Catholic/catholic: Believing/Not Believing in the Church Today

Talk about religion gets people's blood flowing.  Yesterday at this site, I had responses to various postings from 1) a gay activist who has, on repeated occasions, larded the comments section of this blog with statements about how religion is absurd and those who believe in God are pathological, and 2) a devout practicing Catholic friend who bridles a bit at Anthea Butler's question to fellow Catholics, For those of you who stay, how can you do it?

Paul Krugman Talks Centrist Games, I Hear Catholic Centrist Games

Yesterday, I received an email from a Catholic centrist who holds court on the Commonweal blog site, among other sites.  I had mentioned him and critiqued his centrism in a previous posting here, and he was unhappy.  

Charles Blow on Trayvon Martin and the "Restoration of Faith": An Easter Meditation

Michelangelo, "Risen Christ" (1532)

Charles Blow writes that the national conversation about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman turns on the question of "restoration of faith": how to restore faith in our justice system as the perception of radically unequal treatment for a white man as opposed to a black teen eats away at the faith of many Americans in a just and honest society.

News: Homophobia and Repressed Homosexuality, William F. Buckley and Racism, and Adrienne Rich on Living Split

As David Edwards reports at Raw Story, a new study by a research team at the University of Rochester, the University of Essex, England, and the University of California in Santa Barbara finds that it's themselves about whom strong homophobes are most concerned.  The researchers find that "homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires."

Anthea Butler on Philadelphia Trial: Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters

Anthea Butler says that, given how the hierarchy has handled the abuse situation, she's happy to be called a catholic, but no longer a Catholic.  And she puts an important question to Catholics who hang on and continue offering energy and support to the Catholic (as opposed to catholic) church:

Papa Bile and My Automatic Correction Minx

I mentioned in a previous posting that the computer I have now had from several weeks before Christmas came equipped with a devilish fill-in-the-blank feature that often changes words I type, with nary an indication to me that it is doing so/has done so.  I called the program a sly little minx in that previous posting, and I'm sorry to have to report to you that she continues to prove herself absolutely capable of slyness.  And minxiness.  

More Marilynne Robinson: Synchronicity, Synergy, and Nature as Shining Garment of Divinity

Marilynne Robinson finds science's inability to imagine the world analogically, or to speak of what it observes in analogical terms, a significant shortcoming.  The "scientific worldview" is altogether too narrow, she thinks, because it cannot fulfill its promise to explain everything that it observes, when it lacks the language of analogy to extend its definitions and observations beyond what is apparently only on the surface of "reality."