Catholics
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Francis’s Church
Timothy Egan in this morning's Times: The Jesuits have always tried to get people to think for themselves, to arrive at belief through an arduous process. When bishops started telling parishioners that their gay and lesbian siblings were sinners, and that family planning was a grievous wrong, people stopped listening to them — for good
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Brooks on ‘A Secular Age’
Brooks's column this morning tries to summarize Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. There's nothing particularly striking in it to quote, but if you're not familiar with the book, the column will give you an overview of its concerns, which are the concerns of this blog. The basic question for the book, Taylor says, is "Why
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Pope Francis and the Church of the Poor
Pope Francis knew what poverty and oppression looked like: several times a year he celebrated mass in Buenos Aires’s 21-24 slum. Yet, as leader of the Jesuits in Argentina, he denounced liberation theology, and insisted that the priests seeking to defend and mobilise the poor remove themselves from the slums, shutting down their political activity.
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The Sacred Polity
"Was anybody else offended by…can you put your hand on your heart?" Beck said. "It's the national anthem!" He said he had shushed his son and told him to put his hand on his heart when Christina Aguilera was singing the song. "I was really offended by the sports players that were just hanging on
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Rest in Peace, Bob Smith
I've just returned from the funeral of Bob Smith, one of my oldest and dearest friends. He was undergoing cancer treatment, but his prognosis was good. I spoke to him a week or so before he died and he sounded great. One person who spoke to him the day before he died said he sounded
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Walker Percy’s Postmodern Catholicism
Why was he a Catholic? Because he believed that the Church's teachings are true; and because the Church, in his view, stood above and apart from the present age, which he called the age of the "theorist-consumer." In his view, the present age has no use for anything that cannot be bought and sold or
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More on ‘Lost’ and Dante’s Island Down Under
About a month ago, I wrote a too long post about how Cuse's and Lindelof's Lost was an creative exercise in postmodern religious syncretism and mythopoesis, but leaning perhaps a little more heavily on retrieval themes from Dante and by extension Catholic iconography. I think after watching the finale last night, that assessment holds up
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Ideas Matter
[Ed. note: I'm reposting this 2005 piece as a follow up to "The Communion of Saints" post I put up over the weekend.[ My goal in what I’ve written in the "Sinning Originally" pieces is not to argue for a position; it’s rather to describe the world as it appears from within the framework I