So it looks like it’s Romney. Now what? Now we do our best to help him defeat Obama, for various reasons. One oft-overlooked reason is that there’s a very good chance of the Republicans taking over the Senate, and that’s quite important. The voters who’ll vote for Republican senators sometimes won’t show up at the polls … Read more
A Loudly-Delivered Homily Recently this video, of a homily given by Father Sammie Maletta of St. John the Evangelist parish in St. John, Indiana, has been making the rounds of the Catholic blogosphere. Give it a listen, if you will. My reaction to this video was: “Thank God for this fine priest.” Examining the reactions of … Read more
Evangelical preacher Rob Bell has created quite a stir by suggesting in his recent book that there is no hell, because God loves us so much. But this is exactly backwards: There is a hell because God loves us so much. Nobody goes to hell except those who irrevocably prefer something else to God … Read more
A Bleg All right, all you faithful Catholics out there. I’m about to make a “bleg”; that is, I’m going to beg something of the readers of this blog. I’m going to ask you to spell out, as best you can, in defense of the Catholic faith, the specific arguments from natural reason against a … Read more
This piece by Joe Carter at First Things prompted me to think about hillbillies. It cites some studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which found “that atheists and agnostics report anger toward God either in the past or anger focused on a hypothetical image of what they imagine God must be like.” … Read more
Brian Saint-Paul, in posting about Dan Burke’s piece at Religion News Service, alerted me to the following quote from Sister Simone Campbell, who is apparently one of those “progressive” Catholics I hear about: “Those [pro-choice, anti-limited-government, leftist legislators who culturally identify as Catholic] are folks who are really committed to the common good, with a … Read more
The Republicans have taken over the House of Representatives. Good. Fine. Way better than the alternative. WHAT NOW? Here’s the first step they must take, if they’re serious about not acting like the sometimes-corrupt, sometimes-perverse, sometimes-cowardly, self-serving Washington-insider unprincipled useless lumps of flesh they were in the later Bush years. (With, y’know, the human dignity … Read more
Bill Whittle, explaining the Natural Law underpinnings of good law, and observing what is the underlying (as opposed to the proximate) cause of the current economic malaise: What We Believe, Part 4: Natural Law It’s Part 4 of Bill’s series about what American conservatives (and especially Tea Party folks) believe. Here are Parts 1, 2, … Read more
A tip-of-the-hat to The Anchoress, who linked to this piece in which various experts with Divinity-School letters appended to their names convey their opinions about whether demons exist. The expert consensus is that they don’t. (No reasons for thinking this are given, naturally, because reason is irrelevant to expert consensus.) In reading some of these … Read more
I’m about to post some links to some videos by Bill Whittle from PJTV. The purpose of this post is to help readers of InsideCatholic understand the Tea Party folks and their manner of thinking about government. Why This Post? First, a bit of justification: It is worthwhile and apropos to write a post at … Read more
It is with some trepidation that I ask these two questions, steeling myself for getting lectured. But let me give the context, first. The Context I’ve been in the Church all of six months thus far (I was an evangelical, with no particular denominational opinions, until the last four years or so). My wife did … Read more
In the comment boxes under Joe Hargrave’s “Man vs. Nature,” I noted the following exchange. First, Deacon Ed made the following suggestion: If the Chinese mandate only 1 child families, would it be too much of a stretch for Catholics, who purport to understand God’s design for creation, to be encouraged to have 5 children … Read more
In his recent article “On Handguns and the Constitution,” Ronald J. Rychlak touched on the subject of private gun ownership and regulation in the United States. The occasion was the Supreme Court ruling McDonald v. Chicago, which established that the Second Amendment, like all the other items in the Bill of Rights, recognizes and protects … Read more
Please check out this article, at First Things, entitled “The Kids Are Not All Right.” The gist is that a movie has been made depicting the outcome when the children of lesbian couples who conceived by artificial insemination from an anonymous donor encounter their no-longer anonymous dads. Two things in this situation are clear: 1. … Read more