Safe Haven

5 Things To Do When Your Hated Rival Advances to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament 5. Crack open a Coke, and turn up the Bolton. [Oh, geez.--ed.] Get off me. 4. Swear at the other squad of 21 and 22 year-olds, then hang your head in shame. 3. Ignore the Men's NCAA Tournament, until such time that said hated rival is humiliated. 2. Wonder where unethical Nixon cronies are when you need them. 1. Cry.

Judge me if you like, but I read the dictionary a lot. Well, it's more accurate to say that I look up words on dictionary.com a lot. You might say that my current vocation is reading, so it's bound to happen that I come across a word I've never seen. Even in theology, the words I look up are not the "God-words"; rather, they are regular English words related somehow. Augustine or his translator forced me to look up "droll" yesterday. The GRE word game on the site says I know almost 12,000 words, which I guess is good. But I digress, which means I am departing from the main point of my narrative. They served up 419 words, and I correctly defined 92% percent of them. Being the perfectionist that I am, I was annoyed, surely thinking back to those that would have been correct if I had read the definitions a little more carefully. Some of you who are vain will mock me for not knowing a simple word like "droll," and all I can say is that many words w...

5 Uncouth, Humorous Thoughts 5. Since unions eventually ruin every for-profit venture known to man, maybe we should push for the unionization of abortion workers. 4. Ditto the porn industry. 3. I too am upset about the very public sins of Catholic clergy and others, but in the end, the Church is "too big to fail." 2. Um, when is the last time you heard about the ridiculous "golden parachutes" of so-called public servants? 1. At the risk of complaining, I've yet to reap any benefits of this "war on women." In fact, are we sure it's a win if, at the end of all this consequence-free sex, everyone is dead?

Well, I took a test today in pursuit of gainful employment. It was the same test I failed on the 13th. I can't do any better. If I didn't pass, then the work is beyond me. You do what you can. That's all we can ask of ourselves. I'm trying to do this because I need money, and I need to feel useful. It seems like a good opportunity. What doesn't seem like a good choice for me is politics. It makes me angry. It's not that I feel like I am completely devoid of the patience and good humor needed, but what I do lack is patience for stupid people. The sort of people who can opine for 20 minutes about how much they like the president, how he's getting a raw deal, etc. but can't actually tell you one policy they favor or why. I don't despise liberals; it's "default liberals" that annoy me. More than that, some of these people hate their opponents with a fervor only matched by their complete ignorance. Yes, I believe that most people commonly as...

I did a decidedly un-Lenten thing tonight: Extra-large Cecil Whittaker's pizza (pepperoni & sausage) and chicken wings. Hey, it ain't Friday! [I am ashamed of you.--ed.] Why? Isn't this a pagan ritual to you anyway? [I'm ashamed that you think it is of any value.--ed] Meditation on the death of Christ and self-denial has no value? Who knew? I fixed my bedside clock from the odd power outage the other day. I let it flash at me for far too long. It was a warning-sign of ongoing chronometric ignorance that demanded redress. It is true that I have this desktop computer and my cell phone to give me the correct time; it is also the case that unset electronic clocks remind us of the Fall in ways that other broken time-pieces do not. A broken clock might signify an important moment; it might be a gift from a loved one, or a part of history even when it no longer functions. An unset electronic clock screams, "Can't you see what's going on here?" like a dema...

The reality of where the creedal orthodoxy minimally held in common by Catholics and Protestants comes from--from the Catholic Church--follows from applying a sound hermeneutical strategy to history itself. Let me put it out there, and then I'll come up with an example. If the ecumenical councils are presumed true (say, Nicea) and we want to know what the nature of that truth is, and what its implications are. As we would naturally do with Scripture, the real-world context is a part of the truth that the author or authors are trying to communicate. How did the council fathers see what they were doing? What was the nature of the decision they would make? If it was definitive, on what basis was it? To be frank about it, the council fathers did not believe they could err. The reason they formed a council in the first place is to definitively settle--and with divine sanction--whatever question was before them. The hermeneutic of suspicion with regard to the councils--most people miss t...

It seems to me that, respectfully, at the heart of this feel-good ecumenism being advocated in some quarters lurks the re-assertion of the same basic ecclesiology advocated by the Reformers. Just because you're nicer about it doesn't make it any less Reformational than the bitterest of days past. We should all celebrate the fact that we are not taking the Lord's own final judgment into our individual hands, speaking kindly to one another, and hoping and praying for the best. But the Catholic Church speaks clearly on the point of apostolic succession, and combined with Petrine primacy, forms the historically situated basis for levelling the charge of schism against the Reformers. That is, that claim of apostolic visible oneness is not accidental to the claim of authority by the Catholic Church; it is the heart. The reason the Catholic Church doesn't join in the missional-ecumenist party, as it were, is because the Church would have to deny one of her inherent marks, wh...