Update on Previous Stories: The Fast for Justice, the Koran Burning

Quick updates (and further commentary) re: two stories about which I've blogged recently:

Kicking It Old School: Cardinal Burke, The Galero Wars, and the Revival of Real Catholicism

In response to my posting about Cardinal Burke and Fr. Andrew Hamilton yesterday, Kathy Hughes made the following scintillating comment:

I think Bully Burke undercuts his argument with his photos in clerical bling.

John Aravosis and Mark Jordan: A Debate about How to Approach the Role of the Bible in Gay Bashing

I agree with John Aravosis here.  When I linked several days ago to Mark Jordan's essay on which Aravosis is commenting (I linked to an earlier version at Religion Dispatches, while Aravosis is linking to it at the Alternet site), I did so to point to a problem that needs to be addressed in the American cultural and political discussion of homosexuality.  This is that many people talk about what "the bible says" without having a clue about what it actually says.

Michael Bayly on Expulsion as the Cost of Discipleship: Further Reflections on Catholic Identity

In the response of Fr. Andrew Hamilton to Cardinal Burke re: Catholic identity to which I linked earlier today, Hamilton says that the price of walking with Jesus in a path that seeks to abolish barriers between those who count and those who don't is that we will be targeted by those who oppose this message--even within our own ecclesial communions.  Hamilton says that to call this experience martyrdom may be overdone, unless we understand the martyrdom as being martyred for the sake of charity.

And Speaking of Money, and Health Care, and the U.S. as a Shining City on a Hill

That by-invitation-only charity banquet with the fabulous menu that featured one of the princes of the Catholic church in 2006?  I don't imagine I'd have been invited.

Cardinal Burke and Fr. Andrew Hamilton: Defining Catholic Identity for 21st Century (2)

To reiterate what I said at the end of the posting I've just uploaded: though Cardinal Burke and the gentlemen of the cloth who now control the Catholic church tell us that departing from them and their teaching will cause us to lose our access to salvation, to many of us (and our numbers are constantly increasing), it appears precisely the opposite: the only way to save our souls is to distance ourselves from the "Catholic" claims of Cardinal Burke and those in his camp.

Cardinal Burke and Fr. Andrew Hamilton: Defining Catholic Identity for 21st Century

A recent diptych of statements about what it means to be a Catholic follower of Jesus at this point in history has been receiving attention--well-deserved attention.  Some days back, American Cardinal Raymond Burke, now a powerful Vatican official, gave a presentation to the Australian Catholic Students' Association about what it means to be Catholic now.  Burke frames his definition of Catholicism in terms of a combat between church and culture by entitling it "The Fall of the Christian West."