The blog Against the Grain has an interesting post on the subject of the Catholic approach to war, looking at various points of view as to whether that approach has been changing over time, particularly in light of the Iraq war. Looking at some of the points of view referenced there, I could see a [...]

One of this Sunday's readings has this passage from Paul (1 Cor 6:13c-15a, 17-20). There were some complaints on Domenico Bettinelli's blog that the translation "Avoid immorality" was not helpful, since (it was thought) the English word "immorality" refers to any kind of immoral behavior, whereas Paul (using the Greek word porneia) is referring to [...]

Domenico Bettinelli asks: I can understood the secular science antagonism to intelligent design, but I can’t understand the antagonism from Catholics and other Christians. Much the same question is asked regularly on the usual kind of blog, where inevitably more heat than light is generated (and, of course, God began by creating light). Here's the [...]

Wheaton College, being evangelical and finding itself containing a professor who had decided to convert to Catholicism, fired him. The college has a twelve-point mission statement, clearly written from an evangelical point of view. But the professor had claimed that he could agree with all twelve points. Could a Catholic reasonably agree with Wheaton's twelve [...]

I think we sometimes shoot our own eye out while reading the Christmas story. The events surely need looking at intently before they start to become visible as anything more than "trees, walking". Nativity plays are often quite inaccurate, but imprint themselves on the young, like the first visible animate object imprints itself on baby [...]

Haman said to King Ahasuerus, 'There is a certain unassimilated nation scattered among the other nations throughout the provinces of your realm; their laws are different from those of all the other nations, and the royal laws they ignore; hence it is not in the king's interests to tolerate them.Esther 3:8 Haman's claim has been [...]

I'm responding here to Disputations comment on my previous posting: What makes Aslan's death an allegory of Christ's death? One sentence, pulled from nowhere and headed nowhere. There are a large number of ways in which Lewis's account of Aslan's death has consciously been designed by him to allegorically match some of the details of [...]

The Disputations blog has an interesting take (1 2) on theology in the book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, complaining that a part of this is "very bad art, and worse theology" and "cover-your-eyes awful theology" The central complaint is made against these lines: The Witch knew the Deep Magic. But if she [...]

A comment left on the blog Cacciaguida, and a reply relating to my posting just below here brought some followup that it will be useful to address. The Vatican II text under discussion is: Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime [...]

The blog Cor ad cor loquitor has posted a summary retrospective discussion into whether or not the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were morally permissible, and provided many viewpoints both new and old. Some of the comments go into the apparently endless military and strategic details which accompanied the close of WWII and are, I [...]

The Independent Catholic News has again made a strange claim: In the story of Ibrahim and Ishmael, which is shared by Islam and the Old Testament, God asked the prophet to prove his faith by sacrificing his son. Turning quickly to the Bible we find a story that is certainly not shared by Islam and [...]

The Independent Catholic News (ICN) has an apparently most puzzling story from Palestine. Their account of what happened paints a simple picture of a deliberate (or at least reckless) attack by Israelis troops, who fire on a group of children in a strawberry field, killing seven of them. Now it cannot be said that Israeli [...]

Another post on open book pointing to John Allen's latest column. It's interesting to try to figure out what exactly Allen's appeal is. He certainly writes interestingly, provides some hard-to-come-by access to what's happening in Rome, and is knowledgeable about how the Vatican works. Yet for all that I find his columns relentlessly single-viewed, and [...]

With the Asian tsunami, and churchmen agonizing over how God can permit such a random disaster, now is the time to examine the actions of humans more carefully, before deciding to glare angrily in God's direction. If the relation between God and the disasters of nature seems to be confounding and mysterious, the role played [...]