Salt I’ve been impressed recently by the intelligence, articulateness, and unapologetically rakish character of Christopher Hitchens, and curiosity about and respect for the man prompted me to take a look at the fashionable atheist books of the day, beginning with his God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. As is always the case with modern […]
Tag Archives: Christianity
Sillamäe An extraordinary talk by Brene Brown on vulnerability. I’ve recently had a spate of conversations with people about why I would describe myself as religious – they themselves find religion unnecessary at best, and know that there many things about religion that I object to. And here is seemingly a good example of religion […]
“Tell me, you who wish to be under a Law: have you not heard the Law? It is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a maidservant and one of a free woman. The son by the maidservant was according to the flesh, and the son by the free woman was according to the […]
For the Feast of John the Baptist: this extremely good essay by Wendell Berry; highly recommended. Proof – as if it were needed – that the Magisterium of the Church resides not in the priesthood – which is almost always wrong – but in the Prophets. As it was, is now, and ever shall be. […]
Divine Mercy.
14-Jun-10Incredible readings in Church today, and relevant to the moment. The sin of David with Uriah (I must confess I think about this story all the time, since Jung pointed out to me that Uriah is a figure of Christ), Paul’s letter to the Galatians (always amazing), and the following from the Gospel, on the […]
Sully and Christianity…
06-Jun-10An interesting post by Andrew Sullivan particularly relevant for the tendency of religious people today to look backwards to some previous era as purer or more holy than what we have today. As someone who has spent much of his life with Latin and people who love Latin I know this tendency well. The sum […]
The Last Station.
17-Mar-10Tolstoy is a figure I have always kept at arm’s length; beyond reading Anna Karenina (easily the greatest novel ever written; really no other deserves to be put in the same paragraph with it; I hated it) and the most famous short stories, I have mostly avoided him. That he was full of hatred and […]
Inner and Outer.
25-Dec-09If an alien de Tocqueville came to a Christian church to write a “Religion on Earth” book, he would probably conclude that two major tenets of Christianity are dressing up and showing up. And the holier the occasion, the more the commandments “thou shalt dress up” and “thou shalt show up” are followed. For a […]
“Jesus was poor so we could be rich.”
29-Nov-09Andrew Sullivan takes on, in few words, the “Prosperity Gospel” – the Bad News – and gives some real spiritual teaching. It’s staggering really that modern American Christianism supports wealth while Jesus demanded total poverty, fetishizes family while Jesus left his and urged his followers to abandon wives, husbands and children, champions politics while Jesus […]
Establishment Christianity.
21-Dec-10Astonishing statement by a U.S. servicemember on DADT, reported to me by a friend: “This is the first time my government and my religion are in conflict.” What an indictment of establishment Christianity. On the normal processes of military operation – killing, torture, violence – a soldier can see his Church as favorable or irrelevant. […]