thoughts in and out of season
Since Vatican II the updated Church has fallen into the unfortunate updated habit of churning out an ever-increasing flood of words and events. That rather misses the point, it always seemed to me. Didn’t people use to talk about a “small still voice” and that sort of thing in connection with religion? So it’s a … More ...
Here’s a list of Benedicts’s deeds of terror while Grand Inquisitor: Timeline of principal doctrinal decisions, documents, 1981-2005.
It’s worth a look. Every 6 or 8 years he’d say some book or theologian isn’t Catholic. Once he excommunicated a leftwing theologian, and a couple of times he did the same to a rightwing archbishop. … More ...
An English lady Catholic theologian, a convert from the C of E, once forced me to read John Robinson’s Honest to God, saying it was the book that ended Anglicanism over there. The English clergy read it, she said, and they all abandoned the faith.
After reading the thing I found her story despiriting … More ...
So far as I can tell, “religion in politics” means that people vote and so on based on what they think the world is actually like, how we know things, what the point of life is, what makes life good or bad and so on. What’s the purified alternative to that?
Or so said Goethe. It turns out that a major advantage we have today here in America is that feminist English, bad though it is, isn’t as bad as feminist German. The Teutonic gift for heavy-handed seriousness and linguistic clunk has lost none of its vigor. Some examples from an interview with a Viennese theologian, … More ...
Here’s some background on the new guy in the Pope’s old job at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. My best guess is that the Pope thinks the Church’s big problems are in Europe and America. On that view it’s natural he’d appoint (if available) a theologically-trained American with CDF experience who’s personally … More ...
The tyranny of liberalism is mostly a tyranny of ideas. It’s not completely disembodied, of course. Like every tyranny it’s run in a way consistent with the tyrants’ power and profit. The professional and managerial classes and bureaucratic and financial interests that maintain it benefit from the conversion of informal traditional arrangements into bureaucratic and … More ...
What is liberalism?
The view that equal freedom is the highest public standard, and that society should be a rational arrangement to put that standard into effect.
How can liberalism be tyrannical?
“Tyranny” is usurped and abused power. The goals of liberalism are comprehensive, and it views them as a simple matter of justice and … More ...
It’s hard to imagine how sex could be put into some kind of order without any reference at all to traditional taboos. How could you conceivably rationalize something so basic and powerful and hard to get a grip on and make it a matter of simple free choice? With that in mind, it seems obvious … More ...
A problem with expertise as now understood is that it makes standards of objective rigor substitute for common sense, and it can’t nail down enough things to deal with the world or even most practical situations in a way that comes up to those standards. The result is that what’s proposed for our belief are … More ...