There is something in people that can only be described as a need to hate. René Girard explicated this need in his scapegoat theory: People find unity in a shared hatred for an appointed scapegoat on whom they can lay their sins (and their blame) for all that is deemed wrong or evil within the group/ tribe/ family/ [...]
You offer your heart, your love, your labor, your time, everything you have. And no one wants it. You, and all that you have to give, are discarded like trash. This happens not just sometimes, but always, both with persons and with groups of all kinds, within your family, at work, in your church. It evolves [...]
I used to say that I wanted to “grow up into childhood”. Now in my old age, I think about that statement and about my childhood. Certainly, it was not the kind of childhood anyone would want. Much of it was brutal poverty, deprivation of all sorts of things considered fundamental for a happy, healthy child [...]
Guilt has become a term for psychological or emotional disorder rather than what it actually is, which is responsibility for one’s acts, decisions, choices. As a neurosis, it allows you to be the hero of some emotional melodrama in which you are plagued by feelings of guilt and must go on some heroic quest to redeem [...]
He frequently gets a bit of bad press, but I always felt that I get St. Thomas. That rather negative appendage, Doubting Thomas, makes him sound petulant, stubborn. But who was it he was doubting in the moment? Not his Lord, but his fellow disciples—other people. And can we blame him? That which was dearer to him than [...]
Although the United States is a young country compared with the nations of Europe, we have the oldest standing government; that is, our government is unchanged since its birth. I may well be wrong about this. Apolitical by both temperament and conviction, political history is not my strong suit. Nevertheless, I think that what is unique [...]
Chesterton on chasing hats and diabolists.... https://jpearce.co/chasing-hats-and-dealing-with-devil-worshippers/
Milton’s famous phrase from Paradise Lost has been used in countless contexts, in print or in private. Meant to exclaim that it was because of man’s fall that Christ came, and implying, for those who wonder about such things, Would Christ not have come if we had not sinned and made his coming necessary for our salvation? Did [...]
These days, the Church discourages the use of the term “confession” in preference to “rite of reconciliation”. I don’t know why, but it may be because of the negative connotation the word has received from an anti-Catholic culture, which sees confession as enforced, even oppressive. So many good things are discarded now in a fruitless and [...]
I just encountered a young man doing his morning run and we stopped and chatted. I live near a university, so I wasn’t surprised he was a student; a grad student getting his second undergraduate along with a master’s in music and music therapy—and a master’s from the “University of Theology and Spirituality” whatever that is. [...]
