A Sound of Sheer Silence

I continue to maintain that Melinda Selmys is the most interesting voice coming from the conservative Catholic end of the pool (notwithstanding that many on that side think that she is Not a True Conservative).  What I like about her is her willingness to push on some of the neuralgic points of Catholic philosophy and theology, moving beyond the "happy talk" style of many on that end.  In doing so, she often points out questions and problems that I had not seen before or thought about in any depth.  Often I do not agree with her conclusions, but her formulation of the problem is usually very helpful. Over the holiday weekend here in the U.S., she produced a pair of articles that are examples of why she is an interesting voice.  Her first post, entitled "10 Reasons Why Homosexuality Is Not a Natural Law Issue,"  is actually mis-titled.  Her argument is not that traditional Catholic natural law has nothing to say about homosexuality, but that what it does ...

I received an email about my last post .  The writer of the email took me to task for failing to take the conservative Anglicans at face value.  The author felt that I was dismissive of their positions and their arguments.  That I was being "a culture warrior." He is right, in a sense.  I am finding it increasingly difficult to find common ground with the more conservative members of my own religious tradition, whether conceived of more narrowly as "Catholicism" or more broadly as "Christianity."  I am slowly losing the willingness to "see things from their point of view."  And, there is a definitely a part of me that wonders whether this does stem from a lack of perspective, a lack of charity, a lack of balance. But, I don't think so.  And the reason I don't think so is well expressed in this essay by James Alison, one of his best among his many great writings.   The essay, on its face, relates to the issue of in the inclusion of LGB...

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...

Stephen Colbert famously coined (or, at least, popularized) the word "truthiness" early-on in his Colbert Report  program.  "Truthiness" is an assertion that something is true based not on facts, but on one's own subjective sense of what is correct.  Importantly, a statement is not "truthy" if is it incapable  of being proven or disproven by objective criteria--"I love you" cannot be demonstrated to be true or false according to any kind of objective criteria, but that doesn't make it truthy.  Instead, truthiness comes where a claim can  be judged by objective criteria, but the person making the statement simply chooses to ignore those criteria and assert it anyway.  So, while "I love you" is not truthy, "I am capable of hitting a Major League fastball" is certain truthy in my case, in light of my mediocre eyesight and lack of discernible hand-eye coordination.  No amount of believing I can do it changes the fact t...

I wouldn't describe myself as coming from a particularly "science-y" family, but we were certainly exposed to science and encouraged to view it in a positive light.  When I was young, I got really into astronomy, and my parents certainly encouraged that.  I remember that they let me go to a "backward astronomy" course on a Saturday morning, where we looked at sunspots through a telescope and talked about how to find constellations in the night sky.  Viewing conditions in central New Jersey will never be mistaken for the top of a mountain in the Arizona desert, but at one point I was pretty good at picking out specific stars, and I think my parents let themselves get dragged outside in the cold to look at stars with me. The other area of science that I loved as a kid (like many kids, I suspect) was dinosaurs.  My mother took my brother and I to the Museum of Natural History in New York City to look at the dinosaurs, and we had numerous books about the various t...