By Timothy P. O’Malley
A virtuous grumpiness has overtaken a certain kind of Christian. At least, we imagine that it’s virtuous. While the rest of the...
A return to the parish model would involve training seminarians and young clergy to create core groups of lay people who live into their baptismal promises, having the courage to be missionaries in the territorial parish, caring for the sick, relieving poverty, providing young people with tools to live for Jesus in a secular world.
Amazon’s logo symbolizes totality, and there is seemingly nowhere the “A to Z arrow” does not reach anymore. With the extraordinary means at Amazon’s disposal, everywhere is accessible and almost everything is on offer.
Whether it’s religions or potential mates, in the end everything is a product: one choice among many in the supermarket of personal values. And the individual is the neutral, liberated consumer who can take their pick from the shelves.In other words, we have inculcated in our pupils an ideological analogue to consumer capitalism. And there is nothing neutral about that at all.
Anglicans taking shots at Big-Box Churches are like three-year-olds learning to garden: Mine gets such enjoyment from popping the heads off of weeds that pulling out the roots becomes a missed opportunity for more fun.
Keep in contact with real things — the actual people around you, the actual place where you live, the actual God who underpins and suffuses all — and you’ll be inoculated against relativism.
I suspect that most agree with this basic principle, this core assumptions of modern democratic life: pregnancies should be, with rare and rarely charming exceptions, planned.
