Month: April 2008

Media & Culture

My 10-Year Old Wants an iPod…

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My Abby wants an iPod for her 10th birthday next week. I guess they’re all the rage within 4th grade. But I’m just not comfortable with it. I feel a collision coming, and it’s not unexpected. The collision will be between my sensibilities and the cultural norms (dare I say: fads) which shape the environment my young children are discovering as they grow up. Having the girls attend a parochial school, a decision which was primarily based on the desire to provide them a learning environment with at least one foot solidly planted in Cathol...

Religion & Society

Benedict’s Challenge to American Anti-Authoritarianism

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Pope Benedict XVI’s Yankee Stadium homily last Sunday was quite a celebration of American Catholicism, but the pontiff never strayed far from his theme of the unchanging need for faithful Christians, as a community rooted in the apostolic heritage, to be a sign of the gospel’s hope for mankind in the face of sin and death, through bearing witness to the unity of the truth found in the Word of God, revealed in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. This rootedness is not something Benedict sees simply in the hierarchical form of the Church (even if ...

Church

Recovering from the Papal Mass

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As evidenced by my last post, I tried very hard to get myself pumped up for yesterday’s occasion of attending the papal Mass at Yankee Stadium. The Mass was very nicely done, and it was wonderful to hear a stadium full of people thunder “Amen” and the other responses, but it was still a massive crowd attending an orchestrated “event,” and both these factors, unsurprisingly, wore on me greatly. I think it probably would have been a categorical pleasure for me had the organizers of the event chosen to focus solely on the pope&...

Ruminations

Hitting the Road to Worship with Pope Hope

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In less than 36 hours, Joyce and I will be in New York, for the papal Mass at Yankee Stadium. I’m very much looking forward to the experience, even if it means getting on a bus at 6:00am, and spending four hours traveling each way, just to sit high in the upper deck of the stadium. As much as anything else, I’m looking forward to the community. I expect celebrating the Mass with 50,000 Christians, or whatever it works out to be, will be exhilarating. I get energized on Holy Days when several hundred people crowd the church where I typically c...

Media & Culture

Celebrity Gossip and Moral Reasoning (part 2)

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Subjective Objectivity is the nonsense name I give to the nonsensical, widespread phenomenon in contemporary society of viewing the world through the narrow lens of one’s own experience, and assuming that such personal experience defines the norm for reality. This view is cut straight from the cloth of what Pope Benedict XVI has famously called a dictatorship of relativism. Typically, when pressed to defend the personalized opinions that emerge from such self-centered thinking, most believers of the doctrine will retreat into relativism, claiming t...

Scripture

Ransomed From Your Empty Way of Life

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There is a strand of thought in Christianity which supposes that each person, to be saved, is obliged to believe in Jesus as the Christ, wherein they will be judged righteous by God, with no reference to the lives they have led (i.e. their works). I think this is an oversimplification, failing to grasp either the defining significance of our lived lives, or the complex character of a believing faith. I also think the second reading in today’s liturgy, 1Pet 1.17-21, is awfully difficult to reconcile with such a soteriology. 3rd Sunday of Easter, Yea...

Learning

Adler on Liberal Education

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I wanted to write a follow-up tonight to my last post, refuting the silly (if a bit scary) notion of celebrity gossip as a legitimate form of moral discourse, but I strained my neck last night, and have been unable to spend enough time in front of the computer. I’ll have to come back for that. Instead, I’ve been trying to get through a Mortimer J Adler book I started in late February but wasn’t able to do much with in March. I’m not prepared to get into too much detail about it yet, as I’ve only just begun part four of the b...

Signs of the Times

Worshiping with the Stars

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The local United Church of Christ parish is having a “U2charist” on Sunday. This is billed as a worship service, but rather than being focused on worshiping God in Christ – as in “traditional” Eucharistic worship – this looks more like an event that celebrates celebrities. They’re even touting local “News” celebrity Liz Walker as guest speaker. As I understand it, these are essentially fund-raising events, with proceeds going to support efforts that fall somehow under the umbrella of the UN’s Mi...

Media & Culture

Celebrity Gossip and Moral Reasoning (part 1)

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“If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to serve as a horrible warning.” The preceding quote from Catherine Aird is always good for raising a laugh, and there’s a certain ring of truth to it. Having read the Bible, I’m well aware of the kind of role horrible warnings can play in human history. But any real estate agent will tell you that location is everything. Translation: context matters – a lot. Ty Burr wrote an Ideas piece published in the Boston Sunday Globe this past weekend that I found quite disturbing...