Sunday, December 01, 2024

Gratitude: "It Is Good for Us to Be Here"


If you've never watched the lectures of Dr. Iain MacGilchrist on YouTube, do yourself a favor and look him up. I first came across his work in an interview he did with Jordan Peterson, which you can view here (if you have two hours and can deal with Peterson's rabbit-hole brain farts he periodically interjects). Dr. MacGilchrist is a neuroscientist who one of the foremost authorities on brain lateralization (i.e., the hemispheric nature of the brain, the tendency for some neural processes to be specialized to one side of the brain or the other). 

Tuesday, November 26, 2024

Stripper Prefers the Traditional Latin Mass


Back in October, I caught up with an old buddy of mine from high school that I haven't seen since before the pandemic. We grabbed a movie, went to dinner, and drove around our old hometown reminiscing and talking about how the place had changed. My friend is Catholic but...well, his faith has been hot and cold through most of his life—periods of intense zeal punctuated by episodes of falling away and years of non-practice; emotional reconversions and pledges to "get serious about the faith," followed by another inevitable fall, occasioned either by some serious sin or just sheer laziness.

Friday, November 22, 2024

Responding to the Predictable Schlock About the "Mayan Rite"


The big news this week is the Vatican approval of what is being referred to as the "Mayan rite" of the Mass. Traditionalists reacted with dismay, while the usual suspects were quick to leap into action with their "nothing to see here" takes. Where Peter Is, for example, published a piece entitled "Traditionalist Lies: Addressing Malicious 'Mayan Rite' Rumors" (Nov. 17, 2024) fawning over the new adaptations and accusing Traditionalists of "lying" about the new rite.

Friday, November 08, 2024

The 1552 Institution of Anglican Communion in the Hand

I am still working through Nicholas Orme's magnum opus Going to Church in Medieval England (which I intend on doing a review on in the near future once I wrap it up) and I am nearing the end of the book where he talks about how the changes of the Tudor era altered the churchgoing experience of the English. In Orme's description of Cranmer's communion service of 1552, something caught my eye. In explaining the details of early Anglican communion and the conceptual framework behind it, Orme says:

Sunday, November 03, 2024

Our Barren Garden of Symbols


It is becoming increasingly clear to me how vehemently our modern culture loaths symbolism. Our society is so ridiculously analytical, so bull-headedly rationalistic, that we can have no patience for the subtle communication of the economy of symbolism. That's not to say we don't like visual representations; we love those, but only if they are rationalized, corporatized, and utilitarian. We are a society obsessed with logos and mascots but cannot abide signs and symbols. 

Sunday, October 27, 2024

Happy Feast of Christ the King


Hey everyone! Blessed Feast of Christ the King in the traditional calendar. I hope you all are well. I've been very busy and have had less time to write than I would like, so I don't have much new for you this Sunday. I do have several essays in the works though, which I hope to be getting out shortly.

Monday, October 14, 2024

Walking to Church


One thing that’s so nice about Europe is the walking culture. Because the vast majority of European cities emerged before the invention of the automobile, they are built to a human scale, with the expectation that the average person will be able to get around town by simply walking from Point A to Point B.

Saturday, October 05, 2024

Crises of Faith: Letting Go to Hold On



A lot of Catholics ask me for advice on how to process what is unfolding these days. Events are really challenging people's paradigms of how they understand the Church, the papacy, and even the faith itself. They want desperately to understand how everything fits together—how can we process what we've witnessed within the framework of our beliefs? This causes people considerable anxiety, even agony; sometimes it consumes their spiritual lives entirely. They feel profound unease at not being able to account for every jot and tittle within their understanding.

Sunday, September 29, 2024

If I Were Kidnapped by ISIS...(but it's actually about the Church)


Don't ask me why, but sometimes I imagine myself in the Middle East—in somewhere like Erbil or Mosul—and I imagine getting kidnapped by terrorists. I imagine being held in some secret ISIS detention center, bound and malnourished, maybe bloodied by mistreatment, tortured, and awaiting certain death. I imagine the swell of emotions I would feel trying to steady my resolve in the face of imminent doom, dealing with regrets of things left undone, sadness at leaving those I love so prematurely, and preparing my soul for judgment. I imagine the simple but fervent prayers I would likely make in such a harrowing ordeal.

Sunday, September 22, 2024

The Nuance Required Reading Historical Texts

Peter Kwasniewski recently kicked up a hornet's nest with two articles on his substack Tradition and Sanity lauding well-ordered social dances as a wholesome past time for Catholic youth (see "Why Catholics Should Learn to Dance" and "The Great Good of Social Dancing"). This innocuous suggestion was met with fierce pushback from people who insisted that dancing is sinful.

I am not particularly interested in weighing in on the argument about dancing, which Dr. Kwasniewski has discussed thoroughly in his two articles quoted above and which I concur with. I am more concerned with the hermeneutics of the contrarians arguing against dancing, because I think it illustrates an important lesson about how not to read Church documents. In following the discussion on social media, I noticed the contrarians typically argued their point by posting a slur of quotations from popes and saints, insisting that "the Magisterium has condemned dances." Now, I personally learned long ago that strings of quotations mean little without supporting context; many statements that seem to say one thing actually say something different when read in historical context. Or a statement that seems absolute turns out to not be as universal as initially assumed. Context is everything; a
s Scott Hahn says, a text without a context is a pretext.

Friday, September 13, 2024

Two Deaths and Two Masses: The Healing Power of the Requiem



The following is a guest post submitted by a friend of this blog who wishes his reflections to remain anonymous.

Sunday, September 08, 2024

Let's Talk About Married Priests



Let's talk about married priests. Well, not married priests per se, but our attitudes toward married priests. I had a very unpleasant interaction with a reader the other day that has left me sort of fuming and feeling like there's some issues that need to be cleared up. So, be warned, I'm a bit saucy.

Monday, September 02, 2024

Belloc: How Status Protects Labor


In his classic 1937 work The Crisis of Civilization, Hilaire Belloc convincing argues that the rejection of the Catholic Church at the time of the Protestant Revolt is directly responsible for the social and economic troubles of modernity. According to Belloc, the most pressing economic problem is that the vast majority of people are wage-earners to a small owner class who have a disproportionate control of the means of production. This situation Belloc calls 'Proletarianism.' While modern wage-earners have political rights, full economic freedom eludes them because they are too dependent upon those who pay their wages. Unlike the Communists who assert that private ownership of property is the fundamental evil, Belloc states the problem is not that capital is owned and utilized by so few, but that so many are proletarian wage-earners.

Saturday, August 31, 2024

Why I'm not Orthodox


Everytime I post something on my YouTube channel, there are always a band of obnoxious OrthoBros who show up in the comments chiding me for not being Orthodox, or nagging me to convert. It's super annoying. They must think that because I am critical of the current state of Catholicism that I'm on the verge of going Orthodox or something. I guess that is a thing for some Catholics; I often see comments from Catholics who, when responding to bad news in the Church, will say something like, "Looks like it's almost time to go Orthodox!" If your big plan is to "go Orthodox" when things get "bad enough" in the Catholic Church, then you're already a bad Orthodox—because if you really believed the claims of Orthodoxy enough to join it, then you would convert right now, not at some hypothetical future when things get "bad enough" with Rome. 

Sunday, August 18, 2024

Make Your Devotion Attractive


If you consider yourself a devout Catholic, then your devotion should be the most attractive part of your personality. Like turning on a light, your devotion should radiate over every other aspect of your character, enriching it with warmth and goodness. Whether you work a career or are a full-time parent or spend your days as a volunteer, your piety permeate these activities in such a way that it is attractive to others—in a way that makes others say, "I want what they have."