rebuilding of the Temple. It’s
For most of us, Heaven is, as C.S. Lewis remarked, an acquired appetite. Much of the work of the Holy Spirit in this world appears to consist of getting us to the point that we will be happy in the next one. That’s because blessedness is, in the Christian tradition,
Hell is clearly the biggest loser in the Four Last Things Popularity Poll. If there were anything in the Tradition we could get rid of, this would obviously be the thought of everlasting damnation. The ancient Catholic truth about Hell should terrify us. But it should terrify us into our wits, not
The second of what the Catholic tradition calls the “Four Last Things” is Judgment. Judgment is about as popular a concept as root canals. And yet the desire for judgment never really goes away in the human soul. Every other episode of the still-popular-after-50-years Twilight Zone was a story about judgment. So
When we hear a phase like “the newest thing” we generally think of the latest TV show, flavor of soda, or computer upgrade. Our culture is profoundly interested in the Newest and Latest. We Americans especially look to the future and have historically tended to treat it as a kind
When Benedict was elected Pope, a new word was instantly coined on the Internet by Catholics delighted over his election: Ratzenfreude. I must confess I indulged in a bit of Ratzenfreude myself. It was hard not to as the Usual Suspects in the Media shrieked that he was a Nazi and
In 1998, I was asked to give a talk at my parish on my conversion to the Catholic Faith. The local Catholic bookstore set up a table of various materials on the Catholic faith and as I perused them, I was struck by the fact that virtually none of these
If David lived today, I have a feeling not a few modern-day Perfecti in the blogosphere would read something like this: Psalm 51For the leader. A psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came to him after his affair with Bathsheba. Oh great! Here it comes. A happy-clappy hymn from
Christianity in general, and the Catholic faith in particular has no problem with the Sciences. But many people without faith love to talk about “science vs. faith”. They fancy the former is about what they “know” and the latter consists of bowing in blind obeisance to Authority. But, in fact,
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