Bullying is a universal human phenomenon. Throughout history and the world, the strong have taken advantage of the weak, the rich have abused the poor, and the more physically attractive have disparaged the less attractive. On the playground, bullying is brutal and all too familiar… . Continue Reading »
Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass) has been prized down the centuries chiefly as a whimsical, slightly grotesque, and occasionally ribald burlesque, but it is also perhaps the single most illuminating text we possess in regard to the spiritual disquietudes and aspirations of the late antique world. In fact, when one reaches its final chapters, one discovers that below the ludicrous surface of the tale lies a strangely moving religious allegory … Continue Reading »
In an earlier essay on this site”and building upon the insights of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and Avery Cardinal Dulles”I argued that the norms of the Dallas Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, as presently implemented, are straining the theology of priesthood. … Continue Reading »
If the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America isn’t exactly falling apart at the seams, it certainly is becoming frayed at the edges. The North American Lutheran Church and another association, Lutheran Churches in Mission for Christ, are plucking former ELCA congregations up at a greater pace than I predicted… . Continue Reading »
More than 20 million people in the U.S. alone have HPV, a sexually transmitted infection that can and has lead to sometimes fatal cervical cancer. The vaccination, Gardasil, prevents the most common four strains of HPV … Continue Reading »
There are three groups of people who consistently have a detrimental affect on American politics: Republicans, Democrats, and pollsters. Of this trio, the most nefarious are the pollsters. While politicians have the ability to create public policy, pollsters have the power to craft public opinion. Although opinion polls are often treated as if they were harmless detritus of the news-cycle, they are powerful tools … Continue Reading »
The debate over Catholic social doctrine and U.S. social welfare policy took an unhelpful turn in May when a gaggle of academics fired a shot across the bow of House Speaker John Boehner, prior to his commencement address at the Catholic University of America. Their charge? That Boehner’s House voting record showed him to be a man who fails “to recognize (whether out of a lack of awareness or dissent) important aspects of Catholic teaching.” … Continue Reading »
Father Robert Barron, writing recently on the Ascension of Christ, noted that the feast is difficult for contemporary, largely Greek-influenced, minds to grasp: The key to understanding both the meaning and significance of this feast is a recovery of the Jewish sense of heaven and earth… Jesus’s great prayer, which is constantly on the lips of Christians, is distinctively Jewish in inspiration: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Notice please that this is decidedly not a prayer that we might escape from the earth, but rather that earth and heaven might come together… . Continue Reading »
Watching the old men walk down the street, not marching, exactly, not at their age, but moving with a certain stiffness and purpose, and the even older men sitting in the convertibles driving past, few of us standing on the sidewalk as the Memorial Day parade goes by think of what they suffered, nor of all the men who might have been marching too had they not died in battle… . Continue Reading »
It seems a rare accomplishment that a book on the pleasures of reading could actually pull off being pleasurable itself. But Alan Jacobs’ newest book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, does just that. It is a marvelous manifesto of sanity in an age of jeremiads about the modern predicament of attention loss on one hand, and those proud champions of distraction singing the hallelujah chorus of a world devoid of long-form books on the other… . Continue Reading »
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