First Thoughts

The Medicine Show Continues

David Barton and the limits of mixing religion and politics. Continue Reading »

First Links — 5.8.15

Rowan Williams: Can We Ever Be In Charge of Our Own Lives?
Rowan Williams, The New Statesman

Called to Greatness: Vocation and Dignity
Sherif Girgis, Ethika Politica

Smith's Transgender Delusion
Jonathan V. Last, The Weekly Standard

German Bishops to Allow Employees in Same-Sex Unions
Edward Pentin, National Catholic Register

What We've Been Reading

Last week I read Douglas Adams' The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the kind of fun space romp that the Guardians of the Galaxy film tried to be without quite succeeding (the parodies of bureaucratic-speak and jokes about Guardian readers are enough to make a sad puppy smile). I also read King of Kowloon: The Art of Tsang Tsou-choi, a very useful book on Hong Kong's Quixote, though I'm not persuaded that what he did is properly called “art.” I also reached the end of the Decameron and have started on it again, this time armed with notes.
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Chicken Soup for the Soulless

Buzzy Jackson is dismayed by “inspirational” books. Not so much because they exist, but because she “never encountered a single one that spoke directly to those of us with a secular outlook.” “Where was the motivating quote of the day for nonbelievers?” she asks. What she wanted was a Chicken Soup for the Soulless, depressing as that sounds on its face, for that one-fifth of Americans who claim no religious affiliation. She wanted a source of hope and comfort for “the atheists, the skeptics, the agnostics, and the ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ among us.” Yet, on going to the bookstore, she found a void. If Chicken Soup for the Soulless didn’t exist, would it be necessary to invent it? Yes, apparently. Continue Reading »

First Links — 5.7.15

Life in the Public Square
Randy Boyagoda, Michael W. Higgins, Molly Worthen, CBC radio

Pope Francis suggests Divine Comedy as Vital Reading for Year of Mercy
Catholic News Service, Catholic Herald

Review: A Short Guide to Praying as a Family
Br. Joseph Martin Hagan, Dominicana

How to take Christ out of Christianity
Alana Massey, The Washington Post

The Neuhaus Legacy

Neuhaus, public intellectual? Yesterday, CBC radio ran a long segment on the legacy of Richard John Neuhaus. Native of Pembroke, Ontario, it's fitting that Canada's public radio would cover the publication of his biography, written by Randy Boyagoda, also a Canadian. RJN's a native son gone . . . . Continue Reading »

The first E-pistle of @SaulofTarsus to his Followers on Instagram

Dear brothers and hipsters, I, @SaulofTarsus, mimetically writing to you from my iPhone, do exhort you to excuse any exegetical errors. This week, suffering from #FOMO, all things became oppressive and dark—not in a Lo-Fi or Brennan kind of way, but in a terribly Normal kind of way. Aiming my . . . . Continue Reading »

First Links—5.6.15

The Conference Manifesto
Christy Wampole, The New York Times

On Fraternities and Manliness
Emily Esfahani Smith, The New Criterion

From Parent to Parenting
Joseph Epstein, Commentary

Only the Chaste
Bevil Bramwell, OMI, The Catholic Thing

An Exercise in Begging the Question

The world was a dark and gloomy place until the Enlightenment came along, after which people began to think for themselves and break free from the shackles of religious authority. So we are told, once again, in The Moral Arc, a book by journalist Michael Shermer. For him, the Enlightenment did not merely accelerate humanity’s moral progress, but rather it reversed the moral regress characteristic of pre-Enlightenment human history. Since then, science and reason have been guiding humanity on a path toward justice, truth, and freedom. Continue Reading »

Protest and Survive, But How?

Only those churches which have a firm and elaborate grasp of the Christian faith are likely to survive in the coming years.
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