In reading for the feast of Christ the King, and in preparation for Advent, I am every year compelled to re-read and contemplate the thoughts of our good Pope Benedict in Co-workers of the Truth: The King is Jesus. In him God entered humanity and espoused it to himself. This is the usual form of the divine activity in relation to mankind. God does not have a fixed plan that he must carry out; on the contrary, he has many different ways of finding man, and even of turning his wrong ways in to right ways… . Continue Reading»
Modernity amounts to the gradual but steady emancipation of the political sphere from the religious sphere. This begins in America with simple non-establishment, but has grown into a more or less aggressive “separation of church and state.” Even if we are to admit that the state should not establish an official religion, we will always have an ethos that undergirds our political commitments. And that ethos will inevitably have been born in the context of a particular religion… . Continue Reading»
The other day an opinion-maker remarked with apparent surprise that after 9/11 Americans had not started attacking American Muslims. Readers will remember how many earnest warnings against violent reactions were issued in the days and weeks after the attack, and how many patronizing lectures on Islam as a religion of peace were given. You’d think that every group of Americans, other than those who read the New York Times, was a lynch mob just waiting for an excuse to feel righteous in venting their anger on victims who were easy and safe to hurt… . Continue Reading»
Within the mind of any single translator of a liturgical text, formal equivalence and functional equivalence are always at work, opposing each other here, cooperating there. Formal equivalence by itself would give you translatorese, the awkward, often inscrutable prose of the sort that crude translation software is apt to serve up… . Continue Reading»
My theme focuses on Catholics and the American future. But sometimes the best way to look at the future is through the lens of the past. One of the most sacred symbols of the Roman state was an altar to the goddess Victory. It stood in the Roman Senate for nearly 400 years. In a.d. 382, a Christian emperor removed the altar as idolatrous. Two years later, after his death, the pagan prefect of Rome”Quintus Aurelius Symmachus”wrote one of the most interesting letters of Late Antiquity… . Continue Reading»
Hans and Inga, fictional names, got married. It happened so often hardly anybody took much note of it which is maybe why you never heard about it either. Hans and several thousand others like him were young soldiers from Hesse, Germany employed by the British to battle George Washington’s army in the American Revolution. The Hessian wartime predations were exaggerated by American war propaganda. The cruel, violent, merciless, fearsome mercenary Hessians who scared the crap out of honest hard-working American patriots early in the Revolution were by and large all good Lutheran boys”some of whom were known to sing Lutheran hymns when advancing on American lines… . Continue Reading»
Although he’s not very well known in the U.S., save among members of the Sant’Egidio community (of which he’s the founding father), Andrea Riccardi is a major figure in the Catholic Church in Italy: a historian of the papacy, a commentator on all things Catholic, and a player in various ecclesiastical dramas. Most recently, according to Vatican reporter Sandro Magister, Riccardi has taken to defending the Italian character of the Roman Curia, which, after a period of internationalization, has become more pronounced over the past decade… . Continue Reading»
Looking is an act of salvation, of compassion, and it is the path Father Paul Anel has taken in his vocation as a Catholic priest and photographer. His new exhibition, Walls and Light, opening at the First Things gallery this week, brings together ten photographs by Fr. Paul that shed light on the beauty and mystery of ordinary and ephemeral moments in life and nature. Shifting reflections, quiet shadows, moving streams and passing clouds appear as timeless markers of a transient world caught between the infinite and finite, the personal and the universal… . Continue Reading»
I am told in some of my email that when writing about the future of the church or about the future of America, I tend toward the cynical and the pessimistic, and that these qualities are unhelpful to and unwanted by readers who”for reasons that defy comprehension”log on to the internet expecting to be soothed, reassured, and entertained. While reading the news. The news is not good, and it is not good on any front. Europe is, to put it mildly, in disarray… . Continue Reading»
Remember the constant outcry against President George W. Bush’s embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) federal funding restrictions? Even though his administration issued more than $600 million in NIH grants for human ESCR, and much more than that for animal studies, Bush was castigated widely for preventing selfless scientists from creating a robust regenerative medical sector that, the critics claimed, possessed virtually unlimited potential to ameliorate suffering and cure disease… . Continue Reading»
