Noah Toly opens his reply to my recent Q conference review by stating that my piece contained one big weakness. Apparently, this relates to my observation that at Q “bridges are favored over lines in the sand.” Toly replies, “While Q organizers and participants might find this refreshing, Murdock finds it obscurantist, lending a dangerously false sense of reconcilability to what might actually be irreconcilable positions.” Continue Reading »
The Telos Group works to offer a voice that is “genuinely pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, pro-American, and pro-peace, all at the same time.” These are admirable goals, and it is the Telos Group’s self-defined mission to strengthen the capacity of American Evangelicals “to help positively transform the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” To this end, Telos provides many services, such as all-expenses paid pilgrimages to Israel, where they select speakers to address tour participants. Continue Reading »
Memorial Hall is the ugliest building on the campus of Harvard University, in my view. Built in the 1870s, this Victorian monstrosity is situated between the stately columns of Harvard Yard on the one hand and the Science Center with its modern design on the other. Students frequently gather in the Cambridge Queen’s Head Pub in the basement of Memorial Hall. It was here, on Monday evening, May 12, that the Harvard Extension School’s Cultural Studies Club had planned to reenact a “black mass.” A black mass is a grotesque, sacrilegious ceremony in which the most sacred rite of the Catholic Church is deliberately mocked. Satan and his pomp are invoked, often in Latin, and a consecrated Eucharistic host is desecrated, often in vulgar, revolting ways. That Harvard would host such a bigoted event was a surprise to many. Continue Reading »
In November 2012, my wife and I visited Hagia Sophia, the great former Eastern Orthodox basilica. For me, it was an emotional pilgrimage. I converted to Eastern Orthodoxy in 2007, and Hagia Sophia is to us what St. Peter’s is to Roman Catholics, and to a far lesser degree I suppose, what Mecca is to Muslims. Continue Reading »
I know it rankles, but I’m afraid it’s a fact, one we need to acknowledge if we’re to think clearly about our ecumenical commitments. Protestantism doesn’t figure in the way Catholics think about the future of Catholicism. Continue Reading »
When we first met in April 2011, what initially impressed me about Sviatoslav Shevchuk was his almost preternatural calm: which was striking, in that, less than a month before and still a few weeks shy of his 41st birthday, Shevchuk had been elected Major-Archbishop of Kyiv-Halych and head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church—the largest of the Eastern Catholic Churches, Byzantine in liturgy and governance while in full communion with the Bishop of Rome. Continue Reading »
U.N. experts in Geneva were at it again last week telling the Holy See that Catholic teaching on abortion is a human rights abuse, revealing a chasm between the Church’s understanding of its mission and how U.N. officials perceive it. The episode is reminiscent of a time in history when secular leaders did not accept a separation of Church and State. Continue Reading »
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote that the answer to objectionable speech “is more speech, not enforced silence.” This seems a most reasonable proposition. If you are offended by someone’s position, you can counter it with your own arguments and expose their error for the world to see and reject. It is a concept that has served our Republic well in the fight for liberty and freedom. Continue Reading »
John Murdock’s “A Crash Course in Q” was an intriguing piece with one big weakness. Though Murdock’s critique resonated with many of my own reservations about how we frame Christian engagement with culture (including conference-culture), my experience of Q is completely vicarious, so modesty requires me to withhold or temper my own evaluation of the conference. But my experience of the fault lines that Murdock highlights for us is more extensive and direct. I see in them a much bigger challenge than Murdock’s essay suggests. Continue Reading »
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