Word – Page 5 – Madison Catholic Herald Archive (2001-2025)

Over the years, there have been numerous films that feature the character of the “monster-mentor,” by which I mean an elder who forms a young apprentice through the toughest kind of tough love.

Think of Lou Gossett, Jr.’s character in An Officer and a Gentleman who puts Richard Gere’s young Navy recruit brutally through his paces; or of the awful drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket who ruthlessly prepares one young man to be a soldier, even as he leads another to commit suicide; or of Pai-Mei in Kill Bill, Vol. 2, the Kung-Fu master who brow-beats one recruit until she is able to put her fist through a four-inch thick piece of wood.

A message written in blood

Recently, the attention of the world was riveted to a deserted beach in northern Libya, where a group of 21 Coptic Christians were brutally beheaded by masked operatives of the ISIS movement.

In the wake of the executions, ISIS released a gruesome video entitled A Message in Blood to the Nation of the Cross. I suppose that for the ISIS murderers, the reference to “the Nation of the Cross” had little sense beyond a generic designation for Christianity.

Sadly for most Christians, too, the cross has become little more than a harmless symbol. I would like to take the awful event on that Libyan beach, as well as the ISIS message, as an occasion to reflect on the still startling distinctiveness of the cross.

Christianity not primarily about ethics

Many atheists and agnostics today argue that it is possible for non-believers in God to be morally upright.

They resent the implication that the denial of God will lead inevitably to ethical relativism or nihilism. They are quick to point out examples of non-religious people who are models of kindness, compassion, justice, etc.

Non-believers praiseworthy?

A recent article proposed that non-believers are, on average, more morally praiseworthy than religious people. God knows (pun intended) that during the last 20 years we’ve seen plenty of evidence of the godly behaving badly.

Word on Fire

On February 11, 2015

Fr. Robert Barron

Thomas Merton’s influence

I write these words on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Merton, one of the greatest spiritual writers of the 20th century and a man who had a decisive influence on me and my vocation to the priesthood.

I first encountered Merton’s writing in a peculiar way. My brother and I were both working at a bookstore in the Chicago suburbs. One afternoon, he tossed me a tattered paperback with a torn cover that the manager had decided to discard.

Word on Fire

On January 28, 2015

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.

Around the Diocese

On January 28, 2015

Kevin Wondrash

Illuminating the Word: St. John’s Bible pilgrimage

MADISON — Original art pieces from the St. John’s Illuminated Bible are now on exhibit at the Chazen Art Museum on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.

Commissioned by St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minn., the St. John’s Bible is the first handwritten and illustrated Bible to be commissioned in over 500 years. It is a beautiful work of art featuring 160 artworks or “illuminations.” Those who have already visited the exhibit recommend it very highly.

Word on Fire

On January 21, 2015

Fr. Robert Barron

Problems with ‘hook-up’ culture

From the 1950s through the late 1970s, Karol Wojtyla (St. John Paul II) was a professor of moral philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin in Poland, specializing in sexual ethics and what we call today “marriage and family life.”

He produced two important books touching on these matters, The Acting Person, a rigorous philosophical exploration of Christian anthropology, and Love and Responsibility, a much more accessible analysis of love, sex, and marriage.

These texts provided the foundation for the richly textured teaching of St. John Paul II that now goes by the name “theology of the body.”

Word on Fire

On January 14, 2015

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.

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.

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.”