thoughts in and out of season
The Italian publisher of Mother Theresa’s letters and diaries seems to be putting out some teasers: Mother Teresa’s diary reveals her crisis of faith. Still, she became such a symbol that it does seem doubtful she was exactly as portrayed and as people wanted her to be. It will be interesting to find out … More ...
The Pope’s message for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees (“To Overcome Racism, Xenophobia and Exaggerated Nationalism”) is in one sense typical—it follows the line all respectable Christian religious leaders now follow—but in another sense quite extraordinary:
I’m dubious too about the projected war with Iraq, although the reason may be that I know so little about the situation. Still, it’s important to sort through the issues rationally. With that in mind, it seems to me that the definition of “just cause” as a case in which “the damage inflicted by the … More ...
Is the EU a threat or a fantasy? One sometimes wonders: A pair of meteors head for Brussels, both called Fraud. It’s not clear from the article how big the problem of corruption is at present, but it’s structural and seems likely to get far worse with the expansion of the EU to Eastern … More ...
“The question of whether God exists is less important than whether he is love.”
I’ve run into this a couple of times now on Catholic blogs and it really seems wrong to me. If we talk about God while putting his existence to one side a statement about his nature becomes a statement about our … More ...
Dogma, the question of what we can know and what is real, is essential to religion. We can’t commit ourselves to what is nonexistent or utterly unknowable. We need God because we lack something, and what we lack must be supplied by something not ourselves. The God we need is therefore one who is real, … More ...
I’ve been reading or paging through a couple of books critical of antiliberal Catholics: Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei, by Robert A. Hutchison, and Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism, by Michael W. Cuneo. Both give some interesting background info, although the first … More ...
All roads lead to Rome. Looking at what I’ve posted on Metanoia it seems my own road has been more through metaphysics, ethics and law than anything else. All of which are important and even necessary things but somewhat ancillary. They point beyond themselves and set the stage so that the real work can begin.
A rather neat application of the principle everything is really its opposite: Judging Judaism by the Numbers. Numbers don’t matter, the author says, because “the ongoing conversation that is Judaism can happen anywhere, between anyone.” Buddhism can be the triumph of Judaism. And “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” really means “radical … More ...
I’ve started reading Jonathan Kwitny’s Man of the Century, which seems a competent account of the Pope’s life by a very industrious New York journalist well-known as an investigative reporter. The author’s basic outlook is that of a mainstream New York journalist—my guess is that he’s a secular Jew—but he admires the Pope and … More ...