When some people read the Bible, they find God to be a little schizophrenic, telling us to stone sinners in one passage and then forgive them in another. Which is the real God?
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When Jesus enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, everything changes. As Mark tells it, Jesus has been moving about in secret, teaching in private, refusing to draw attention to his miracles, and speaking in coded parables. He cleanses a leper but then warns, “See that you say nothing to anyone” (Mark 1:44). Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ, but Jesus instructs him “to tell no one about it” (8:30), and after the transfiguration he “gave them orders not to relate to anyone what they had seen, until the Son of Man should rise from the dead” (9:9). It’s an anti-PR campaign. Continue Reading »
Texas is a big place, and as Robert Wuthnow has recently reminded us in Rough Country: How Texas Became America’s Most Powerful Bible-Belt State, it has an oversized role in matters of religion and politics. That is one reason why the recent Texas Monthly cover story falling head over heels for gay marriage struck me as significant. Now, a month later, the reviews are in. The April “Roar of the Crowd” letters section describes a “voluminous inrush of response” often including the magazine itself, returned in protest. The staff seems likely, however, to take the rebuke as a badge of honor. Continue Reading »
Last year I wrote for First Things on John Wesley's reaction to anti-Methodist riots in the mid-1700s as it relates to contemporary assaults on religious liberty. Recently a letter by John Wesley revealing his views about law enforcement and religious freedom was tweeted by its owner, the Wesley Hobart Museum of the Uniting Church in Tasmania, Australia. The letter,
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My home state of Missouri is one of the most aggressive in carrying out the death penalty. So far this year, Missouri has executed two men, Walter Storey, forty-seven, on February 11 and, most recently, Cecil Clayton, seventy-four, on March 17. Since 1989, Missouri has executed eighty-two people. Continue Reading »
Today Allen Tate is remembered—if at all—as a Southern Agrarian or New Critic. His name barely registers in discussions of “Catholic” writers. It was not always so. Tate’s 1950 conversion from atheism to Catholicism was so well celebrated that Marshall McLuhan would say that his was “the nearest American equivalent to Newman’s conversion.”Why do we hear so little of this American Newman? I started to wonder recently why do we not hear of his going to Mass with Ernest Hemingway in Paris, his pilgrimage to see T.S. Eliot in London, his correspondence with W.H. Auden? Why had I not heard of his time as poet-in-residence at Princeton where he spent countless hours discussing the Catholic faith with Jacques Maritain – who would eventually become his godfather? A friend who knows his work said to me, it is because he wrote the poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” and because we think he defended an old South that we are keen to expunge from our stained memory. Continue Reading »
Shortly after George Pell was named Archbishop of Melbourne, he instituted several reforms at the archdiocesan seminary, including daily Mass and the daily celebration of the Liturgy of the Hours, both of which had fallen by the wayside in the preceding years. The seminary faculty, enthusiastic proponents of Catholic Lite, thought to call the archbishop’s bluff and informed him that, were he to persist in such draconian measures, they would resign en masse.The archbishop thanked them for the courtesy of giving him a heads-up, accepted their resignations on the spot, and got on with the reform of the Melbourne seminary—and the rest of the archdiocese. Continue Reading »
In a recent issue of First Things (“Vinculum Magnum Entis,” April), David Hart recounts (or, perhaps, constructs) a conversation with a paleo-traditional Thomist over the salvific status of animals. His interlocutor defends “a particularly colorless construal of the beatific vision” which has the consequence of preventing any pesky animals from passing through the Pearly Gates. Continue Reading »
I argued last month that Pope Francis ought to see the reconversion of Europe as his most important task. Surely he agrees that European Christianity is in deep trouble. Surely he does not believe that Christianity no longer matters to Europe, or can no longer be compelling to Europeans. How can he . . . . Continue Reading »
The Anglican pastor and poet George Herbert died of tuberculosis on March 1, 1633, just one month shy of his fortieth birthday. Like his famous contemporary and friend John Donne and his nineteenth-century American echo Emily Dickinson, Herbert did not publish his poems during his lifetime. From . . . . Continue Reading »
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