A Sound of Sheer Silence

I wish more people understood and made space for the very real grief that accompanies a crisis of faith/belief/trust. Perhaps we might give one other more grace. (Telling Catholics to “just leave already” probably isn’t the right thing to say at this moment.) https://t.co/Sk1fDjtkB6 — Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) August 27, 2018 Do I think people should leave the Roman Catholic Church?  On one level, yes, I do.  I left, and I do not regret my decision on any level.  The events of the last month or so have been public confirmation of the things that I came to believe about the structural brokenness of the Roman Catholic Church--things I have written about here , and here , and here .  I don't say this with schadenfreude, but simply a recognition that my concerns weren't simply in my own head or the product of some sort of anger or hostility.  And I am very happy and energized as a member of the Episcopal Church, optimistic about its future and its po...

A term that has recently entered The Discourse, or at least I have recently become aware of it, is "emotional labor."  Emotional labor is the work of regulating one's own feelings and emotional state in such a way as to maintain some sort of social environment.  More specifically, it is controlling or restraining one's own natural or reflexive emotional state in order to prevent someone else's emotional state from spiraling out of control.  So, if you are in a situation where you are scared of something, but you have to suppress or hide that because you know that if you show fear you will cause the person you are with to completely freak out, you are undertaking emotional labor. Emotional labor is usually brought up in the context of male/female relations, tied to the claim that women are expected to perform an undue amount of emotional labor insofar as they are presumed to have responsibility for the emotional state of their male partner.  Here we might think o...

Let's think for a moment about how we get around.  Human beings are clearly designed to walk upright.  Our spine is optimized for an upright posture, and is on a relative basis stronger than our quadruped cousins to handle the higher load at the top of the body.  Our head is set on top of the spine in a manner that has us looking forward naturally only when standing upright (and, conversely and unhelpfully, looking down when on all fours).  Our hips have a different design than most four-legged mammals, allowing for a greater range of motion but putting our legs in an awkward position relative to our torso if we are on all fours.  Our arms are shorter than our legs, forcing us either to "walk" with our knees as points of contact (which they are manifestly not designed to do), or else to arch our backs in an awkward and unstable posture.  Our hand bones are small and fragile, clearly not designed to take the repeated pounding involved in being a point of con...

In my last post , I previewed a discussion of Cardinal John Henry Newman and his highly influential work  An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.   A couple of months back, I talked about a discussion between Ross Douthat and Dr. Massimo Faggioli , regarding the future of the Roman Catholic Church in the Era of Francis.  One of the things that struck me about that conversation was that there was a hole in the middle of it--no one was able to really grapple with theological change and how it works.  Usually when issues involving theological change comes up, the default move is to cite to Newman .  I have read a great deal about  this work, but I had never actually read it myself. So, I went out and read it.  It was a clarifying read, because it is clear to me that the hole that Douthat and Faggioli circle around in their talk is a product of Newman and his approach.  Newman doesn't actually provide a theological basis fo...

Yesterday Pope Francis revised the Catechism of the Catholic Church in several places.  Most notably, he basically removed the "wiggle room" found in the original version with regard to the death penalty, saying that it was "inadmissible" in at least all modern situations (whereas before, the Catechism said it was likely improper in all modern situations).  This should not have come as much of a surprise--as Jack Jenkins notes in his piece, Francis more or less telegraphed that he was going to do this last year, and both Popes John Paul II and Benedict have been consistent in their opposition to capital punishment. The merits of this move (which I support fully, for what it is worth) are less interesting to me than the meta-conversation surrounding it.  Immediately, the usual suspects jumped to the fore , decrying the move as a repudiation of previous teaching, and thus a repudiation of the Magisterium of the church, and thus creating a divide by zero error that ...