A Sound of Sheer Silence

Elizabeth Scalia called for submissions among the blogosphere on the question of why people stay Catholic .  I figured I would chime in, despite the fact that I am perhaps not the sort of person she had in mind to answer the question. The single sentence answer to the question for me is that I remain a Catholic because of its visceral catholicity.  James Joyce once famously defined Catholicism as "here comes everybody," and that remains for me the most salient definition of Catholicism.  To be "catholic," to be universal, is to include the wide variety of people and places that make up the human family, with all of their attendant particularities, baggage, opinions, and nuances. There is a danger of turning catholicity exclusively into an abstract, intellectual construct--a statement about the scope of the intellectual reach of the faith.  That's an important part of the definition of catholicity, but I don't think it is a substitute for actual, visceral...

Projection is Not the Same Thing as Analysis The story of Emily Letts is making its way through the Interwebz this week.  She is a 25-year old woman who filmed a video of her abortion and the immediate aftermath.  Letts says she released the video as a counter to the notion that abortion is a shameful act that leaves the women that seek one damaged in its wake.  Unsurprisingly, there has been commentary from the Catholic blogosphere, notably from Elizabeth Scalia .  Scalia purports, based on a study of her facial expressions in one segment of the video, to see the truth of the video: If you let yourself become distracted by what is coming from her mouth, you miss all that is revealed in her face, which tells the whole, and very different story. A month after the abortion — with the dramatic change in hairstyle that so many women effect when emotions are high and they need to feel in control of something — watch Emily, then. The light is gone from her eyes. The s...