My attention span is waning. I’ve noted it for the past couple of years: no longer can I sit for hours with a single book before me—barely recognizable is my teenage self who marathoned through Harry Potter volumes the day they arrived at my door—and the convenient packaging of 25 minute episodes of my favorite TV-shows has so shaped me that even sitting through a two hour long movie is at times difficult. I’ve no doubt as to the cause of my attention shortage, though. The recurring itch to check phone, e-mail, and social media as I attempt to work through any text of depth or any movie of richness reminds me again and again that my ability to focus was exchanged over time for the instant gratifications of the alerts and messages my electronic devices have brought me. Continue Reading »
Cardinal George Pell (b. 1941) was educated at the Pontifical Urban University and Oxford University, where he earned the doctorate in history after being ordained to the priesthood for the Diocese of Balarat. After extensive pastoral work in his native Australia, he was named auxiliary bishop of Melbourne, and later Archbishop of Melbourne, before being appointed Archbishop of Sydney in 2001.Continue Reading »
Archbishop Blase Cupich of Chicago did Synod-2015 a great service on October 16, by holding a press briefing during which he said the following, responding to questions on offering of Holy Communion to the divorced and civilly remarried:
Both St. John Paul II and his successor, Benedict XVI, were committed to the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on the collegiality of bishops. Indeed, the future Benedict XVI, as Father Joseph Ratzinger, helped formulate that teaching in his work as a Council peritus, or theological adviser.
The videos of Planned Parenthood employees bragging about performing “less crunchy” abortions in order to harvest intact organs set off a political firestorm. The imbroglio reached its apex during the second Republican presidential debate, when Carly Fiorina decried the harvesting of a brain . . . . Continue Reading »
A new Roman Catholic church, dedicated to St. Thomas Aquinas, has risen at the Newman Center of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Designed by architect Kevin Clark, the church and center together came in at a cost-effective $25 million. St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church is a classic . . . . Continue Reading »
In June, Christianity Today published an article by Mark Yarhouse, a professor of psychology at Regent University in Virginia, on “gender dysphoria.” Gender dysphoria is the APA's current description of the condition whereby someone perceives one's “gender” to be other than one's birth or . . . . Continue Reading »
In light of the numerous overwrought print media and blogosphere reports circulating in recent days, we’re happy to provide, in the spirit of Sergeant Joe Friday of Dragnet, “just the facts” about certain events at Synod-2015.
As president of a confessional, Christian graduate school serving a large urban demographic, I have the opportunity to join other believers in gatherings that are deliberately ecumenical: interdenominational, multi-ethnic, even cross-linguistic, and always with a mind for Christian unity. I have . . . . Continue Reading »
The “universal call to holiness” identified and explained in the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, is widely celebrated as one of Vatican II’s most compelling ideas.
