thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb “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 ...
Other ways to make the point I made in my most recent entry:
It should be obvious that in the modern world there’s no such thing as a pluralistic society. After all, life today is marked by pervasiveness, complexity and comprehensiveness of social cooperation, and those things require common habits, understandings and beliefs. Further, modern modes of production, exchange and regulation depend on standardization. The present day is … More ...
The managerial welfare state rolls on, extending its responsibilities into more and more of social life. Tony Blair wants to add attitudes and informal personal connections to what’s administered, and to treat criminal law as simply an aspect of social management: TB’s vision for Britain.
Blair’s program follows coherently from the widely accepted basic … More ...
The obvious reason to become a Catholic is that you accept the claim of the Church to be a divine institution meant for all men, yourself included. A lot goes into that claim—what the world is like, how the Church fits into it, Church doctrine, ritual, organization, history, and what not else. One can discuss … More ...