Tag: father

On
Fr. Robert Barron

Saying ‘yes’ to sex as path of love

One of the commonest complaints against Catholicism is that it is the religion of “no,” especially in regard to the sexual dimension of life.

As the rest of the culture is moving in a progressively more permissive direction, the Church seems to represent a crabbed, puritanical negativity toward sexuality.

Different kinds of ‘no’

I think it is important, first, to make a distinction between two modalities of “no.” On the one hand, there is “no” pure and simple — a denial, a negation of something good.

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Kevin Wondrash

A ‘smart people’ problem?

Daniel Dennett, one of the “four horsemen” of contemporary atheism, proposed in 2003 that those who espouse a naturalist, atheist worldview should call themselves “the brights,” thereby distinguishing themselves rather clearly from the dim benighted masses who hold on to supernaturalist convictions.

In the wake of Dennett’s suggestion, many atheists have brought forward what they take to be evidence that the smartest people in society do subscribe to anti-theist views. By “smartest” they usually mean practitioners of the physical sciences, and they point to surveys that indicate only small percentages of scientists subscribe to religious belief.

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Kevin Wondrash

Ridley Scott’s film misses the point

Ridley Scott’s new film Exodus: Gods and Kings features Moses, the Pharaoh, hundreds of thousands of slaves making their way across the floor of the Red Sea, all 10 plagues, the burning bush, and even the angel of Yahweh in the form of a petulant 11-year-old boy with a British accent.

And yet, the movie is spiritually flat, as though its makers had read the biblical story but understood precious little of its theological poetry.

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On
Sue Barry, For the Catholic Herald

Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration begins January 1 in Sauk City

SAUK CITY — “Spending time before the Blessed Sacrament is the gift we can give to God this Christmas,” according to Fr. John Blewett, pastor of Divine Mercy Parish in Sauk City.

The parish has been working since May to expand its current, two-day a week Eucharistic Adoration Program held at St. Aloysius Church to a Perpetual Adoration program slated to begin January 1.

Bishop Robert C. Morlino is scheduled to dedicate the new chapel, called the “Mary, Mother of God Chapel,” fittingly on the feast of the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, January 1.

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Kevin Wondrash

A God-haunted film

The great British physicist Stephen Hawking has emerged in recent years as a poster boy for atheism, and his heroic struggles against the ravages of Lou Gehrig’s disease have made him something of a secular saint.

The new bio-pic A Theory of Everything does indeed engage in a fair amount of Hawking-hagiography, but it is also, curiously, a God-haunted movie.

Religion for atheists

In an opening scene, the young Hawking meets Jane, his future wife, in a bar and tells her that he is a cosmologist. “What’s cosmology?” she asks, and he responds, “Religion for intelligent atheists.”

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Kevin Wondrash

Hildebrand and our relativistic age

Postmodern relativism and deconstruction have produced, at the popular level a culture dominated by the “whatever” attitude, a bland, detached indifferentism to the good and the true.

How often have you heard someone say, “that’s perhaps true for you but not for me” or “who are you to be imposing your values on me?” or in the words of the Dude in The Big Lebowski, “well, that’s just like your opinion, man.”

Subjectivism in society

Is it not a commonplace today that the only moral absolute that remains is the obligation to tolerate all points of view? What this subjectivism has conduced toward is a society lacking in energy and focus, one that cannot rouse itself to corporate action on behalf of some universal good.

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Fr. Rick Heilman, For the Catholic Herald

It’s time for a new Holy League
Man crisis

According to Matthew Christoff, “There is a serious ‘man-crisis’ in the Catholic Church. It is widespread and serious. Unless the Church, including its bishops, priests, and lay men begin to take notice and make the evangelization of Catholic men a priority, the Catholic Church in the West will decay, as more and more men abandon the Church. Unchecked, the exodus of Catholic men from the faith is likely to continue as men become increasingly casual about Catholicism.”

Recognizing this crisis, Pope Benedict XVI wrote: “In vast areas of the earth the faith risks being extinguished, like a flame without fuel. We are facing a profound crisis of faith, a loss of a religious sense which represents one of the greatest challenges for the Church today . . . The renewal of faith must, then, be a priority for the entire Church in our time.”

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Fr. Robert Barron

‘It doesn’t matter what you believe . . .’

A team of sociologists, led by Catholic University professor William D’Antonio, published a survey a few years ago that received quite a bit of media attention, for it showed that many Catholics disagree with core doctrines of the Church and still consider themselves “good Catholics.”

Forty percent of the respondents said that belief in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist is not essential to being a faithful Catholic. Perhaps the most startling statistic is this: 88 percent of those surveyed said “how a person lives is more important than whether he or she is a Catholic.”

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On
Kevin Wondrash

Revisiting the argument from desire

One of the classical demonstrations of God’s existence is the so-called argument from desire.

It can be stated in a very succinct manner as follows. Every innate or natural desire corresponds to some objective state of affairs that fulfills it.

We all have an innate or natural desire for ultimate fulfillment, ultimate joy, which nothing in this world can possibly satisfy. Therefore there must exist objectively a supernatural condition that grounds perfect fulfillment and happiness, which people generally refer to as “God.”

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