Andrew Sullivan has been thinking about Christianity lately – what’s happening to it on a large scale. I don’t think he’s doing a great job expressing himself on this topic, and I think he is aware of this. I think he’s fighting the good fight, but something about it is daunting and indeed depressing. For […]
Category Archives: Religion
Sigh. Christians.
05-Apr-12online pharmacy isotretinoin I have heard this line bandied about as proof that Jesus died feeling betrayed by God – which, I will admit, is a possible interpretation, though intriguingly this saying is reported by two men – “Matthew” and “Mark,” whoever they were – who obviously thought Jesus was the Messiah and Son of God and not […]
Thomas Browne.
30-Mar-12“It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no further state to come, unto which this seems progressionall, and otherwise made in vaine; without this accomplishment the naturall expectation and desire of such a state, were […]
Contraception.
20-Feb-12I’ve been far too busy to write or even think too much – the unhappy result of teaching – but thank goodness for Garry Wills, to express what his Church actually knows and believes.
Everything and Anything But Edifying.
05-Feb-12“This expression, ‘God’s world,’ may sound sentimental to some ears. For me it did not have this character at all. To ‘God’s world’ belonged everything superhuman – dazzling light, the darkness of the abyss, the cold impassivity of infinite space and time, and the uncanny grotesqueness of the irrational world of chance. ‘God,’ for me, […]
Night in the Desert.
05-Feb-12Feeling horribly contained by urban life here, I drove out of the city not really knowing where I was going and pulled my truck to the side of the road by a small shrine about fifty miles into the desert. I pulled out my sleeping bag and found a spot where the rocks were a […]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IAhDGYlpqY Language changes, and words take on new meanings in time, but this is an example of a meaning-shift a bit bewildering to me. I’ve seen it enough so I should be fine with it; but the word “religion” is being used to mean “everything I dislike about religion” or “bad religion.” Here in this […]
This Just Doesn’t Stop.
26-Jan-12The headmaster of the Delbarton School has been accused of sexual misconduct with the school’s boys. There are multiple accusers. The (former) headmaster, Fr. Luke Travers, is a Benedictine monk and was headmaster of the school while I was there. He was slightly creepy, but it is only fair to say that a large percentage […]
Blessing of New Parents.
22-Jan-12This is from the “never saw that before” department: while at mass at San Augustin cathedral in Tucson, I was going up to communion behind a couple with a newborn infant. They were very cute: they were supposed to go up to communion in single file, but walked up half side-by-side as if unable to […]
Again, the Absurdity.
31-Mar-12Another display of the universe’s fearsome absurdity came on October 9th, 1992, when a meteor streaked across the entire eastern United States, breaking up over Kentucky and being filmed in Pittsburgh and elsewhere while streaking to its destiny of knocking out a taillight on a parked 1980 Chevy Malibu in a driveway in Peekskill, New […]