It is amazing what a good commentary can do.

Some time back I attempted to read the Gospel according to Luke, and I found myself stumbling constantly.  This was nothing more than a form of unfamiliarity – despite my upbringing and hearing passages from the New Testament (at least) once a week for as long as I can remember, I don’t get first century Galilee.

Fine, but aren’t the episodes and teachings timeless?  If you’ll labor with the text, won’t it come alive in some way very near to your own life?  Sure it will, but that can seem an awful lot like cherry-picking.  And that’s probably not quite fair, because one does not usually want to cherry-pick, but to understand the gospel as a complete work, as though one had walked with Jesus and experienced Him.

Anyway, we’re veering off the course.  Stay focused, you.

If the text must be understood – at least to some extent – from the perspective of a 1st century reader, Barclay has translated the social and historical (con)text into 20th century language.

Isn’t this the 21st century?  The man died in 1978, dude.  What do you want?

Once he has done this – . . . → Read More: Jesus Digest

As noted in previous posts, Barclay has a tendency to “naturalize” some of the events in the life of Jesus.  One of the main ways he does this is by suggesting that demon possession, for example, was merely a psychological illness; a serious illness to be sure, with staggering consequences, yet truly a product of the mind.

Now, I don’t dismiss that psychological illness could play a role in something like demon possession, and that the power of cultural beliefs (here, a cultural belief in the reality of demon possession) can exacerbate and extend suffering in some cases.  Let us indeed consider the  nuances.

Still, from a very (fortunately) limited experience and from second-hand information, it is hard for me to dismiss the other possibility – that demons take some form in reality.  That is, people are sometimes stricken completely outside of their wishes (however masochistic these can be), and the condition manifests a kind of power and fury that borders on supernatural.

The trouble with this “naturalizing” of miracles, as I see it, is two-fold:  One, it often seems a stretch to draw out of the context that these things were other than supernatural acts.  Two – even if . . . → Read More: Mark 4:35-41

Now interrupting the series of posts on the Gospel according to Mark for this (important?) bulletin…

In other places I have commented on my love of local newspapers.  We get the Joliet Herald News, and I read every issue.

This guy, a columnist named George Gaspar, finally got my goat one too many times.  I am compelled to write …A LETTER TO THE EDITOR!

Here is his column.  Below is my response (not sure why it’s in bold).

With 300 words or less, the Editor has put me at a disadvantage.  I can’t have all of my grievances redressed, so we’ll’ve [sic] to settle for the major point.

Mr. Gaspar obfuscates the point in his March 2 “Viewpoint” column.  He would swing the weight of women’s rights like a medieval mace in order to beat the Church back into the Dark Ages, where it becomes an easy target to malign and calumniate.  (This would be interesting to explore; at a glance, I would offer that Thomas Aquinas could express a better argument in sighs than Gaspar has in this column).

Let’s be honest – whether the “extremist” Republicans or the “extremist” Catholics want to turn back the clock is . . . → Read More: Letter to the Editor

Mark has now reached the point, in my reading, where the conflict between Jesus and the religious authorities is escalating. Every page, it seems, alludes to the fact that the authorities are plotting to kill Him, and would do it immediately, except that the people would revolt against such an action.

So, like theives, they will wait for the night.

In the meantime, they continue to confront Christ about His teaching and actions. He drives the money changers out of the Temple and they want to know by what authority He has done this; they try to trap Him on the subject of paying taxes, and the resurrection; ultimately, they are incensed and furious that He would liken Himself to God and declare that they, far from appearances, have denied the Lord in their hearts.

All of this from under the shadow of the cross, within days of a torturous death.

On a purely human level, I am amazed at the way He keeps His cool. How can He think of that response to the Pharisees and Herodians – “Pay unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” – knowing that they are bringing about His death? . . . → Read More: The Incomparable

Just can’t find it at the moment.  Suffice it to say I really am moved by both sides of this story, and not only for the headline.  Have a read about the gifts that were exchanged.

I shared some thoughts with my friend Adam Fischer, and realized they’d fit in with TCG.

U2 has a song called “Grace” from their album, All That You Can’t Leave Behind. I was not an instant fan; rather, the song grew on me over time, and now I often sing it to my girls at bedtime.

A line goes, “She travels outside of karma.”  I’ve long loved this one, referring to grace, and thought it a lovely expression for what I believe grace to be.  Grace operates outside of blind justice, and has no interest in giving us, strictly, what we deserve.  Rather, it represents a flow of blessings, the workings of the highest mind, which is subject to nothing while offering goodness to all.

Just today, another line offered unexpected depth.  ”What once was hurt, what once was fiction, what left a mark no longer stains.”

The first and last descriptions have always made some sense.  All three, in fact.  Yet the middle one suddenly meant more.

Hopefully this thought is not based on a flawed understanding – from what I have read, there are a number of myths involving a god coming to live among humans, the son . . . → Read More: “What once was fiction”

Unfortunate that the robbery happened, but that loss yielded to some good neighborliness.

Will County Habitat for Humanity houses robbed, community helps

You will sometimes hear the criticism that Catholicism (because of its stance on artificial contraception, for example) doesn’t like sex. The critic will often give the impression that this is because of a prudishness, or of a distaste for anything involving rushing blood and heaving flesh. Or, that being orthodox means a person isn’t much fun, sexually or otherwise.

I regret that this is sometimes true, but is only by a mistake of the opposite kind which I will now describe – that is, the mistake our critic is making.

The critic, if he believes what he is saying, has it backward – he does not like sex. Instead, it is the Catholic Church’s love of sex which is unsurpassed.

This is because the critic only likes a part of sex, and maybe two parts at best – that is, he typically likes only the pleasure (and here I include any of the risqué sensations which might accompany a sexual tryst).

Further on, among those who are stabler, sex is pleasurable and it represents a kind of crowning moment in a relationship. Here are two people (let’s deal with two at a time) who feel they have exhausted every . . . → Read More: Sex

I question the logic of a man who believe that man’s disregard for the nature of things can change the very climate of the planet he lives on but would equally have no effect on the social fabric of which he participates in.

…to lead you to a longer one:  Link.

This is a blog kept by William M Briggs, a professor of Statistics as Cornell University.  I’m giving a talk on abortion soon, and found his blog while gathering information.  He deals at length with the issue, leaning a particular way, and yet, I think, keeping the even tone of a good moderator.  Sounds like a professor to me.

Would love to hear further thoughts, and the comments on this particular post are quite readable.

This subject did not occur to me until I saw an intriguing article through the New York Times:  Link.

The article is worth a read, if you’re patient, but the basic idea is this:  Humanists consider their brand of communion to be a viable – and, really, a more reasonable – alternative to traditional religious institutions.  Or, they emphasize the notion that you don’t need God to find meaning in life.  As such, why wasn’t humanism represented at any point during the tragedy in Newtown, CT?

Aside from the fatal blow that is obvious to most people – that is, without God, without an eternal reality, haven’t you rendered everything meaningless? – I found this to be an interesting question.  The article mentions, after all, that humanists are readily available to celebrate a wedding, and most other life events.

But it doesn’t ask the really interesting question.  Rather than ask, it assumes that humanism IS a viable alternative to faith in God (or gods, or at least spiritualism).  It assumes that humanism has answered, with perfect rationality and without appealing to anything beyond that which can be experimented upon, every human longing and lament.

The article could have been aborted . . . → Read More: Humanists and Tragedy

GK Chesterton, or someone like him, commented on the “aristocracy of the living,” meaning that social phenomenon under which a modern citizen imagines that he is smarter than anyone who lived before him. They did die, after all, and here he is, alive. And we are much closer to not dying, or at least it takes us a lot longer to die, these days.

It is not unlike the child assuming he is smarter than his parents, and most assuredly (in America, anyway) smarter than his grandparents. By this, however, he mainly means that he is living in the subculture of youth in America, and as aliens in that land, his parents do not know how to navigate it as well as he does. It gets worse with the grandparents, whom he assumes are of a weaker intelligence because they suffer from ideas that he, in his enlightenment, can see are bigotries.

The child’s obvious mistake is his failure to understand that the parents, if they are psychologically healthy, have no interest in being children anymore. They are only interested in the subculture inasmuch as their children are.

The grandparents have their bigotries, and some of them have almost universally . . . → Read More: Bigotry

No, I will not change the title.

If you haven’t had a change to read Ed’s terrific piece entitled Sex on this very blog please take the time to do so now.

…..

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Ok good. I was reminded of his piece when coming across this story on the WSJ. There was a quote that really struck me

Even if we no longer believe in a deity, a degree of repression is seemingly necessary to our species and to the adequate functioning of a half-way ordered and loving society.

It’s sad to me, that in a day and time when pretty much every important piece of Catholic belief and theology can be had by simply going to the Vatican website, that Catholic moral teaching on sex is still represented as “repression.” Perhaps I should forward the author Ed’s excellent piece.

Now I don’t want to completely discredit the author. He’s attempting to make an important point – one that many in our culture are afraid to mention – that porn is bad. Like, life shatteringly bad. Like, men lose their jobs, homes, and families because of it bad. Yet in an increasingly permissive culture that doesn’t want anything negative to . . . → Read More: A riff on Ed’s “Sex”