Over the past decade, the mysterious epithet “neo-Catholic” has been tossed around now and then. I first encountered it courtesy of Rev. Joseph O’Leary, the famed “Spirit of Vatican II” combox denizen who seems to have endless amounts of time to troll the net on behalf of gay causes and no time to, like, … Read more
Culturally deprived and TV-less laggard that I am, I’ve been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD lately — for the very first time. First impressions: Joss Whedon can write rings around everybody else. Second impression: Dickens lives! By that, I mean that Whedon seems to have hit on Dickens’s formula: Create a character … Read more
Here’s a piece by a Lefty named Annalee Newitz about the insufficiently Lefty liberal power fantasy that energizes stories like Avatar: These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color — their cultures, their habitats, and … Read more
St. Thomas Aquinas was once tricked by his fellow students who cried out, “Look! A flying ox!” Thomas dutifully went to the window to look, and his peers all laughed at him heartily. Thomas’s reply (and one of the many reasons he’s a saint): “I thought it more likely that an ox would fly than … Read more
A recent headline from Zenit announces, “Scholars Aim to Disprove Darwin.” Â My thought: “Good luck with that.” I’m highly skeptical that guys like Hugh Owen, who believe in a young earth and the coexistence of dinosaurs and humans, are going to land any punches that overthrow the basic arguments for stuff like an old … Read more
For some reason, I still seem to mystify people in my views on the American political scene. Indeed, the most mysterious criticisms I get are the ones illustrated in the comments here, for instance, which say (in mixed tones of bafflement, rage, and disappointment), “How can you simultaneously be a Catholic writer who respects the … Read more
As readers in this space may have noticed, I have had a thing or two (or three) to say about the Bush/Cheney program of torture and the incredible lengths of sophistry to which spokesoids for the Thing that Used to Be Conservatism have gone on its behalf. My concerns have basically come down to this: … Read more
You may want to sit down for this, but flamboyantly apostate Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong actually thrilled me with a prescient bit of insight into Scripture! How is this possible? Well, there is a basic principle at work in the universe called the Gomer Pyle Axiom of High and Low Expectations. It works … Read more
One thing you can give our media Chattering Classes: They are utterly consistent. After Major Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire on a roomful of defenseless people in Fort Hood, it was absolutely assured that we would immediately be told that this outrage had nothing to do with his Islamic faith and that it was … Read more
I can’t help but like Kathy Shaidle, the scrappy author of a Canadian blog called Five Feet of Fury. I’ve always had a weakness for people who tell you exactly what they think and never bother to mince words, and Shaidle is all that. One of the most forthright critics of Canada’s Tyranny of Nice … Read more
Years ago, I heard a Black Pentecostal pastor in Spokane talking about a time he and some other local non-denominational pastors had been asked by a family they knew to come and pray for their granny who, her family said, “had an evil spirit.” One of the pastors was of a more modern frame of … Read more
Unam Sanctam is the sort of document that gives our Protestant brothers and sisters a real jolt, primarily because it looks at first blush as though it teaches that Catholics cannot have Protestant brothers and sisters. Written by Pope Boniface VIII in 1302, this papal bull concludes with a shocking dogmatic definition: We declare, … Read more
One of the great consolations Christians have is that we worship a God who has Himself wrestled with temptation. At the Judgment, we will face not an Olympian abstraction who breezed through on his looks and money, nor a severe and icy Critic who eyes us coldly and says, “Why can’t you just not be … Read more
Every couple of days it seems somebody falls apart due to “insensitivity.” The problem has been buzzing around in our headlines for years. We all remember back in January 1999 when a group of Professionally Aggrieved Grievance Professionals came unglued after David Howard, a white aide to Anthony Williams, the black mayor of Washington, D.C., … Read more
When asked why he had become a Catholic, G. K. Chesterton famously replied, “To get rid of my sins.” The forgiveness of sins is the awesome gift that Christ offers us, a gift so beautiful that words can scarcely express the glory of it. One of the most lovely things you can possibly experience is … Read more
Some years ago, my kids got a computer game called Myst. It‘s a very curious game — there are no instructions, no rules, and no commentary offered at the beginning. You find yourself plunked down into a strange environment on a mysterious island. You don‘t know where you are or why you‘re there. As you … Read more
Sane people never ask, “Did Michaelangelo cause the statue of David, or was it his chisel? Did Shakespeare cause Hamlet, or was it his pen? Choose!” But for some reason, when the subject turns to evolution, many fundamentalists, both atheist and Christian, completely forget that a thing can have primary and secondary causes. Instead, they … Read more
Our Lord teaches us to pray that God’s will be done “on earth as it is in Heaven.” But I sometimes fancy that we (and I know for certain that I) have seldom given any thought to what that means. Â I think that, in part, it’s because we don’t quite know what to make … Read more
Years ago, a friend’s brother was at Reed College in Oregon. It’s one of those schools where the students seem to major in protesting more than in actual studying. After several months of watching silly demonstrations about every conceivable PC cause, the guy decided to create one of his own, just to see how many … Read more
Roughly a century ago, a modernist scholar complained that Jesus came to proclaim the kingdom of God, but instead all we got was a lousy Church. He’s probably not the only person to have felt a bit disappointed, nor the only one to form the conviction that the Church is a tragic letdown, a mistake, … Read more