A few years back, Russell Shaw wrote a terrific book called To Hunt, To Shoot, To Entertain: Clericalism and the Catholic Laity. It took its title from an amazing remark by a 19th-century English monsignor who loftily declared, “What is the province of the laity? To hunt, to shoot, to entertain.
Some years ago I was listening to a radio show that featured a singer from South America. She introduced a song by mentioning that it dealt with certain taboo subjects for Americans. The audience tittered knowingly, like the good apostate Puritans we Americans are. She quickly corrected them. “No, it’s
Okay, all you happy kulturkampfers, you started down the path to intellectual awareness with “Discovering the Classics“. Remember how, just minutes ago, you ruddy cheeked lads and lasses ran off, eager to organize your book group? Problem is, being quick studies, now you’ve read all the texts I recommended, so
Some time ago, my friends and I decided to form a Great Books Reading Group to get in touch with what little intellectual activity there was in the world before The Door began publishing. The idea was roughly to get together one Friday a month, pop open a few brewskis, pool
It was, as so many have already said, the Pearl Harbor of our time. It was Dies Irae, the Day of Wrath. It was unbelievable, numbing, sickening, like something out of a movie. It was our worst nightmare, made all the worse by the fact that it had never entered
At 10:55 AM on Ash Wednesday, February 28, 2001, I bolted out of my bedroom in a haste normally reserved for the announcement of lunch when a 6.8 quake sent the biggest seismic shock wave through the Seattle area (and my house) in 50-odd years and (think about this for
To somebody thinking about postmodern culture, one of the most fascinating passages in the New Testament is Titus 1:12: “One of themselves, a prophet of their own, said, ‘Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.” What is fascinating is not the slam on ancient Cretans, but the fact that
C.S. Lewis once wrote an essay describing a far-off land called “Niatirb” (“Britain” spelled backwards) where two feasts seemed to be held on the same day: “Christmas” and “Xmas”. The distinction between the two feasts seems to hold in the US too. This is reflected in our holiday entertainment fare,
My friend, Dr. James Felak of the University of Washington, notes that life is full of broad proverbs that are both true and commonsensical, yet flatly contradictory and false if we try to make them into an all-encompassing rule of life. That’s why everybody believes “haste makes waste” but also
It’s easy to get angry at the sheer quantity of baloney in today’s culture. Consider, for instance, the following chatter, drawn at random from recent media babble: Despite some religious accessories, Rose McGowan puts the “ain’t” in “saint” in her latest magazine cover. McGowan, star of Jawbreaker and singer Marilyn Manson’s betrothed,
G. K. Chesterton once remarked that Catholics agree about everything; it is only everything else they disagree about. That is to say, Catholics (and by this he meant “Catholics who know and believe their Faith”) agree on a few cosmic truths summarized in the creeds, prayers, sacraments, and common life of the
When I was coming into the Catholic Church, I met a number of angry ex-Catholics enraged against the Sacrament of Confession. “I hate it!” they would say. “I grew up with all that Catholic guilt!” As though the sacrament caused the guilt. I never understood that, because I had been raised completely
Roger Ebert, in his review of The Prince of Egypt, expresses a notion common among moderns when he complains of God’s habit of choosing people (like Moses) and nations (like the Jews), “I have always rather thought God could have spared man a lot of trouble by casting his net more
We’ve heard it a million times in the last 20 years. “The Catholic Church does not believe in choice!” This refrain was particularly loud in the 90s when the Church led the successful fight against the mass abortion agenda (ignominiously spearheaded by the Clinton Administration) at the Cairo and Beijing
Two of the most controversial topics among Catholics and Protestants are evolution and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Great quantities of ink and electrons are expended in print and on the Internet each day, arguing about these things. “Catholics call Mary the cause of salvation!” complain our Evangelical friends. “Not only
One of the most popular sorts of story in the world is the “Cheat the Oracle” story. The idea is that Heaven decrees the hero’s fate and nothing can change it. The hero (or perhaps the hero’s parents or guardians if the hero is an infant) then attempts to cheat
Recently, a reader wrote me to say, “I have Jewish friends who ask, ‘How can Jesus be the New Adam and the Messiah when it is painfully clear that everyone is still suffering from Original Sin? How can he have conquered death when the penalty for Adam’s sin—death—is still being
The Catholic and the Evangelical, faced by a Culture of Death that hates them both without much distinction, have, in the past 30 years, seen many of their quarrels fade in significance before the specter of Mordor, stretching forth its arm to extirpate the Judeo-Christian worldview from our culture. This
For those who may have missed it, PZ Myers, a washed-up academic at a third tier school who takes out his bitterness on Christians and calls it “science blogging”, claimed that some human toothache named Webster Cook had received death threats for stealing a Eucharist and threatening to desecrate it. Reader John Farrell repeatedly
As a convert to the Catholic Faith, I naturally want to see others embrace it as well. But when I talk with folks who want to be Catholic I often find myself repeating Jesus’ counsel to “Count the cost.” Why? One thing that concerns me about converts, especially from Protestantism,
Recently, I was introduced to a new species of humor. Take any famous line from a movie, song, poem, book or play, then replace key words with the word “pants”. It makes everything funny. Examples: Star Wars: “I find your lack of pants disturbing.” It’s a Wonderful Life: “Every time
The Christian faith drives ideologues crazy. And as our ideologies change, so do the things that irritate us about the Faith. But there’s always something. Because, in this fallen world, we do not really progress. We wobble. Yesterday’s crazy ideology breeds rebels who throw off the crazy old ideology and
There are, said Robert Benchley, two kinds of people in this world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t. In addition to that division, there are another two kinds of people in this world: Cat People and Dog People. I stand firmly with
I was talking with a friend the other day. He’s a fellow convert who (as is common with us) was wondering why on earth Catholics who don’t believe much of what the Church teaches stay. He was greatly puzzled about the tendency of many life-long Catholics to remain quite proudly
Recently, Newsweek ran a piece by Kathleen Deveny in which she lamented the fact that she didn’t know how to talk to her daughter about God. Several things struck me about the piece. First, and most arresting, was her opening remark: “Sometimes I think it is easier to talk to
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