UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon began talks yesterday in Berne (Switzerland) with key development agencies on how to tackle the crisis provoked by soaring food and fuel prices and put an estimated 100 million of the world’s poorest people on the brink of starvation. The prices of staple foods like rice, grain, oil and sugar [...]
Entries from April 2008
50 per cent higher
April 30th, 2008 · No Comments
Tags: Blog
Become what you see II – Loverde
April 30th, 2008 · Comments Off
By its nature, pornography encourages an expression of human sexuality which is not only deformed but also severely limited and patently false. The use of pornography by young people prevents an understanding of human sexuality integrated with the self-expression and intimacy that is the full expression of the human person. Instead of growing to an [...]
Tags: Blog
Media-savvy Scots Catholics
April 29th, 2008 · No Comments
I like Pastoral Letters. Here is Bishop Philip Tartaglia’s Communications Sunday Pastoral Letter
The Pope warns that the mass media can be used for ideological purposes, and “can tend to legitimise or impose distorted models of personal, family or social life”. As Scottish Catholics, we know only too well how true this is, and we [...]
Tags: Blog
Ayres for Bede
April 28th, 2008 · 1 Comment
Lewis Ayres has been appointed to the newly established Bede Chair of Catholic Theology at Durham.
Ayres, an English lay Catholic theologian, currently teaching at Emory is a world-regarded, leading expert in patristic theology (particularly Christology and Trinity) with a strong constructive/contemporary dimension to his work, with a very well developed understanding of what it means [...]
Tags: Blog
Become what you see
April 28th, 2008 · Comments Off
A propos Spaemann’s line about becoming what you see, did you read Jason Byassee ?
As theologian Sarah Coakley has so brilliantly said, ancient Christian reflection on desire shows that Freud is exactly wrong: Talk about God is not repressed talk about sexuality; talk about sex is, in fact, repressed talk about God. To paraphrase C.S. [...]
Tags: Blog
The Whole Christ and the Eucharist
April 25th, 2008 · No Comments
This is the paper I read to the Cheyneygates ‘Work-in-Progress’ seminar at Westminster on 24th April 2008.
When the congregation of my Church is gathered in worship we say that Christ is with us, although, without faith, no evidence of him imposes itself on us. The degree to which we find one another unattractive and [...]
Tags: Blog
The Tradition Alive
April 24th, 2008 · No Comments
Brazos Press has a wonderful manifesto
The onset of the twenty-first century finds the Western world in the midst of transition at a seismic level: from Christendom to post-Christendom, from industrialism to post-industrialism, from modernity to postmodernity, from colonial hegemony to multicultural pluralism, and so forth. It is at the same time a period of [...]
Tags: Blog
The gift of sight
April 23rd, 2008 · Comments Off
You were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.
We stand at a threshold – either we can continue to allow this plague (pornography) to spread with fewer and fewer checks, or we can take concrete steps to uproot it in our lives, our families, our neighborhoods and our culture.
We [...]
Tags: Church
Mary Ann Glendon
April 22nd, 2008 · Comments Off
I have been reading Mary Ann Glendon at First Things, to which I will be renewing my subscription.
Although awareness of this impending demographic storm is beginning to sink in, policymakers in Europe and the United States tend to frame it only as a “welfare crisis.” The falling birth rates that are fueling the welfare [...]
Tags: Blog
Marriage – more than it is cracked up to be
April 21st, 2008 · Comments Off
How central to the Christian understanding of the meaning of marriage is the sexual difference between men and women? It is this question that Christopher Roberts addresses in his Creation and Covenant: The Significance of Sexual Difference in the Moral Theology of Marriage, and no one paying attention to the arguments about the blessing of [...]
Tags: theology
The primary subject of politics is the human person
April 18th, 2008 · Comments Off
Because politics, in the vision of the Church, deals with the good of people, individually and collectively, the primary subject of the political system is the human person. As a result, there are matters and issues that arise which the Church considers fundamentally
related to the dignity of the human person.
These matters are life, the family, [...]
Tags: Blog · Public square
Civil Society
April 18th, 2008 · Comments Off
Civitas – The Institute for the Study of Civil Society is doing a valuable public service. It produces fact-sheets for teachers
Do Fathers matter?
Does Marriage matter?
Yes, it has come to this. More urgently than teachers, it is politicians who need those fact sheets. And we need to familiarise ourselves with some of these linked organisations
Tags: Public square
Communion, sacrifice and atonement
April 17th, 2008 · Comments Off
Reconciliation in Christ? Atonement and Sacrifice
Touchstones of disunity or the pathway to communion?
Saturday 14 June 2008 10.30 – 3pm
Cheyneygates, Dean’s Yard
Westminster Abbey, London SW1
Canon Nicholas Sagovsky
Westminster Abbey
Douglas Knight
Theologian and Author
The doctrine of the atonement has been controversial within Anglican thinking in recent years, marking the different principles held by [...]
Tags: Conferences · London
Church on pavement
April 16th, 2008 · Comments Off
Chris made me blog this too:
A number of Catholic lay people have joined with some local religious communities to plan a welcome that evening. The event will combine prayer, evangelization and singing, which organizers hope Pope Benedict will hear.
The Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, the Knights of Columbus, the Sisters of Life, Communion and Liberation, [...]
Tags: Blog
Facing the hard questions helps
April 16th, 2008 · Comments Off
In addition to reshaping the dialogue between Catholicism and Islam, Benedict XVI has made significant changes in the Vatican’s intellectual approach to these volatile issues. Catholic veterans of the interreligious dialogue who did not press issues like religious freedom and reciprocity between the faiths have been replaced by scholars who believe that facing the hard [...]
Tags: Blog · Public square
Benedict in the US
April 16th, 2008 · Comments Off
The premier example of this was his Regensburg lecture of September 2006 in Germany, widely criticized at the time as offensive to Islamic sensibilities. That lecture, in fact, has shifted both the course of inter-religious dialogue and the internal dynamics of the intra-Islamic debate, precisely as I believe Benedict XVI intended it to do. It [...]
Tags: Blog · JPII & Benedict XVI
This is a great book
April 15th, 2008 · Comments Off
Colin Gunton in his The One, the Three and the Many (Bampton Lectures) sought to offer a theological analysis of modernity while at the same time calling Christian theology back to the heart of its faith, the Triune God. In The Eschatological Eschatology: Time and the Hospitality of God, Douglas Knight has similar goals, though [...]
Tags: Eschatological Economy
Hovey on Mark
April 14th, 2008 · Comments Off
Craig Hovey To Share in the Body: A Theology of Martyrdom for Today’s Church
“Craig Hovey challenges Christians to be worth persecuting, but he does so without romanticizing suffering or the church. Every church is called to be a martyr-church, not to glorify death, but to declare that death means nothing in the light of what [...]
Tags: Blog
Middle-class families: an existential threat to big government
April 14th, 2008 · Comments Off
The news that Poole council used surveillance powers designed to track down terrorists to spy on an ordinary middle-class family they suspected of not living in the correct catchment area for their chosen school is not as surprising as it first seems. The government is, after all, fully aware that there exists in this country [...]
Tags: Public square
‘Abortion and religious-related content’
April 13th, 2008 · Comments Off
Not quite as bold as ‘The man who sued God’, but it is manifestly a David and Goliath battle which is to be admired, for the outcome has considerable implications for Christians in the areas of equality and freedom of expression.
The Christian Institute simply wanted to pay Google so that when the word ‘abortion’ was [...]
Tags: Blog