When I was in graduate school in the eighties, foundationalism was a dirty word. We didn’t think it was possible or even desirable to provide a metaphysical grounding for theological claims, so we spent our time doing method instead. Methods, after all, can be applied to a mode of inquiry without raising the question of truth. We were not confident enough in the truth of our faith to subject it to any single account of what truth is… . Continue Reading »
This year’s renewal of the usually pedantic “Keep Christ in Christmas” discourse had a few interesting twists. A historically early Chanukah allowed Bill O’Reilly to vilify all those who uttered “Happy Holidays!” between a long string of holiday-less December dates. O’Reilly’s latest point of contention—that Santa is verifiably “white”—added an amusing flavor to what has become an annual ritual; one which is played out primarily via bumper stickers, front lawn decorations, Church bulletin boards, and awkward exchanges with grocery cashiers. This year, I was a bit surprised to discover that the trite debate had invaded my football fandom… . Continue Reading »
When Dana Gioia’s essay “Can Poetry Matter?” appeared in The Atlantic in 1991, it galvanized a national conversation about the state of American literature and how creative writing was being taught, produced, and consumed by the reading public. Among other points, Gioia argued that poetry had become obscure, self-referential, and detached from common experience through the influence of university writing programs and trendy ideological nostrums. Gioia’s latest essay, “The Catholic Writer Today,” published in the December 2013 issue of First Things, bears a striking resemblance to his Atlantic essay on poetry . . . Continue Reading »
On Tuesday, Pope Francis canonized Fr. Peter Faber, SJ, one of the great figures of the Catholic Reformation; and by doing so, gave us a key to understanding his own approach to the new evangelization, and a model for spreading the faith in modern times. Peter Faber is little known today, but Francis’ announcement should change that. . . . Continue Reading »
Joseph hasn’t received nearly as much attention as Mary over the centuries. There are no lengthy debates about whether Joseph is a co-redeemer, and no one to my knowledge has entertained the possibility that Joseph was perpetually celibate. Yet Joseph is as critical to the Christmas story as Mary. Consider the counterfactuals . . . Continue Reading »
I had to promise my first born child to the fairies to get into Julie Taymor’s sold-out production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it was worth it: This is fantastic Shakespeare, and it’s worth putting your name on the standby list to try and see it. Despite its reputation for gauziness, Midsummer is actually a ruthless play: all four couplings marred with traces of compulsion, faithlessness, pettiness, and cruelty. . . . Continue Reading »
Ostensibly a protest against the abrupt cessation of talks between the corrupt Ukrainian president and the European Union negotiating Ukraine’s entry into the EU, the “Euromaidan” at Independence Square (maidan means “square”) in Kyiv, Ukraine has blossomed into a determined gesture of non-confidence in the government of Viktor Yanukovych. Since November 21, hundreds of thousands of citizens have shown their dissatisfaction with what they perceive to be Yanukovych’s capitulation to pressure from Russia’s Vladimir Putin by demonstrating and occupying the central square of Ukraine’s capital. . . . Continue Reading »
Though I didn’t vote for President Obama I was unusually happy for his election. To me it said many good things about America. While his speaking ability was possibly the best since Ronald Reagan (whose speaking ability was the best since John F. Kennedy), I thought his small business tax policy, as he explained it to Sam Wurzelbacher (a.k.a Joe the Plumber), was appalling. I didn’t much like his notions on a lot of other issues either, starting with questions over abortion, but to be honest, I really wanted a reason to for vote for him. . . . Continue Reading »
When Francis Eugene George first sought admission to the Chicago seminary in the 1950s, Chicago Catholicism imagined itself the future of the Catholic Church in the western world—and not without reason. A lot of the ferment in Catholic intellectual, liturgical, and pastoral life that would eventually produce the Second Vatican Council had already passed through Cook and Lake Counties in the previous two decades. Thus “this confident Church” (as one historian of Chicago Catholicism dubbed it) readily imagined itself the cutting-edge of the Catholic future: where Chicago was, the rest of the Church would eventually be. It was a conceit, to be sure; but it was a conceit with some institutional and pastoral foundation. . . . Continue Reading »
“No serious person is without contradictions. The test lies in the willingness or ability to recognize and confront them.” So wrote the late Christopher Hitchens in 2003, on the centennial of the birth of his fellow countryman Malcolm Muggeridge. The two had much in common. Both were middle class products of the English public school system and elite universities; both were journalist-adventurers, disillusioned socialists, contrarians, and iconoclasts. They were not quite contemporaries—Muggeridge died in 1990, just over forty years after Hitchens was born—but Muggeridge’s life offers a lens through which to remember Hitchens, who died two years ago this December. . . . Continue Reading »
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