A Sound of Sheer Silence

I mean if Buttigieg thinks evangelicals should be supporting him instead of Trump, he fundamentally does not understand the roots of Christianity. But then he is an Episcopalian, so he might not actually understand Christianity more than superficially. — Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 7, 2019 Episcopalianism is to Christianity what Rice Krispies are to rice. It may have once been the later, but now it's just a hollowed out puff prone to snapping, crackling, and popping. — Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 8, 2019 Right-wing political commentator and self-professed evangelical Christian Erick Erickson decided to talk shit about my faith and my religious tradition over the last few days, and as such I feel entitled to respond. One can approach this response from a number of directions.  One obvious direction, and one that I saw commonly in the Twitter response to Erickson, is to interrogate this notion of "the roots of Christianity," which the Episcop...

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 ...

In the 80s movie War Games , a computer system (called, for reasons I don't remember, WOPR) is installed to take command of the nuclear arsenal of the United States.  A hacker played by a young Matthew Broderick accidentally triggers the "Global Thermonuclear War" scenario, and so WOPR attempts to run the scenario using real nuclear weapons.  In the climatic scene, Broderick "teaches" WOPR that nuclear war is an unwinnable game by causing the computer to replay itself Tic-Tac-Toe on a continuous loop.  Since Tic-Tac-Toe always ends up in a tie if the players understand the game, WOPR "learns" that all nuclear war scenarios, like Tic-Tac-Toe, always end in "ties," in that everyone is destroyed.  Having learned this lesson, WOPR provides the pithy lesson shown above: "A strange game.  The only winning move is not to play." I am becoming increasingly convinced that this sentiment describes the focus on orthodoxy--the idea that the ...

"The church is in need of reform."  This is one of those statements that is true, but obviously true in such a way as to have limited value.  The church is always in need of reform with regard to something,   Augustine went so far as to say that " ecclesia semper reformanda est "--the church is always to be reformed. But "reform" is not a specific enough concept to be useful.  Before you can reform something, you must figure out what needs to be reformed.  This is always a tricky and controversial bit, and often reform agendas never get off the ground as a result of fights over what to change and what to keep.  But even if you were to get consensus on what to do, there is the other tricky question of how to go about accomplishing these reforms.  Because, of course, reforms are not self-executing, and many a reform movement has sputtered and died as a result of execution problems.  The Catholic Church spent the better part of the Middle Ages...

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:  a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;  a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;  a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;  a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;  a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away;  a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;  a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace. Ecclesiastes 3:1-9. I know I said that this series was going to be done with five posts, but another dimension to this discussion occurred to me over the last few days that I felt was worth adding.  It is spawned from two things.  The first is the...

People who grow up in the United States, such as myself, have a very difficult time wrapping their heads around the idea of an established church.  Every November, we get together to eat turkey ostensibly in remembrance of folks who fled England to get away from the grasp of the established church.  People who agree on nothing about the meaning of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution agree that it means that the government cannot establish a church as the official church of the country.  The basic story we get is that an established church is bad because it puts the power of the state behind efforts of that particular church to enforce orthodoxy, leading to religious wars and conflict.  In addition, an established church is bad for that church, because the church will be "captured" and subject to the agenda of the state, compromising its freedom and witness.  And, certainly, there is support for both of those theses in the history of the established Chur...

Until stumbling upon this article today , I had not heard of Michael Coren.  He's Canadian, known primarily for existing in that narrow subculture known as "Catholic apologetics," along with the Catholic Answers crowd, Scott Hahn, Mark Shea, etc.  Most of those folks are converts, and Coren was as well.  He wrote books with frying pan-to-the-face titles like "Why Catholics Are Right." I should say he was part of that crowd, because now he is part of the Anglican Church of Canada.  His reasons for leaving Catholicism are not unique--LGBT issues primarily--but perhaps a little surprising for someone who used to walk in those circles.  Still, h is discussion of why he left seems honest and heart-felt , and certainly something I can relate to very easily.  He is walking the line that I am walking, and so I wish him nothing but the best. What was interesting to me is his discussion of the reaction from his former fellow travelers to his decision.  I sup...