On the Square Today

Joe Carter’s column today explores the impulse among some Christians to try to outdo Christ at his own game. Though a good number of Christian groups mandate teetotaling, Carter takes the Southern Baptist Convention to task for its disappointing effort to answer the question, ” What Would Jesus Drink? “:

. . . While my fellow Southern Baptists consider Christ to be the Creator and Sustainer of the cosmos, we would not consider him fit to serve as a trustee for the Southern Baptist Convention. Not only was Jesus a “user of alcoholic beverages” (Luke 7:33-34), but he had the audacity to turn perfectly good water into wine.

George Weigel’s column is a reminder that, as the beatification of John Paul II nears, we ought not to forget he was an everyday Christian disciple as much as an extraordinarily saint :

When the Church puts the title “Blessed” or “Saint” on someone, the person so honored often drifts away into a realm of the unapproachably good. We lose the sense that the saints are people just like us, who, by the grace of God, lived lives of heroic virtue: a truth of the faith of which John Paul II never ceased to remind us.