My parish, St. Dominic's in San Francisco, performed Bruckner's Requiem Mass in D Minor for All Souls Day last week. I wasn't at all familiar with the piece, but it was beautiful, and beautifully done by the outstanding choir.
I was introduced to The Body's Grace by Frank from Letters to the Catholic Right in this post , where he quotes Williams saying: It puts the question which is also raised for some kinds of moralist by the existence of the clitoris in women; something whose function is joy. If the creator were quite so instrumentalist in ‘his’ attitude to sexuality, these hints of prodigality and redundancy in the way the whole thing works might cause us to worry about whether he was, after all, in full rational control of it. But if God made us for joy…? I want to talk about the first part of that quote here, regarding the clitoris. I am not aware of any theology that has been done on the clitoris, but there should be. As Williams alludes to, the existence and nature of the clitoris is a theological "problem," especially if you want to hold on to traditional Christian sexual morality. It is especially problematic if you want to hold that sexuality needs to be understood through the...
I have two very hot takes. The first is that Joe Biden is the best United States President in my lifetime, and probably the best since Franklin Roosevelt, and his many critics on both the right and the left are wrong. The second is that the Irish monk Pelagius and his (mostly Celtic) disciples were basically right, and more specifically Pelagius's great opponent Augustine (and by extension the rest of the Western Church ever since) was wrong. But the hottest take, the Hegelian synthesis of this Hotness, is that these two takes are ultimately the same take. I believe that Biden is a great President because I am a Pelagian with a Pelagian world view, whereas American politics is fundamentally Calvinist, which is just Augustinianism taken to its logical conclusion. Let me try to justify this ball of hot takes. 1. Most of what we know of Pelagius comes from his opponents, especially Augustine and Jerome, who attempted (more or less successfully) to have him cast out ...
Exactly twenty-two years ago, in February of 2002, I was living in River Forest, Illinois, finishing up my undergraduate degree. I was living in an enormous old priory, hoping that I would be able to join the Dominicans when I was done with school in the summer (which, in fact, happened). The priory was built in the 50s, when the Dominicans would have classes of a fifty or sixty students a year. Those days were long gone, and so I was the only person living on the hall, on the far other side of the building from the actual Dominicans. Other than meals, I was basically living entirely by myself. In my evenings, after getting done with my homework, I had a ritual on weekdays. I would turn on the radio to the Chicago rock radio station Q101 and listen to the syndicated show Loveline . Loveline was a call-in show, focused on giving sex and relationship advice to teenagers and twenty-somethings. The hosts of the show were comedian Adam Corolla ...
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