Readers following Blaine Amendment cases will be interested in following New Horizon Church Ministry v. Spitzer, which was filed in federal court this past October. For more on the Blaine Amendments, click here.
HT: Kris Tate
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Blaine Amendment case in New York
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Tony Blair received into the Catholic Church
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was received into the Catholic Church yesterday. Here is an earlier article on his 30 year journey to Rome.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Calendar It!
This from Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture:
“[P]lease keep in mind that our 2008 annual Fall conference: The Family: Searching for Fair Love, will take place November 6-8, 2008. We believe this theme will prove very timely. In 2008 the Church will celebrate important anniversaries of Pope Paul VI’s Encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968), and Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter Mulieris Dignitatem (1988), and we have also noticed that Pope Benedict’s message for the celebration of the World Day of Peace on January 1, 2008, already available on the Vatican website, takes the family as its central theme. In that message the Holy Father says that “The natural family, as an intimate communion of life and love, based on marriage between a man and a woman, constitutes “the primary place of ‘humanization’ for the person and society,” and a “cradle of life and love.”” Our 2008 annual Fall conference will aim both to explore and to promote the Holy Father’s exaltation of the family as the primary place of humanization for the person and society.”
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Michael P.'s Headline a Bit Premature
Yesterday Michael P. posted on the abolition of the death penalty in New Jersey under the headline "No more 'state-endorsed killing' in New Jersey." MOJ friend John Breen writes the following:
A Bit Premature Thanks to Michael Perry and Rick Garnett for posting on New Jersey's decision to abolish capital punishment in the Garden State. Although this news is certainly welcome, and deserves to be celebrated, the facts on the ground, as indicated here and here, show that Michael's headline "No More State-endorsed Killing in New Jersey" is a bit premature, to say the least.
Monday, December 17, 2007
Gaudete in Domino semper
"God Is Near as Friend and Faithful Husband"
VATICAN CITY, DEC. 16, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of the address Benedict XVI delivered today before reciting the midday Angelus with several thousand people gathered in St. Peter's Square.
* * *
Dear Brothers and Sisters!
"Gaudete in Domino semper" -- "Rejoice in the Lord always" (Philippians 4:4). With these words of St. Paul, the holy Mass of the Third Sunday of Advent opens, and for this reason it is called "Gaudete." The apostle exhorts Christians to rejoice because the coming of the Lord, that is, his glorious return, is certain and he will not delay. The Church makes precisely this invitation while she prepares to celebrate Christmas and her gaze is turned always more toward Bethlehem. In fact, we await his second coming with certain hope because we have known his first coming.
The mystery of Bethlehem reveals to us God-with-us, God near to us, not simply in a spatial and temporal sense; he is near to us because he has wedded, so to speak, our humanity; he has taken our condition upon himself, choosing to be completely like us, except in sin, to make us like him. Christian joy thus flows from this certainty: God is near, he is with me, he is with us, in joy and suffering, in health and sickness, as friend and faithful husband. And this joy remains even in trials, in suffering itself, and remains not on the surface but rather in the depths of the person who gives himself to God and confides in him.
Some ask themselves: But is this joy still possible today? The answer is given by the life of men and women of every age and social condition, happy to consecrate their existence to others! Was not Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta perhaps, in our times, an unforgettable witness of evangelical joy? She lived in dailycontact with misery, human degradation, death. Her soul knew the trial of the dark night of faith, and yet she bestowed the smile of God upon all.
We read in one of her writings: "With impatience we await paradise, where God is, but it is in our power to be in paradise beginning here below and from this moment. Being happy with God means: loving like him, helping like him, giving like him, serving like him" ("La gioia di darsi agli altri," Ed. Paoline, 1987, 43).
Yes, joy enters into the heart of those who place themselves at the service of the least and the poor. In those who love in this way God takes up his abode and the soul is in joy. If, however, happiness is made an idol, the wrong road is taken and it is truly difficult to find Jesus. This, unfortunately, is the proposal of the cultures that put individual happiness in the place of God; it is a mentality that finds its emblematic effect in the pursuit of pleasure at all costs, in the spread of drug use as an escape, like a refuge in artificial paradises, which subsequently show themselves to be completely illusory.
Dear brothers and sisters, even at Christmastime it is possible to take the wrong road, to exchange the true feast for that one that does not open the heart to Christ. May the Virgin Mary help all Christians, and men in search of God, to reach Bethlehem, to meet the Child who is born for us, for the salvation and happiness of all men.
[Translation by Joseph G. Trabbic]
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Constitutional Protestantism and Constitutional Catholicism
Almost 20 years ago now Sandy Levinson published a book, Constitutional Faith, in which he makes the analogical move mentioned by Tom Berg in a recent post by exploring "Catholic" and "Protestant" interpretations of the constitution.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Reason and Regensburg: Pope Benedict and the Dialogue of Cultures
At the Dialogue of Cultures’ conference, Jean Elshtain’s paper (title above) suggested that it was easy to predict a winner in a battle between the hard extremism found in some elements of Islam and the soft nihilism (and hedonism) found culturally rooted in the West. She agreed with the pope that the situation needs to be addressed at both ends. Having exhausted the faith of Jerusalem (and Athens), the West has lost the ability to defend human dignity. To be culturally viable, there is an urgent need to reestablish the mutually reinforcing dialogue between faith and reason in the West.
As for Islam, Elshtain argues that we should take the jihadists at face value – this war is about religion and not economics or politics. Those of us in the West can contribute to the project of peace by supporting (standing in solidarity with?) moderate Muslim scholars who are attempting to retrieve a non-voluntarist interpretation of Islam, often at risk to their own lives. Elshtain also pointed out that West suffers from some of the effects of voluntarism within its own tradition, suggesting that the seeds of modern notions of self-sovereignty were sown in the 14th and 15 centuries by theologians who replaced God as logos with God as will.
She said much more and more eloquently than I have captured here, but I think this short couple of paragraphs gives a sense of her thought provoking paper.
Monday, December 3, 2007
Dialogue of Cultures conference
As expected, the Dialogue of Cultures conference at Notre Dame was great. David Solomon, Dan McIinerny, and our own Elizabeth Kirk are to be commended for their work in bring the conference together. In addition to the talks, the conference also provided a great opportunity for discussion during breaks, meals, and late night with old friends and new. One of my new acquaintances works in the recording industry in California. He paid his own way to the conference to present a paper largely because one of his former professors (another conference speaker) had inspired and challenged him 30 years ago. What a testimony to the professor’s use of his gifts as teacher! As time permits over the next few days, I’ll blog on some of the conference talks. I heard wonderful things about the “Natural Law in American Catholic Social Ethics: John Ryan, Jacques Maritain, and John Courtney Murray” panel, but I had to be at another panel. Perhaps Patrick Brennan can offer us a synopsis of what he, Michael Moreland, and Zach Calo discussed in that session. I would also ask others who were at the conference to send me their reflections on the various talks for possible posting.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
The Dialogue of Cultures
One of my favorite conferences of the year is the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture's annual fall conference. The year's conference, The Dialogue of Cultures, will take place on the Notre Dame campus from Thusday, Nov. 29 through Saturday, Dec. 1.
The theme is taken from Pope Benedict XVI's 2006 Regensburg address: "While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically falsifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. … Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.
Check out the rich fare in the Conference Schedule.
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