Religion
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Sunday Night Journal — September 18, 2011 Now and then I talk to someone who’s visited Rome, and almost always, especially if the person is Catholic, I’m told that it’s a wonderful experience. And I say “Yes, I’m sure it is,” but I always feel a little guilty that I don’t feel more enthusiasm for…
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Some people think it foolish to ask God for little things, but I do not think it matters at all what one asks for, so long as in asking for anything one recognizes one's own dependence on God…. Sometimes a tiny childish thing brings home to us more than a big thing the intense love which can…
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Via Image magazine on Facebook, here are two articles by the same person, Lillian Daniels, a liberal Protestant (United Church of Christ) minister: You Can't Make This Up and Spiritual But Not Religious? Stop Boring Me. Surprisingly, the second one is at the Huffington Post. It's just a few paragraphs; the first is more substantial. She's amusing in places:…
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Via Image magazine on Facebook, here is an interesting piece at pop culture mag Paste: a discussion of Sufjan Stevens and the general situation of the Christian artist in an anti-Christian culture. In general it's not anything that anyone familiar with the thinking of writers like Walker Percy hasn't already heard, but it's interesting that it appears here.…
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Or should I say the dark? At any rate, he sees and accepts the hopelessness of the atheistic attempt to derive morality from the bare facts of physical existence. The thing that annoys me most about the loud spokesmen for shallow atheism–Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, et.al.–is their refusal even to admit that this problem exists.…
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Christianity does not proclaim merely some salvation of the soul in a vague afterlife in which all that is precious and dear to us in this world would be eliminated, but promises eternal life, “the life of the world to come.” Nothing that is precious and dear to us will fall into ruin; rather it…
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Sunday Night Journal — July 24, 2011 As almost anyone who is at all interested in the matter knows, the promulgation of Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae reaffirming the ancient Christian ban on artificial (barrier or chemical) methods of avoiding pregnancy came at the end of a decades-long struggle for their acceptance. The pope took…
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Somewhere in Chesterton there's a passage that compares the Protestant Reformation to a shipwreck, and it closes with the observation that, as with a real wreck, the survivors are always going back to the wreckage to retrieve something. I thought of that when I read this story about an evangelical group which is practicing perpetual worship. …
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Sunday Night Journal — July 10, 2011 This is something I’ve been planning to mention for some months. It’s been quite a while now—I’m not sure I want to remind myself of just how long—since Dale Nelson sent me a copy of his excellent article on Victorian poet Coventry Patmore’s long poem The Angel In…
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Craig Burrell has a fascinating review of a book called The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages. It's really an essay on the subject, so expect to spend more time with it than you would on the average blog post, but well worth it. In the comments on any controversial religion-related topic at the…
Light On Dark Water 