Making Sense of Religion
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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
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The Communion of Saints
There are so many more like them. There’s Father Mario Falconi, an Italian priest who refused to leave Rwanda during the genocide and bravely saved 3,000 people from being massacred. There’s Father Mario Benedetti, a 72-year-old Italian priest based in Congo who fled with his congregation when their town was attacked by a brutal militia.
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Thoughts on “Lost” and “The Divine Comedy”
And so if we’re at all awake, we have this sense of living now at a threshold moment, and the story being told here on Lost projects for us what the stakes are using a technique that interweaves themes from both science and religion, logos and mythos. But at the heart of our story, as…
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Bishop Tobin
Normally, I don't get into discussions about the church hierarchy because, sub specie aeternitatis, the hierarchy doesn't really matter that much. Its role is to keep the lights on and pay the bills, and to provide a minimal sense institutional continuity that humans need to function in groups over time. But whenever the people who
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Kierkegaard on the Couch
…the specific character of despair is this: it is precisely unaware of being despair. –Soren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death There is abundant chatter today about “being spiritual” but scarcely anyone believes that a person can be of troubled mind and healthy spirit. Nor can we fathom the idea that the happy wanderer, who is all
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Futile Culture Wars
I’m with Barzun. The West is decadent. Decadence happens, and like winter it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just a time that doesn’t have much exterior spiritual energy anymore–the spirit has gone underground, so to speak, into the soul’s interior. And since the whole movement of salvation history has been a movement from outer…
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On Converting the Slaves
Ta-Nehesi Coates has a thoughtful post on the slaveholders' making Christians of their slaves that is worth reading, but I reproduce here a comment by Doctor Cleveland: It's a classic example of how ideology controls perceptions, where the slaveholders (in this case) just couldn't see what they were doing because they couldn't acknowledge some basic
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Quote of the Day: Jonathan Swift
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. (h/t Eunomia)
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Doubt & Belief
Douthat puts it nicely in a post last week: As you might expect, I see the genesis of religion rather differently: An intuitive belief in some sort of presiding Agent seems to be an extremely common, albeit hardly universal, feature of human nature; this intuition has intersected, historically, with an enormous amount of subjective religious
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Sustainability: A Dem or GOP Value?
Deneen has put up an interesting post in which he points out that Liberals are more conservative when it comes to the environment than people who call themselves conservatives. He talks, I think, accurately about the fundamental incoherence in both the liberal and conservative positions, and the post is worth reading here. What interested me