Wisdom, Life, and Being Towards Death

When reading Scripture on my own impulse or in service of the needs of my academic work, I am much more of a “New Testament guy” [plus Genesis, a bit …

Humanity: A History of Bad Habits

One of the first lessons I teach my students – in classes that make use of sacred texts – is that however much our lifestyles and technologies have changed, the …

The Saga Continues

I’ve got 25 “drafts” in various stages of development [including a “full post” response to a comment several entries back], Roman’s (from Theology and Justice) counterpoint to “Accept the Mystery…” …

Accept the Mystery or Take the Leap?

This started out as a reply to a reply to a comment I made over at Theology and Justice [which also has this post that I recommend to, well, anyone who’s reading …

Briefly Revisiting Catholic Solidarity

Our necessary interdependence, our essence as social beings, our responsibility to act in solidarity with and for our neighbors—these are teachings to which the Spirit had brought me long before my conversion. For …

It Only Leads If It Bleeds

An exercise in a kind of speculative theological anthropology, what follows is not intended to represent any established doctrine of the Church but rather only the development of my own thought …

Difficulty Level: You have read Job, haven’t you?

An update last month on my conversion process came as I was making my way through a dark period to what I thought was that well known “light at the end of …

Strange Bedfellows II: Citing the Sources

In response to my post, Strange Bedfellows, a new reader commented: “I’m scratching my head. I can only say that your take on Catholicism is very different from that in …

The Grand Inquisitor and the Dark Days of the Soul

Work on my next intended post (re: salvation and sacrifice) is continuing but I’ve been distracted–temporally by work and spiritually by trials and obstacles related to my conversion. It’s that …

Classifying Catholics

As a break from a much more serious and involved post on sacrifice and the economy of salvation (which is taking longer to articulate than anticipated), I thought I’d get …