When the Social Justice Warriors Get in Their Own Way

As the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland is doing: The Church’s wooing of the SNP is largely to blame. It started when Cardinal Winning clashed with the then Labour Executive over their social liberalism. Winning and many of the other people in charge convinced themselves that the nationalists were going to be more onside on issues like abortion. There was absolutely …

Women Deacons in the Catholic Church? Not the First Time They've Thought About It

My mother used to tell her unretentive sons that geese "get up in a new world every morning."  While I can't speak to geese, that's certainly a problem with our press: Pope Francis has created a commission to study the possibility of allowing women to serve as deacons in the Catholic church, following up on …

Pro-Life Democrats: If You Knew the Priorities…

@timothypomalley is lachrymose for his party's call to repeal the Hyde Amendment: I had hoped for this. Until this week. Like many pro-life Democrats, I had been dispirited by the inclusion in the 2016 Democratic Party Platform of the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which has previously disallowed federal funds to pay for abortion except …

Texas A&M Newman Association 1975-6

I've alluded to my years in the Catholic Students Association in pieces like this.  Now you can get a little more flavour of what that was like in the following video. Thanks so much to Jeanne Geidel-Neal for the music for this video. As noted elsewhere, the "straight outta Irondale" folks won't like this, but …

The "Arabs" of Thomas Aquinas Weren't Arabs At All

Returning to the site Ite ad Thomam, I saw an advertisement for the "Annual Fall Workshop on Aquinas and the 'Arabs'" at Marquette University (not, these days, an ideal venue for such a traditional Catholic conference.)  For someone like myself who started the Summa as an undergraduate and finished it as a PhD candidate, it …

When One Steals From A Church, One Sins Twice

Never gave this much thought, but from the "Ite ad Thomam" site: So stealing from a church is actually two sins, theft and sacrilege? Or is it still one – sacrilegious theft? Two sins.  And both have to be confessed.  In other words, it's not enough to say merely "I stole something from a building," …

Sometimes It Pays to Think

Like in this, from A.B. Bruce's The humiliation of Christ, about Eutyches, the Monophysite fanatic: It is plain from those representations that Eutyches had no distinct definite conception of the constitution of our Lord's person. He felt rather than thought on the subject of Christology. He did not pretend to comprehend the mystery of the …

My "Journey" with Jürgen Moltmann

Diving for stuff in a discard bin isn’t the classiest way to spend one’s time, but for the academic diving in the free book bin at the used book store can be a true adventure. (Diving in the dumpster may be a necessity for the adjunct academic, and the new overtime rules don’t help a …

Pope Francis and Two-Way Ignorance

Pope Francis isn't much of a fan of things American these days, but his visit to this country was a revelation: Prior to his election Francis had never set foot in the United States, making him the only pope in the last eighty years other than St. John XXIII who had never been to America …

You Really Can Do Biblical Preaching From a Lectionary

Recently my wife and I ventured to Regent University for me to deliver a paper.  While there we got the chance to view one of the University's new acquisitions, namely a Torah scroll from Yemen.The fact that a Christian university could acquire such a donation is a sign of the times: Evangelicals are about the …

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