[From Facebook ( Read more... )

The big theological news of the day - or the last several days - is really the new social justice encyclical that Pope Benedict has published. While my areas of academic interest and competence are more in the historical and artistic kind of things I mentioned in my last entry, I have to sit up and take notice of something this significant. ( Read more... )

Picking up on the earlier entry where I got a note from Fordham grad student Mike Canaris mentioning that Cardinal Dulles thought he should talk with me about our mutual dissertation topic of Francis Sullivan, and my amusement at the relatively small world of professional theology - that Cardinal Dulles should even vaguely be aware of who I am - I ( Read more... )

Various articles and such that have caught my eye over the last several days and that I wanted to jot down. Vaclav Havel's unapologetic casting of the climate issue in wider language of morality. I thought this interesting and important because of the strong feelings the cultural Left has in support of environmental issues such as this, but who ( Read more... )

Oi. I woke up this morning to find that there was a new document that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) had issued regarding the Second Vatican Council's statement that the Church of Christ "subsists in" the Catholic Church. Nicole Winfield, one of the regular AP reporters I read covering the Vatican, has a story out on it that ( Read more... )

Huh. I'm just going through a part of my interviews last year with Sullivan where he's talking about Judge John Noonan's book A Church That Can And Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching. I didn't really think of it at the time, but I actually heard the material of that book in its developmental stage as the (first?) Erasmus ( Read more... )

4:23am. I am, for the first time since the beginning of the semester, caught up on grading. Midterm grades are entered. Done is done. Pouring a tall, foaming beer to end the night. A root beer ( Read more... )

The best of our Vatican-watchers, John Allen, published this piece a few days ago in The New York Times. This was a welcome and informed contrast to the Times' own editorializing, which lazily fell into routine ideological postures that had nothing to do with what had actually occurred. I think he hit the nail on the head about Benedict's ( Read more... )

Here's a strikingly-provocative essay by Italy's Sandro Magister insisting that it is time for Islam to step up to the plate and embrace reasonableness and peace ( Read more... )

Predictably, the New York Times interpreted the brouhaha about the Pope in term of "tolerance." Tolerance is, I think, an idea that has gotten away from people: it has too often become the idea simply that differences are to be homogenized into some sort of un-diverse unity, rather than remaining part of our encounter with others. Equally ( Read more... )