Blog of the Archdiocese of Washington
In certain Protestant circles (not all), especially among the Evangelicals there is a strong and often vivid preoccupation with signs of the Second Coming of Christ. Many of the notions that get expressed are either erroneous, or extreme. Some of these erroneous notions are rooted in a misunderstanding of the various Scriptural genres. Some are …
Continue reading “When Will Christ Come? Some Basics of Catholic Eschatology”
Last week on the blog we spoke briefly of tolerance in the discussion about Sloth. For it sometimes happens that what some call tolerance is more of a disinterestedness of discovering the truth and living by it. But there is such a thing as true tolerance and it has an important place in the human …
Continue reading “Coming to a Truer Understanding of Tolerance”
In ancient Greek mythology the dog Cerberus guarded the entrance to Hades (the misty and gloomy underworld, the abode of the dead), permitting anyone to enter but none to leave. Cerberus is usually depicted as a three headed dog and some have tried to link this to his seeing the past, present and future. Cerberus’ …
Continue reading “Cerberus – the Mythical Three Headed Dog as an Allegory for What Ails Us.”
There was something awful about the year 1968. I was but a lad at the time, merely seven or eight years of age, but almost everything on the T.V. terrified me. Terrible reports from Viet Nam, (where my father was at the time), the Tet Offensive nightly reports of death and casualties (was my daddy …
One of the lesser known and lesser read works of CS Lewis is his correspondence with Rev. Fr. Don Giovanni Calabria. Few indeed have read them since they were written in Latin. And though an English translation was published in 1998, I know few who have ever heard of these letters. The full collection of …
Continue reading “Remarkable and Lesser Known Insights by CS Lewis on the Loss of Faith in the West”
We live in a culture where, increasingly, any sense of the sacred is being lost. The thought that something could be sacred, special, holy, or somehow “off-limits” is bewildering to many. Indeed many secularists consider those who do see some things as sacred, to be stuffy and somehow arrogant. There are many in our culture …
Continue reading “Is Nothing Sacred? Apparently Not. Reflecting on Another Absurdity in the News”
The breakdown of the traditional family is at the heart of what Daniel Patrick Moynihan once called a “tangle of pathologies.” The image I have often used is that the breakdown of the nuclear family is in fact a kind of nuclear fission. For the family (not the individual) is the basic unit of society. …
We live in an age of demanded secularism. If a religious utterance is made by the State or Government officials the cry goes up from an increasingly hostile minority and there are the usual platitudes about “Separation of Church and State,” a phrase that does not occur in the Constitution. Free Exercise Clause – It …