Bilgrimage

It's a thing now among journalists and religion commentators to ask what has happened to the public intellectuals of the churches...

Some of my short takes on several pieces of news commentary in the past few days:

E.J. Dionne on the Arizona legislature's excellent "de-evangelization"  program:

This is the kind of thing I'd have written in my journal, before I began blogging--and as I read the day's news and news co...

Provocative one-liners from smart news commentary or articles I read this past week:

E.J. Dionne's statement at Commonweal  right now about the "saintly politics" Pope Francis is ostensibly using as he c...

The devastation in Oklahoma is, of course, in the forefront of my mind this morning. Just yesterday, I swapped emails with a former c...

And here's where the determination of the current leaders of the Catholic church to maintain at all costs the historically develo...

As 2012 ended, I began compiling a list of religion-politics-culture discussions from the year that seemed worth continuing in 2013. Th...

Lots of blather these days at centrist Catholic blog sites about who occupies the center (which is to say, who issues the defining dic...

E.J. Dionne is absolutely correct with his analysis of how far to the extreme right the Republican party has now moved under the man...

Why has it taken liberal Catholics so long to begin seeing what many of us have seen for some time now? I just wrote.  And as I dealt w...

E.J. Dionne argues that the U.S. Catholic bishops squandered a premier moment of unity in American Catholicism, when Catholics across th...

An end-of-week wrap-up posting that ties together recent events and commentary with previous postings on this blog . . . . In a posting earl...

This strange approach to politics, involving nudges, nods, and winks on cultural issues, reflects the real division in the nation: between t...

There is so much work to be done to battle against family breakdown and to encourage husbands and wives to strengthen their commitments to e...

And now time to catch up on this and that. I mentioned some time ago (I think) that my nephew Luke had completed his master’s degree in ...

A few disparate thoughts today—a day on which I am returning home from my trip, and have little time to blog—from E.J. Dionne’s new book Sou...

This has been a week of travel, in which it has not been easy to be online frequently. Given this, and since I’ve fulfilled my major task f...

People talk about God as though doing so is easy, self-evident. I talk about God that way. But here’s the problem. To communicate...