Safe Haven

It's really very simple: If the living product of a sexual union is a person, you can't make an exception for when it's OK to kill them. Even in horrible situations like rape, we need to remember that this person did not choose how to come into being. None of us did. Shall we take life away, because of the evil of someone else? It seems astonishing to me that we spend so much time talking about 'reproductive rights' and not about that most fundamental right we all have: the right to life itself. What are we? Are we defined by what we are able to accomplish, or by an inherent dignity that no others can deny or destroy, and that misfortune and accident can only obscure, but never eliminate? Tell me why a political party who presumably exists to promote economic fairness among those weakest among us: the racially marginalized, the disabled, the forgotten, has forgotten its first duty-- to defend the weakest among us. Who needs more help than a child? Some people ...

That guy was a jerk-face. All I did was say that Todd Akin is a good man who made a mistake. Unfortunately, it might mean that Senator McCaskill will win re-election. I said I would pray she picked up an economics textbook (among other things) should she be fortunate enough to win. Well, this guy didn't like that at all. I may have speculated that she would switch parties if she did that. Whereupon this guy pointed out that Akin voted against raising the debt ceiling, as if that was the equivalent of putting puppies in blenders. I said maybe we need a default to wake up our whole political class. At which point, he consigned me to whatever mental holding-tank he has for storing his subhuman political opponents. He said, " I don't think you have any idea what a sovereign default would entail, so I can see why you feel right at home with the Republican party, where knowledge is weakness." I added the period for the aid of my readers and for him, since he was so full of ...

I need to talk about a couple of things. First, the Gospel for the 20th. The rich young man. Meets Jesus. Asks Jesus what he needs to do still. Also says he's kept all the commandments. Jesus says to be perfect, sell your stuff and follow him. But he's rich, and he went away sad. Now, when I was Reformed, we said 2 things about this and related texts: First, there's no way he actually kept the commandments; that's impossible. We need grace, and we are wretched sinners with no good of our own, but that God loves us. Second, this man wasn't saved. If you meet Jesus, and he asks you to give up some small thing like stuff to follow him, we can only hope we understand what's being offered. But he didn't. Ergo, unsaved. Catholic theology reads this text very differently. Jesus said, "if you want to be perfect..." not saved. And we take him at his word that he kept the commandments, in some real fashion. We distinguish between venial and mortal sins (...

I hate that I'm so connected, sometimes. I don't even need to log in to my e-mail anymore; it comes on my phone. Facebook, same thing. And if you know me, you know that I'm a people person. I draw strength and inspiration from people all the time. I hate being alone. Praying and writing are part of shaking off the lonely, as it were. But because I don't want to be an attention and emotion junkie, I recognize the goodness of quiet. I finished a book yesterday, and that was good. [But it was a very emotional book.--ed.] That it was. And I had to tell somebody about it right away. I could go on one of those sanctimonious rants about how technology is pulling us away from God and each other, but I won't. Rather, I wonder what it means, our distractions. I think we are looking for God. And one of the troublesome aspects of the similitude between the Creator of all things and the good things He created is that it's pretty easy to confuse one for the other. After all...

One of my friends was asked a question about his favorite baseball team, the Atlanta Braves. All these warm emotions came flooding back, as my affection for the Braves is not small. [Aren't you a die-hard Cardinals fan?--ed.] Yes. But the Braves of my youth in the '90s taught me to love the game more than my team, or at least to see baseball beauty unshaded by the passions of loyalty. [Wow. Pompous much?--ed.] If I write something pretty, I just gotta go with it. As everyone probably knows, pitching is my favorite part of baseball. I used to pitch to my brother in the backyard; I'll take a 1-0 or 2-1 pitching duel over a home-run explosion any day. And my favorite pitcher by a long way is Greg Maddux.  He always had that underdog thing about him, because I never saw him hit 90 MPH on the radar gun, and definitely not later. He surely is proud of the fact that he could out-think the hitters instead of overpower them. No one with 355 wins is actually an underdog, but you kn...

O Jesus, I need you to know that I've forgiven and forgiving the best way I know how. The truth is, I can't stay mad for long at all. It's too hard. So I was hurt and hurting, But all I do now is cry and cry, because I really don't know if it's gonna be OK. Do they know that not a day has passed? Do they know that my laughs are less deep, the sun is less bright because they are gone? O Jesus, take my tears. I cannot pretend that I am fine, and I can't change the past. But I can't make it without You. Just promise me you'll take the tears away One day. [Written after meditation on the Gospel reading, Mt. 18:21-19:1, August 16, 2012.]

I need to be praying, but I wanted to blog first. I've been on this Earth 32 years now. I know that's nothing, in the grand scheme. But to me, I feel like I haven't made my mark. You know? Maybe I pine for worldly success. I have Christ and His Church; what more could I want? [Heaven.--ed.] Good answer. Number one. Survey says, "Love!" "Family!" "Money I've actually earned!" [Did you just reference Family Feud?--ed.] Yep. [That Richard Dawson was a saucy one. If he even looked at my wife, I'd punch him in the face.--ed.] I know, right? He was awesome on Match Game before we were born. [He was the smartest game show host ever.--ed.] Yeah. He made "The Running Man," no offense to Ahnold. I should just probably worry about today, and not get too fixated on what people think is important or valuable. Sigh. I just don't feel useful.

I tried to pretend that I hated it . I've been on a Richard Marx kick for a week or more. "Hazard" might be my favorite. But there's this. And this might be everyone's favorite fornication theme song, but it's awesome. I love you, Angelia.

5 Romney T-Shirt Slogans 5. Romney 2012. Because Supply And Demand Never Heard Of Hope And Change. 4. Romney 2012. Because Ann Romney Doesn't Mind If You Eat A Hamburger. 3. Romney 2012. Yeah, He's Boring. Look Where 'Exciting' Got Us. 2. Romney 2012. The Last Time Unemployment Was This High, No One Knew What 'Jumping The Shark' Meant. 1. Romney 2012. Because The Only One Who Should Be Unemployed Is Obama.

5 Thoughts For Today 5. We cannot let disorder--in life, music, or anything--be called, "creative." It's not. I can see that the spirit of this age is Chaos, and it masquerades as authenticity. 4. For the record, I'm still evangelical enough that criticizing Billy Graham in public just seems wrong. And any Catholics using the Church's teaching on Holy Orders (which I believe wholeheartedly) to make cheap jokes at his expense are four-fifths of the way to getting punched in the face. 3. I figured out something yesterday: It's not that I am willfully averse to making some sign of adoration toward Christ in the Eucharist; it's that I am desiring Him so much that I want to stop wasting time. I get totally lost in the Eucharistic liturgy, and I don't come out of it until the Mass is over. But I'll try to slow down. 2. Mittens and The Kid, 2012. Because They Suck Way Less Than The Other Guys. Tell me you wouldn't wear that on a T-shirt. 1. ...

Sooner or later, you're going to have to face it: The irreconcilable dilemma between the central hermeneutical principle of the Reformation, Sola Scriptura--with all its true implications--and the earnest desire nonetheless to have visible ecclesiastical expressions as mediating institutions between the individual man and his God. The highest and best expression of Sola Scriptura, coming as it does with a great "respect" and hopefully awareness of the ancient history, leaves one as a renaissance man, perhaps, but it does not fundamentally change the arbiter of truth: the individual. He decides what the Holy Spirit says in the Scriptures, he decides which ecclesiastical decisions from the past were the right ones, he provisionally consents to the authority he lives under now. None of this is itself an argument for Catholicism as such. But if the bitter taste of that leads you to consider the paradigmatic alternative, thanks be to God. In any case, face up to it , and don...

Pride, I'm convinced, is the worst of all vices. It keeps you from seeing the most obvious good things in the world. It keeps you from turning around in the spiritual life. To be brief about it, it keeps you from Love. Most average people--who are not especially wicked--know when they've made a mistake, let's say a bad one. What happens next depends on pride. Pride is the opposite of strength; it is insecurity named theologically. What drives you crazy with some people is, they're apologetic about the smallest offenses, and it really is a fault. And then they miss the heart of the matter. They miss something really big. And if one happens to experience this, you can taste the incomprehensibility of it all. Gnats, camels, the whole bit. And then you are astonished at the pride, again. To be frank, it doesn't mean you're "sensitive," it means you are a Pharisee. I suppose it happens to all of us at one time or another. And I do need grace to be the...

It'd be pretty easy to go on a sanctimonious rant about this. But instead, maybe I'm just supposed to ask a question. What are we actually doing when we go to church? That is, what is its purpose? Is it possible that Jim and his commenters had the purpose wrong, and when what they thought was the purpose did not bear fruit, they drew the wrong conclusion? And this is where my Catholicism falls out as a matter of course. It really isn't just cheerleading. We go to Mass to offer sacrifice. That is, our life in union with His. We owe God that. We owed him that even before the full revelation of his Son. But because nothing we could offer ourselves would be worthy, it must be in Christ. More than that, it must be Christ. And my life is the pittance, yet most necessary bilateral gift. But alas, it is said, Christ died only once, and yet you call it sacrifice, even to say Christ is immolated on the altar. That is true. Yet what is this so close a relation? Is Calvary repeat...

One thing that moves me very deeply is to remind people in my life that God loves them. Insanely. Fanatically. Unendingly. If only I could believe that myself! But it is true to say that God loves us more than we could possibly love ourselves. The Cross shows us this. For many of you, the Cross of Christ is about the total removal of sin and guilt, and to be sure, there is an element of satisfaction in it. But it is not primarily transactional; it is relational. I was in dialogue with a guy who agreed with me (without knowing it) that it was relational, and this was his reason for being Reformed and not Catholic. But would he understand how far the Reformed tradition has moved back toward the Council of Trent in its popular piety! On the ground, "faith alone" is freighted with everything that "faith formed by love" means for a Catholic. Loving trust, that heart of living faith, is already assumed. People would reject extra nos imputation as preposterous if they th...

...so, self-awareness and freedom of action are key problem areas in the Borg way of life. In fact, in a subsequent encounter with the Borg--named in the narrative re-telling of the mission logs as, "I, Borg"--the crew of the Enterprise realizes that a Borg who has become self-aware ought not to be used to destroy all Borg, aside from the questionable ethics of doing it in the absence of that awareness. For one thing then, the Borg show us that our flesh--I mean the word literally, not spiritually--is not what makes us human. They regard purely artificial life-forms as inferior. But to disrespect and deny that basic self-determination, that individuation, is to deny something at the core of our being. (Different species in the Star Trek universe are simply a medium to talk about human cultural differences.) Quite frankly, I don't see how theosis approaches this. If we take the sacramental life as a guide--because in it, we get partial realization and a preview of our ...

I have often humorously compared the Catholic Church to the Borg Collective. The similarities are slightly unnerving for a Protestant considering conversion. In recent days though, ideas have bubbled up that the Catholic/Orthodox idea of theosis destroys individuality. I think it would be good to contrast the Borg Collective with being a member of the Catholic Church, for instance, so that we can see how the Catholic Church is not like being assimilated into the Borg. Let's recall who the Borg are, so that we can think about what it's like to be assimilated. The USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) under the command of Jean-Luc Picard, was thrown a great distance from the explored area of the galaxy by the flippantly malevolent super-being "Q," into system J-25, where they encountered a cubic Borg vessel of great power that killed several members of the crew, assimilated several others, and nearly destroyed the ship. Each Borg is tied into the collective mind; he or she hear...

I spent most of the day with Bryan and Carol Cross (and Olivia and Laura). I admit I did most of the talking. [You always do most of the talking.--ed.] We spoke of discussions we recently had with the Reformed, where they might go, and the state of the Catholic Church. [Not good, at least here.--ed.] It's improving. I had missed Bryan so much, it was bound to be a blather-fest. My brain is random, too. We went from Jim Brickman's catalogue to liturgical music and back again with scarcely a pause. I saw Fr. Barron's Catholicism series just chillin' on a bookshelf; I prevailed upon him to make a plan to get a gang together to watch it. So he did. We'll see when it goes down. JK's Thought Of The Day: If Jesus was silent in the face of the most outrageous injustices against him, if he swallowed up our iniquity in the power of the all-embracing love of his sacrifice when he had every right to exact retribution, perhaps the petty slights against us are unworthy of...

To Peter Leithart and others, let me take the risk of being rude and say that I'm crying crocodile tears that you judge me in schism from the personal mental phantasm you call "the Church." When you come anywhere close to figuring out what your ragtag band believes to be the most essential doctrines (and agree among yourselves that you're not going to hell, at a minimum) you let me know. I'm super gratified that despite your vehement disagreements with the Church of Rome, many of you consider me part a true "branch" of your mental phantasm, but oddly enough, opinions on that vary almost as numerously as the thousands of separate visible communities in which you have gathered yourselves. I suppose that an open communion table is a worthy goal among you, but doing this indicates of itself that those doctrinal particularities have been relegated to a sphere of secondary importance, a statement contradicted by both your visible separations, and the vehemen...

I'm sitting here again with nothing to say. I had a blast at Chick-Fil-A with...everyone. Since I'm not an idiot, I don't walk around worrying about how my actions affect some "community" or other, as if every person that might fit the category thinks and acts a certain way. The problem with people like Rachel Held Evans is that they want to hide the fact that they don't really stand for anything in particular. Does the Bible teach against homosexual practice? It's a simple question. Do you believe in those things? How to say something is a different consideration than whether it should be said. We could flagellate ourselves all day long about failures to show respect, love, or what-have-you, but at the end of the day, we're going to offend someone. If we tell the truth in Christ with love, people WILL hate us. And we need to have a real conversation about whether that's our fault, or theirs. Be willing to say, "I did all I could to respect t...

Riddle me this one, you Zwinglian Gnostic masquerading as a minister of Christ: If the New Covenant--the full revelation of God's love to all people, including the Gentiles--is in effect, why would it be less sacrificial than the Old? It makes no sense. You're gonna get bent out of shape about some candles and incense? Really? Moses would be furious. You just called him a Gnostic in your rush to give Jesus all the glory. Did Moses sin against God by doing what the LORD himself said? Stop being a moron, and do some covenant theology, for pete's sake. There's plenty new about the New Covenant, but here's a hint: it isn't what you think. Offer your bodies as living sacrifices. Pretty sure I read that...IN THE NEW COVENANT! So what you're saying is, the glory of the New Covenant--greater than that of Moses--culminates in no actual sacrifice, no priests, and ugly churches with nothing in them? You're so bad off, I almost want to send you to Dr. Luther to ge...