Soumagne Catholic Charities in Illinois has closed down all its foster-care operations rather than comply with new regulations allowing same-sex couples to adopt. The bishops’ lawyers are out, contesting that they have a First Amendment right to freedom of religion, and hence do not have to abide by state regulations; which sounds mildly plausible, until you […]
Category Archives: Religion
Catholic Charities on the Dole.
30-Dec-11Of all the Hitchens videos posted recently, this is my favorite. He is eloquent without stint after a slow exordium, chronicling various ecclesiastical offenses, moving from ones the hierarchy acknowledges to fresh and contemporary outrages. “I don’t know I think I’d like to hear more shame about this. I’d like to see a bit more […]
Christopher Hitchens, Flagellum Dei.
19-Dec-11I see no particular reason to call Christopher Hitchens a good person – anyone, as I have said, who leaves his wife when she is pregnant with their second child is safely distancing himself from all the more benign forms of respectability – but I must confess that despite the obvious – despite Greenwald’s pointing […]
Truth, Religion, and Universalism.
02-Dec-11I wrote my piece contra Mr. Kreeft very quickly, and wish to revisit two thoughts: First of all, on “truth.” I knew there was something interesting to be said about Kreeft’s contention that it was the “crackpot” colleges – Thomas Aquinas College, Christendom College, et al. – alone which were defined by the pursuit of […]
An unusually bad essay crossed my computer screen the other day, by Peter Kreeft, who is apparently a kind of figure in Conservative Catholic circles. To give a sense of what sort of person he is, supposedly he was asked whether a Catholic could be a liberal, and he said it was “a very challenging […]
Seeking a true religion.
19-Nov-11A great set of reader emails on Sullivan’s blog, proving once again how good his system is of disallowing comments but printing good reader emails. The issues – whether the universe itself can be said to have any “relationship” with us, what is left of the old religions once our critical faculties are done dissecting […]
Yet another remarkable story from Plutarch. The similarities to the sacrifice of Isaac are remarkable, and in general, whether or not religious precepts should be exposed to this kind of treatment, as opposed to taken at face value, is one of the perennially relevant theological questions; and whether or not the virtue of actions may […]
Andrew Sullivan on the New Atheists.
11-Nov-11I utterly agree with him: I have written about Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins before, as well as their spiritual progenitor Bertrand Russell.
“However destructive may be the policies of the government and the methods and products of the corporations, the root of the problem is always to be found in private life. We must learn to see that every problem that concerns us as conservationists always leads straight to the question of how we live. The world […]
The Bayside Prophet.
31-Dec-11remorselessly Stumbled across the writings of Veronica Leuken, the authoress of a series of mad, mildly sadistic and occasionally humorous prophecies revealed to her by the Blessed Virgin and Jesus in – where else? – Bayside, Queens. As with all prophecies – one of the very worst habits of the Biblical tradition – they are a […]