Religion
I’ve been at a loss as to how to respond to the comments to my post this morning about the Cranston school prayer banner, because those who advocate for the removal of the banner are so extreme in their beliefs (even those who are typically reasonable and moderate in their approach) that they appear to…
The debate over a banner with a prayer in a Cranston public school — which the ACLU attempted to bully the district into moving with the threat of a lawsuit and which the school committee has voted to defend — makes very stark the contrast of the sides. On one side is the fact that…
We hear a lot of the rights-based arguments being made in favor of same-sex marriage hereabouts, including the call to RI Founder Roger Williams and the “separation of church and state”. The arguments for religious liberty have seemed muted in the coverage of the debate. In today’s ProJo, Professor Robin Wilson (co-editor of the book…
I agree with R. R. Reno’s assessment, presented in his review of The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope, by Roger Scruton (non-subscribers can try here): Scruton observes that “the belief that human beings can either foresee the future or control it to their own advantage ought not to have survived an…
Philosophy Professor John Haldane adds his own commentary to the list addressing Stephen Hawking’s lately released The Grand Design. If the subject catches your interest, you should certainly read the whole essay, but one point attracted my attention in particular: [The authors] then go on to note, however, that “it is not only the peculiar…
Elbridge Colby has an interesting article in First Things (see here if you’re not a subscriber) addressing the ability of nuclear weapons to fit within the just war tradition. One point worth emphasizing comes to mind upon reading his summation of the “nay” argument (with which he disagrees): The argument proffered by the churchmen is…
A recent article (apparently not online) in The Rhode Island Catholic summarized same-sex marriage legislation introduced to the General Assembly as follows: Both Chafee and House Speaker Gordon Fox support allowing same-sex couples to marry. Last Thursday, Rep. Arthur Handy and Sen. Rhoda Perry filed bills that would recognize “civil marriage” between same gender individuals,…
One of the more amorphous aspects of the Catholic Church that persuades me of the wisdom of its approach to conceptualizing life is that it eschews easy answers to thorny problems. (That doesn’t mean, of course, that individual Catholics or even broad movements of them don’t from time to time slip into human habits.) Bishop…
RI Bishop Thomas Tobin asks the key question: Nor should the so-called “separation of church and state” be used as a weapon to silence the faith community, or restrict its robust participation in the debate of important public issues. I’ve found that whenever I’ve spoken out on public issues — e.g., abortion, gay marriage or…
Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk notes an unfortunate, but natural, reaction to dementia. Relating the story of a woman who could only connect with her afflicted mother by singing hymns, with the lesson being that “there’s always someone in there,” Pacholczyk goes on to lament our tendency to behave as if that’s not the case: Sometimes we…