Religion
Professor Stephen Mathis has come across my post responding to his op-ed, and he comments, in part: I think the ultimate problem with devaluing people or their organs is problematic precisely because it makes them vulnerable to more powerful folks. But I do disagree that disallowing a price tag on organs makes them worthless: I…
Congressional United Church Pastor Eugene Dyszlewski took to the Projo letters section, on Sunday, to attack Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin for his criticism of supposedly Roman Catholic Congressman Patrick Kennedy, who had attacked the Catholic Bishops for continuing to oppose abortion funding within healthcare legislation. Writes Dyszlewski: The congressman poses a legitimate question about…
CNS News has posted a video of an interview with Rhode Island First District Congressman Patrick Kennedy, where he says that the Catholic Church’s opposition to including funding for abortion in healthcare reform plans “is an absolute red herring” that does nothing but “fan the flames of dissent and discord”. You have to start to…
The following is a sentiment that I seem to have been hearing in multiple contexts, recently, written in this case by George Cardinal Pell in a review of Peter Seewald’s book on Pope Benedict (emphasis added): … by his own account, the answers Seewald received “grabbed him by the scruff of the neck.” He started…
Douglas Farrow takes up one of the more difficult questions for the right-wing Catholic: Pope Benedict’s call for a “true world political authority” in his recent encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. Farrow doesn’t fully assuage fear that the pope has erred in the direction of his European intellectual surroundings, but he does provide the context of…
As we slide into autumn, with the sensations and associations that it brings, Michael Ledeen’s musing on the relationship between the living and the dead in Naples seems more relevant now than it did in the summer edition of First Things. He makes some very interesting points, which resonate with greater strength as the trees…
So there’s been some controversy over Ted Kennedy’s receipt of Catholic burial rights, with the participation of Cardinal Sean O’Malley, no less. I lean toward the other side, as described here by Catholic University School of Canon Law Dean Father Robert Kaslyn: He compared the pastoral issue to the question of whether couples seeking a…
Upon death, I expect to confront, in some fashion, my countless errors of thought and of faith and to regret the actions to which they led me. On some issue, perhaps a habit, many of us will find it difficult to resist the urge to defend long-held beliefs even in the face of divine correction.…
It is unlikely that René Girard’s essay “On War and Apocalypse” is of a sort that would appeal to many Anchor Rising readers — that would appeal to any given group, really, except perhaps theologians. But he does make an interesting point about sacrifice and the advancement of knowledge: We cannot refasten the bindings because…
Cardinal George Pell, of Sydney, is entirely correct that “part of the logic in attacking the freedom of the church to serve others is to undermine the witness these services give to powerful Christian convictions.” Providing, say, adoption services in Massachusetts is thus defined not as something done out of religious conviction, but a secular…