I finally got the chance to watch Little Boy --the family film that came out in theaters last summer and is now released on DVD When his dad enlists in the army and disappears to fight the Japanese, seven year old Pepper Busbee's world is shattered. Wanting to get his Dad back, he learns that magic won't work, so [...]
Wow! Go here to see the beautiful re-design of the Aleteia website. Aleteia is a growing international Catholic website. It combines news, comment and Catholic insights on the news from around the world. I'm honored to be one of their regular contributors and look forward to working with my former colleague from Patheos--Elizabeth Scalia--as she takes [...]
In Catholic theology "invincible ignorance" is simply the lack of knowledge about the faith for which a person is not held responsible. So, for example, primitive people who have never heard the gospel, infant who have yet to learn, and people who because of mental illness or disability cannot learn the faith. The term has entered [...]
Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity My article this week at Imaginative Conservative is a discussion of morality in movies--using two examples of film noir to show how good and evil can be treated in filmic storytelling. The smart thing about film noir is that we identify with an ordinary good character who is drawn [...]
Really? Yesterday's post on universalism deserves a follow up. If there is such a place as hell, and we are assured by the gospel and by common sense that there is, who will go there and why? Does God send people to suffer for all eternity in hell? Why would he do that if [...]
We we all take that express escalator straight to heaven? "Catholic" means "universal" but "Catholicism" does not mean "Universalism". Universalism is the false doctrine that everybody will be saved. This is a sentimental belief held by people who are so cushioned from the realities of life that they don't know anybody who deserves hell [...]
Is Mercy Marshmallow Mushy? My article for Aleteia this week considers the matter of mercy. Too often mercy is no more than soft sentimentality. It's like marshmallows: soft, fluffy, sweet and lacking in nutrition. “The mushy bits” were the soft, sweet, sentimental parts of the story. Those were the bits for the girls [...]
It was Mother Teresa who said, I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is 'Abortion', because it is a war against the child... A direct killing of the innocent child, 'Murder' by the mother herself... And if we can accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people [...]
Did you help by donating to the campaign I ran last Fall to help build our new church? Thanks to you we have now had the ground breaking ceremony and the earth movers have begun their work. Joseph Pronechen has written a great article about the new church at National Catholic Register here. Today they are [...]
From what we know so far a "disgruntled employee" Bryce Williams walks up and shoots dead twenty four year old Alison Parker and twenty seven year old Adam Ward. This continues a stream of mindless violence in our society that seems to be surging. Social engineers will say, "People respond like this because they're poor. They [...]