I'm convinced that I am a little bit insane. ("Only a little bit?" I hear you say) Not only that, I'm really convinced that almost everybody else is. However, let me define my terms. By 'insane' I don't mean bat-shit crazy, eye rolling drooling insane. Instead I mean that we do not have a total grip on reality. [...]
Here's your Valentine's card. Have a heart...the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The devotion to the sacred heart of Jesus is pretty hard for a convert to understand. The imagery is usually sentimental. Too much Catholic kitsch for the tasteful Anglicans and too much Catholic weirdness for the typical Baptist. I once visited the Monastery at Conyers [...]
Todd Starnes comments here on the weirdness that the new Google talkback gadget knows who Allah and Buddha are but draws a blank on Jesus. Some folks across the fruited plain are wondering if their Google Home smart speakers have an aversion to Christianity. A number of users have complained that Google’s popular virtual assistant can [...]
Join me in September to re-trace the steps of the Magi from Petra to Bethlehem and beyond. Go here for full information
You can now go to my main blog to listen to the podcast of my homilies week by week. Go here for Sunday's homily: Citizens of the Kingdom and Fishers of Men.
Thomas Williams reports here about the Catholic Bishop of Little Rock. Anthony B Taylor-- boycotted the March for Life because the state Attorney General was on the platform, and the Attorney General is in favor of the death penalty. Williams points out that the two issues are not exactly of the same magnitude: In the United [...]
Ross Douthat has a column at the New York Times today which ponders the priestess of pop religion: Oprah Winfrey. In the fall of 2014, Oprah Winfrey ran a “transformative two-day live event,” a traveling roadshow that was held in eight cities around the country. For this interactive revival-tent experience, she was joined by her “handpicked life trailblazers,” authors [...]
Some regular readers at Patheos may be wondering what happened to my blog Standing on My Head. Last fall I moved it over to my new website to consolidate all my outreach efforts in one place. I still blog here from time to time, and ten years worth of archived material is still published here at [...]
There was a case some years back when same sex civil unions were legalized in Britain in which two elderly sisters applied to get married so one could inherit easily if the other died. As I remember, they were denied their civil rights. I guess that was not only a case of two women marrying, but [...]
A poll from the Pew Research Center reports that fewer Americans than ever believe the Christmas story is historical. The New York Times reports here about the "Christmas Wars" The most seismic change captured by the survey, from a theological standpoint, may be the declining number of people who said they believed the biblical story of Christmas [...]