Mark Twain once said that when he was 15 he thought his father the stupidest man alive, but by the time he was 25, he was amazed at how much the old man had learned in 10 years. The Puritans could probably empathize. In their day, these Angry Young Men
My pal (we’ll call him “Hal”) is nothing if not a Christian of deep convictions. Hal believes the Bible is the sole source of revelation. He thinks the Spirit guides each believer to individually discover truth for himself (so who needs the Church to tell us what to believe?) He
We tend to be hard on the Pharisees without seeing the difficulty they faced. They were not cartoons. They were men—men who, like us sometimes, learned the right lesson but drew the wrong conclusion from the Law of Moses. Under the Law, ritual defilement was intended as a kind of
Next year the Democratic Party will publish its platform in which the Democrats will state their conviction that their principles and ideas are, well, better than those of Republicans, Libertarians, Socialists, Independent and Greens. If Democrats didn’t think this, it would be hard to see why they were Democrats. The Republicans will
One of the most common claims you will hear in our ongoing national conversation about faith is the notion that faith is “personal” and therefore not a fit topic for public discussion. The only guess I can make about why people would make such an absurd assertion is that they
St. Paul’s place in the Church has been a bone of contention ever since he was knocked off his horse by our Lord on the way to Damascus. He was a mass of paradoxes that seemed (to those who did not understand him) a mass of foolish contradictions. How do
We’ve been discussing how patriotism is the normal human love of home. It is a natural extension of the commands to love your neighbor and love your father and mother. It was upon this nature that grace built into the Church the love of our true homeland, Heaven. God raised
There’s a reason humans have always applied parental imagery to the Mother Country or the Fatherland. There’s a reason the very word “patriotism” is derived from patria, the Latin for “fatherhood”. Love of country is simply obedience to the commandment to love your neighbor and especially the commandment to love your
I came of age intellectually in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate cynicism of the 1970s. I was taught by the prevailing winds of culture to believe love of country, pledges of allegiance, national anthems, and all that sort of thing were terribly corny. If you want to know the mood of the
One of the many advantages Christians have over those who live in the world is the range to which we can extend our angst. Secularists, forced by their own principles to live in a one-floor ranch style universe, inevitably wind up wasting time on neuroses which are small beer in
Whether we are talking about pre-Christian or post-Christian paganism, the task of the Catholic is always the same: to bear witness to Jesus Christ. The question is: how? In the New Testament, different approaches to pre-Christian paganism are evident. Paganism is a search, but it is a search hampered by
“Paganism” is a term fraught with all sorts of connotations. It originally meant something like “country dweller”, “rustic”, or even “hick”. That’s because (contrary to popular myth) Christianity did not spread among the Hee Haw-watchers of antiquity, but among the city dwellers and urban folk. The very last people to receive
I used to be a pagan. Not a neo-pagan with phony stilted semi-Tolkienesque speech (“Bright blessings! Merry meet!” “An it harme noone do as thou wilt,”). Nor was I an adherent of some recently minted group of Gaia-worshippers playing dress-up in their Society for Creative Anachronism costumes and pretending they
Recently there has been a flurry of books from the “New Atheists.” Such figures as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have been holding forth to state . . . well, not anything new. The reason there is nothing new to say is that there cannot, by
Generally speaking, when one thinks of clericalism (i.e., the notion that the sacrament of Holy Orders confer, not only a priestly charism, but infinite wisdom, unchallenged authority, and limitless power on the recipient) this is normally thought of in our culture as an affliction of “conservatives”. They are, after all,
They started off, as all couples do, simply delighted with each other. They came to our house a couple of times when they were still dating. “John” was the brother of a good friend, “Sally” was his soon-to-be betrothed. They were fun. They had a good sense of humor. Both
People are worried about me. One reader writes: You don’t give enough credit to the system we have in America. It is the closest thing to idealistic conditions as humanly possible (City of God, Augustine). That’s bad enough, of course. But in addition to my failure to identify America with
On July 10, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith released “Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church”, a document stating the absolutely-not-new fact that, yes, the Church does believe it is the Church Christ founded and that other Christian bodies are right
Ever attended a clown Mass? Me neither. To be sure, I’ve seen lovingly photographed liturgical bizarrenesses from time to time chronicled on the Internet. And I’ve seen some enthusiasts for the Latin Mass often talk as though such stupid liturgical antics are happening everywhere all the time and that they
Sometime ago, a friend of mine introduced me to a wonderful bit of parody that begins: Awake from your slumber!Arise from your sleep!The homily’s over!It wasn’t too deep! It brings to mind the old joke that the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist is that you can reason with
Years ago, I heard a Pentecostal pastor in Spokane talking about a time he and some other local non-denominational pastors had been asked by a family they knew to come and pray for their granny who, her family said, “had an evil spirit”. One of the pastors was of a
One of the great consolations Christians have is that we worship a God who has himself wrestled with temptation. At the Judgment, we will face not an Olympian abstraction who breezed through on his looks and money, nor a severe and icy Critic who eyes us coldly and says, “Why
When asked why he had become a Catholic, G. K. Chesterton famously replied, “To get rid of my sins.” The forgiveness of sins is the awesome gift which Christ offers us, a gift so beautiful that words can scarcely express the glory of it. One of the most lovely things
Most sane people never ask “Did Michaelangelo cause the statue of David, or was it his chisel? Did Shakespeare cause Hamlet, or was it his pen? Choose!” But for some reason, when the subject turns to evolution, many fundamentalists, both atheist and Christian, completely forget that a thing can have primary
Our Lord teaches us to pray that God’s will be done “on earth as it is in Heaven”. But I sometimes fancy that we (and I know for certain that I) have seldom given any thought to what that means. I think that, in part, it’s because we don’t quite
Advertisement
