A Sound of Sheer Silence

This Saturday, our priory of the Community of Mary, Mother of the Redeemer had our first monthly day of reflection.  There are five of us here in Columbus, at least for now--we have a half-dozen or so folks who are interested.  In any event, we met for about four hours, mostly just talking about what is going on in our individual and collective lives, as well as a book we are reading together.  In many ways, it was like chapter meetings that have been going on in monasteries and other religious communities for 1600 years.  But, there is was at least one way in which it was different from those chapter meetings.  Among the five of us, only one--me--is a straight man. In the last 36 hours, I have been trying to put together what I think the significance of this fact is, because I think it is significant, at least on some modest scale.  While we were meeting, we learned that one of the oldest horrors that have stalked Christian and Christian-influenced so...

In the last couple of weeks, I've been listening to a great podcast called Inglorious Pasterds .  The three guys who make up the show--Matt Polley, Brad Polley, and Michael Baysinger--are insightful as well as funny and irreverent in the best possible way.  It's great, and the community that has formed around it is pretty great as well.  Seriously, check them out. Anyway, this week they had Pastor Brian Zahnd on the podcast.  My twitter friend "Egregious Philbin" turned me on to Zahnd a few months back, and his discussion on the podcast was interesting and challenging.  One of the things he said that stuck with me was, when discussing the full-throated embrace by evangelicals of Trump and the trapping of power, he said (paraphrasing a bit) that "they (i.e. evangelicals) don't see the Kingdom of God working in the world, and so they turn to political action to fix things." I think that's right, and it is even broader than just talking about Trump ...

Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the release of the Second Vatican Council document Nostra Aetate ("In Our Time").  I have not counted words, but I believe  Nostra Aetate  is the shortest of the Vatican II documents, clocking in at only five paragraphs.  Nevertheless, there is an argument to be made that  Nostra Aetate  is the most consequential of all of the Vatican II documents, and is undoubtedly the most revolutionary. Special attention should be paid to Paragraph 4 of  Nostra Aetate .  The document as a whole is about the relationship between the Catholic Church and non-Christian religions, and Paragraph 4 deals with Judaism. In it, it makes three major claims.  First, while acknowledging that Catholics believe Jesus to represent the true fulfillment of the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants, it rejects the notion this transition from the old to the new covenant leaves continued practitioners of the old divorced from God's love a...

I am going to make a bet with you.  Nothing that comes out of the Synod on the Family--no speech, no document, no pronouncement from the Pope-- will prove to be as significant as the Pope's speech on Saturday.   The prompting for the speech was the 50th anniversary of the institution of the Synod of Bishops in the aftermath of Vatican II, and in the speech Pope Francis lays out in the clearest form his vision of the Church and the role of the Synods in that Church.  It is, I think, the most radical thing that Pope Francis has ever said.  If Pope Francis is able to implement this vision, the nature and operation of the Catholic Church will be different.  Not unrecognizably different, but different nonetheless. There are at least three important take-aways from the speech. The first has to do with the final outcome of the current Synod on the Family happening in Rome.  Amid talk that the Synod was doomed to fail  as a result of diminishing prospects fo...

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...

1.  Many years ago, I read a book by Karen Armstrong entitled The Battle for God .  In the book, Armstrong tries to define and explore the concept of "fundamentalism."  Technically, fundamentalism refers to a specific movement in Protestant Christianity, stemming from the Niagara Bible Conference in the 1880s and 1890s that defined what it believed to be the "five fundamentals" of Christian faith.  However, the term "fundamentalism" has expanded to other religious contexts, so we talk about Islamic Fundamentalism, Jewish Fundamentalism, etc.  In fact, in her book, Armstrong discusses the history of Jewish, Islamic and (Protestant) Christian fundamentalisms in parallel. But what is fundamentalism?  Armstrong argues that it has three basic components--a substantive component, a political or social component, and a rhetorical component.  The substantive component is a whole-cloth rejection of the values of the broader society in which it finds itself--i...