A Sound of Sheer Silence

1. Last week, I went on a retreat with the CMMR .  We drove to Nazareth, Kentucky, to the mother-house of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth.  Nazareth, and that part of Kentucky generally, is a really interesting, and kinda strange, place.  The area was settled soon after the Revolutionary War by English Catholics from Maryland and some French Catholics fleeing Napoleon.  As a result, this area of north-central Kentucky (including the bigger towns of Bardstown and Elizabethtown) has this unusual Catholic through-line permeating what is otherwise the normal, rural American South. Likewise, the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth themselves were formed in the U.S. in 1812 to minister to this population, and other similar pockets of Catholics in the South and Midwest.  Thus, they are a uniquely and exclusively American expression of Catholicism.  Sure, they looked to European models for guidance (their rule is that of Vincent de Paul), but they are products...

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 ...

This summer, the Episcopal Church will be having its triennial General Convention, in Austin, Texas (a strange choice in my book, as Texas in July might as well be the surface of the sun).  Among the topics to be voted on is the initiation of the process to rewrite or revise the Book of Common Prayer, last done so in 1979.  Revisions to the Book of Common Prayer are truly a "third rail" and an inevitable source of controversy.  In fact, the Standing Committee on Liturgy and Music, the group that would be in charge of the mechanics of a revision, seems to be less than completely enthusiastic about the project, offering an alternative that would delay a revision for a least a decade .  And my sense, based on reading stuff on the Interwebs, is that it is likely that folks will take the out and kick the can down the road. The rector of my parish, who will be heading to Austin as a delegate, is resolutely against opening up the Prayer Book to wholesale revisions.  ...

[Warning.  There is no way to talk about what I want to talk about in this post without getting deep into story beats and specific elements from The Last Jedi .  So, this post will be one big spoiler for the movie.  Since the movie has only recently come out, if you have not seen it and want to be surprised, stop reading now.] I saw the new Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi , on opening night on Friday.  For an overall grade, I would give it an "A -."  There were elements that simply did not work, suggesting (strangely, given that this was such a massive, big budget film) that the script could have used one more editing pass.  Still, it was great fun, with some excellent performances--especially Daisy Ridley (Rey) and Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), who are excellent together. Reviews of the film have been very polarized.  On the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes , professional reviews were almost uniformly positive, while the fan review score is middlin...

We are coming to the point where no one really doubts that there is a serious divide in the Christian world, a divide that appears to be getting wider as time goes on.  But I feel like people are struggling to give a name to this divide, and I would like to take a crack at providing some framework for talking about this divide. On one side, you have a group of people who understand Christianity fundamentally and primarily as a way of life .  Under this view, we have been given by God a model of how to live our lives, a model that reflects the "best life" we and those around us can have, and our job is to go out and try as best we can to do that.  This model, above anything else, is to be found in the life and actions of Jesus of Nazareth as set forth in the canonical Gospels, and then secondarily in other parts of the Bible, and tertiarily in the lives of other Christian witnesses.   Under this view, the ultimate measure of whether and to what extent one...

1. In 1843, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote a book entitled Fear and Trembling .  The primary focus of the book is the story of Abraham's attempted sacrifice of his son Isaac on Mount Moriah (Genesis 22), known in the Jewish tradition as the Akedah .  Kierkegaard begins his analysis by noting that sacrificing one's own son, or any innocent person for that matter, is unethical.  In the normal course of affairs, if someone asked you or told you to kill your own child or some other random person, you would of course reject that request.  In fact, you would be obligated , by any reasonable moral framework, to reject that request.  Your ethical duty is clear, and it says that you must not kill an innocent child. But, in the Akedah , it is God who commands Abraham to kill Isaac.  As the creator of the universe and the ground of all being, God is generally seen as the ultimate source for all moral analysis.  If God is the ultimate measur...