Today marks the 50th Anniversary of the Opening of the Second Vatican Council, an event that has rightly been called the major religious event of the 20th century, and which went a long way to restoring the thriving diversity of the ancient and medieval periods to the life of the Church, which was increasingly mired in early modern political forms ( Read more... )

Been reading Rowan Williams, now finishing up his time as Archbishop of Canterbury, and about him. Wanted to jot a few passages down, such as this precise critique of the anthropological assumptions underlying peace movements (and the political and cultural Left more broadly, perhaps?) since the 1960s: When, in the late sixties and early seventies ( Read more... )

While I was away from my journal last week, it was interesting to see the Catholic Church's impasse with the Federal Government come to a head in the form of a constellation of lawsuits over the circumventing of the First Amendment protection of religious freedom. Constitutionally, it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out, in seeing ( Read more... )

In recent months, I've been interested to see some reports that have made me think some more about the power of the press to shape contemporary consciousness as to what is the news and how to perceive it. This thinking has been sometimes brought on, interestingly enough, by (what seems all too rare to me) stories that made it into the news cycle ( Read more... )

I thought that this was an interesting reading of some of Benedict's thinking with regard to his comments in Benin last month, and his thoughts toward "liberation theology," broadly understood. The Lonely Liberation Theology of Benedict XVIby John L Allen Jr on Nov. 20, 2011 NCR Today ( Read more... )

Here's an article in Slate that caught my eye. This is something that Kevin and I have been talking about as he takes part in developing the revolutionary new set of possibilities in the new data and technologies in neuroscience: the tendency to claim too much for it. I've been thinking about it for the last year, noticing in my teaching how in ( Read more... )

A good John Allen commentary on a more realistic sense of what's going on in implementing accountability in the Catholic Church with regard to the Church's involvement in our culture's sexual abuse crisis.The Policy Myth versus 'Accountability with Teeth'by John L Allen Jr [1] on Sep. 09, 2011 All Things Catholic ( Read more... )

Just wanted to copy a few columns or articles into the journal here. It has been interesting to watch this debate about ethics itself that's been happening in the UK since the riots. The number of writers drawing attention to the idea of public morality itself is interesting, particularly in a world of post-modern assumptions or dogma, where one ( Read more... )

Ringing in the new year in low-key fashion this year. (As I probably explain every year at this time, I primarily think of the new year as beginning on August 16th, halfway through August and the start of a new school year, and, incidentally, the anniversary of my arrival in my hometown of Oregon, Illinois in 1976.) My outpatient procedure to ( Read more... )

On Friday, ten years of nerdy glee come to a conclusion with the series finale of Smallville. Ten years is obviously a great run for a television series, and as I noted in an earlier entry, this makes Smallville the longest-running sci-fi or fantasy series in North American television history. Personally, it's the sort of thing that resonated on ( Read more... )