Whatever he means to be saying, Pope Francis sometimes seems to be strongly implying exactly the title of this essay: We Christians Don’t Do Truth But We Do Poor People and Immigrants. He’s in line with a good number of Catholics, including many of the bishops and Cardinals of the West and most certainly the … [Read more…]
In The End of the Twentieth Century, the Hungarian-American — and Catholic — historian John Lukacs points out: [A]t the end of the twentieth century, many people respect religion as well as science, together; but the respect is faint. (This has to do with the fact that we have descended to a stage lower than … [Read more…]
Let me propose a new definition of a liberal: A liberal is one who values will greatly and thus is inclined to exaggerate his power over the thing-like world, over his own nature and the nature of other human beings, over a merely factual world, and — maybe — over truths. This seems strange in … [Read more…]
There is an argument of sorts being conducted in the Catholic Church between those who think the Fathers of the Vatican Council II erred in claiming God grants religious freedom to human beings and those who think Truth must always be served by…well, by serving some established view of the Truth. See Religious Freedom. Was … [Read more…]
A news story about an international meeting of the Jesuits, [ Cardinal Rode Exhorts Jesuits to Love Church], includes these paragraphs: [Cardinal Rode, prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life at the Vatican] also mentioned the “feeling of ever growing separation between faith and culture, a separation which … [Read more…]
I’ll start by asking two seemingly strange questions: Should we expect Heaven, the world of the resurrected, to be a magical world as in pagan myths of other worlds? Should we expect to spend time without end gallivanting around with all sorts of strange winged creatures and looking down into the Abyss of Hell — … [Read more…]
I have posted an article on my other blog, Thoughts…, which gives my initial impressions upon reading the first 200 pages, of 500, of Kazantzakis’ controversial novel. I claim that novel misses the mark somewhat but it’s not as much in conflict with Christian orthodoxy as the writings of theologians and philosophers in the Calvinist … [Read more…]
The answer would seem to be, “Yes”. We’ve lost our ability to say that Christ was man and God in one divine Person just because we use the word ‘person’ to refer to each instantiation of a human being. One of these two possibilities is true: Jesus of Nazareth was born a human person. If … [Read more…]