“Estimates are that one in six Catholic priests currently serving in the States comes from abroad, and roughly 300 new international priests arrive every year.” (John Allen, http://ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic/foreign-priests-and-risk-plunder) I have a definitely biased reaction to that statement. I’m a former priest, who had to leave the clerical club because I wanted to also find God [...]
Posts from ‘February, 2010’
Should Obama Get Nasty?
In the Feb. 21 issue of THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, Walter Rogers wrote: President Obama’s political predicament is perhaps more serious than he understands or appreciates. He appears to see opponents as rivals to be charmed. What he should see are enemies determined to destroy his presidency. To save the agenda for which he was [...]
It’s the system, stupid!
From today’s New York Times, in a lead article on poverty in the US: “American business is about maximizing shareholder value,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics. “You basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.” When I think on [...]
“I believe in order to understand”
The following three statements, from three different people, make sense of one another: Pascal: We must love things before we can know them. Kierkegaard: A believer is someone in love. St.Anselm: I believe in order to understand. To really understand something we have to be in a relationship with it, involved with it, to some [...]
Democracy or Dependency: The State of the US Congress
Democracy or Dependency: The State of the US Congress In a recent THE NATION article, Harvard Law Professor, Lawrence Lessig, lays out compelling evidence for the following conclusion about the state of our democracy due to the state of our Congress: “Rather than being, as our framers promised, an institution ‘dependent on the People,’ Congress [...]
Revelation?
“The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us.” John Henry Newman When the heart is so reached, an old fashioned, theological word [...]
Religious Violence
A comment on the rise of religious violence and terrorism that seems to make a lot of sense to me: “The secular world has to have enough justice in it for one not to have to constantly invoke God’s justice against the injustice of the profane.” That’s from Aijaz Ahmad. To which Tony Eagleton adds: [...]
