The Fearful Descent
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Fast facts for fasting
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis has called for a day of fasting and prayer tomorrow. And to help people prepare, the U.S. bishops have posted a quick guide on what fasting entails:
For the two days of the year when the Church requires fasting of Catholics (Ash Wednesday and Good Friday), the parameters of the fast are given as: “When fasting, a person is permitted to eat one full meal. Two smaller meals may also be taken, but not to equal a full meal.” Catholics may, of course, eat less, but this is considered the minimum required.
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Fast facts for fasting
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis has called for a day of fasting and prayer tomorrow. And to help people prepare, the U.S. bishops have posted a quick guide on what fasting entails:
For the two days of the year when the Church requires fasting of Catholics (Ash Wednesday and Good Friday), the parameters of the fast are given as: “When fasting, a person is permitted to eat one full meal. Two smaller meals may also be taken, but not to equal a full meal.” Catholics may, of course, eat less, but this is considered the minimum required.
View original post 354 more words
Kristeva’s Declaration of Dependence: On JP2
The only thing better than exposing famous atheists as believers as I did with Sartre and Camus is enlisting the help of atheists in unpopular ecclesial causes. I sense the tide has turned, especially for Neo-Cons, on John Paul II. Their attempts to baptize capitalism and every American war with the aid of JP2 have fallen short. A surprising number of them now busies themselves taking the same sorts petty pot shots at Wojtyla they once hated from liberal Catholics (I won’t stoop to linking their attacks).
I would argue being in the crosshairs of both sides of the theological spectrum is a good place to be. But don’t let me make the argument. I’ll let Julia Kristeva, an atheist, feminist, and psychoanalyst make it for me. (She also appeared at the 2011 World Day of Prayer for Peace in Assisi. You can read her call for peace…
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Acquainted with the Night: The Art of Jerzy Nowosielski (An IMAGE Journal Essay)
Here’s an artistic blast from the past.
What follows is an essay I published with IMAGE Journal with the help of the Starmach Gallery in Krakow (You too can own a Nowosielski!).
IMAGE needs your generous emergency donations more than ever. They are in serious financial trouble through no fault of their own. I know many of you read IMAGE, so please step up.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
—Robert Frost
Lately I’ve become acquainted with the night coursing through my veins. Like any good diabetic, I have to draw murky drops of blood several times daily to measure my sugar levels…
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Catholic-Bashing: America’s Last Acceptable Prejudice (Vis–à–Vis the Fortnight for Freedom Campaign)
[The contents of this post have been slightly modified for this repost.]
Systematic prejudice in America is rightfully in the spotlight again after yesterday’s verdict in Florida. The reaction to it reminded me of an article by Philip Jenkins, a sociologist who is America’s most even-handed commentator on religion. The article below summarizes the argument of one of his most important books The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice.
The irony is that anti-Catholicism is so pervasive in the United States that it’s invisible. The biased coverage of the priest sex-abuse scandals is one recent example that’s also the subject of another book by Jenkins, Priests andPedophiles.
I also dug out this article because of a bigoted anti-Catholic comment today on my Kristeva post by someone named “Frank.” I initially wanted to respond to it, but the whole thread landed in this blog’s trashcan. I…
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A True Opium for the People is a Belief in Nothingness After Death!
A message from beyond the grave from the poet Czeslaw Milosz who died on this day in 2004.
When was the last time any of you (who don’t attend fundamentalist churches) heard a good and theologically sound hellfire sermon? The last, no the only one, I’ve ever heard was in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Here it is in its glorious entirety if you need a memory refresher (BE AFRAID!):
Over the last two centuries Hell has been banished from the Catholic imagination more effectively than Adam and Eve from Eden. I suppose the last blows came sometime during the long 19th century dominated by Napoleon, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, and Feuerbach.
The infernal trenches of World War I gave hellfire a slight rebound. The whole messy experience cast hell from oblivion back into our world, but not the underworld. It became a truism to say that people not infrequently make hell on earth. The concentration camps and gulags of World War II…
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Attn: University of Notre Dame Press Overstock Sale!
Only two days left to take advantage of these savings.
These overstock events remind me I will probably never get over my book addiction.
The University of Notre Dame Press is selling over 400 titles online, most priced at $5 per book, with a few priced at $10 and $15. You can get all the instructions and link to the sale books here (there’s a code, NDEOVR13 , you have to type in at checkout, so make sure you read this page first):
I’ve already spotted Fritz Bauerschimdt’s book on Julian of Norwich, a book on von Balthasar made famous by the pope emeritus, a book by the head of the Erasmus institute James Turner, one onDante and Petrarch, one by Hauerwas on Truthfulness and tragedy, a book by Haldane, another one by Grisez, Soloviev’s essays, Nicholas Boyle’s great book on literature as theology that was positively reviewed by Greg Wolfe inIMAGE Journal…
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Famous Atheists Who Weren’t Atheists 2: The Christianity of Camus
There’s nothing strange about this Camus post being one of our greatest hits.
Albert Camus was nearly as unfaithful as Jean-Paul Sartre . . . to atheism.
This should not be especially surprising to any semi-conscious reader of his novels. Despite his good existentialist intentions Camus could never really get beyond good and evil. Most of his literary works collapse under the weight of trying to cover up their origins in, and direct debts to, classical Christian doctrines, especially Original Sin.
It’s as if he keeps trying to roll a rock to seal off the tomb, only to find it rolled away every darn morning. Just look at the plots of The Fall, The Plague, and The First Man and tell me God shouldn’t sue for copyright infringement upon the biblical narrative.
The connections go even deeper as a recent memoir reveals. The book is entitled Albert Camus & the Minister. It is written by the (Methodist) minister, Howard…
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Modern Religious Pluralism is Neither Radical nor Modern
Myth-busting 101 with Robert Louis Wilken.
Commentators on religion are always harping about how our contemporary “radically pluralist” situation is unprecedented, and more likely than not, catastrophic for the Christian tradition.
Self-styled radical theologians such as John Hick in God Has Many Names, Charles E. Winquist in Desiring Theology, plus John Shelby Spong and Raimondo Panikkar in academically less respectable volumes (whose names I shall not mention), argue that Christian theology must change or die in the face of this revolutionary situation.
Robert Louis Wilken, one of our most important scholars of early Christianity, believes nothing could be further from the truth. In the volume Remembering the Christian Past (Eerdmans, 1995) he proves that we’re only replaying the debates of early (and medieval) Christians:
“Christians, however, have long had to face the challenge of other religions. For the first four hundred years of Christian history a traditional religious culture (which was not, as once…
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Cosmos the in Lost 