Back on March 29, we wrote At the Right Place, which detailed many of the parking violations we saw at a Lenten Penance service at our Parish, St. Alphonsus, in Wexford, PA. Included in the violations were numerous cars parked in clearly marked fire lanes, three cars surrounding and violating the same fire hydrant–it’s at the end of a narrow grassy island and there was a car on each side–and other cars parked where they shouldn’t have been–in parts of the narrow driveways that are clearly not parking… Read the rest
Archive for Religion
WWJP (Where Would Jesus Park?)
Helping the Faith
Happy Easter!
Easter seems to be a good day to write about problems in our Church: an organization that’s about 1,980 years old and has faced many and varied problems since its founding–both self-inflicted ones and those created by others.
As we will hear repeatedly during the next several weeks at Mass, immediately after the Resurrection, some disciples were hiding, some were fleeing, and all were doubtful and doubting. The eleven and the others needed repeated assurances from the risen Lord, and that was despite witnessing Christ’s miracles and ministry… Read the rest
Pet Peeve: the Emotionless Jesus
Why Do They Make Jesus so Boring?
Easter weekend seems like a good time to complain about the hollow portrayals of Jesus in many movies and, unfortunately, the way His words are read by many priests at Mass. We don’t think that infusing his speech with emotion is irreverent or sacrilegious, and we wish they would give it a try.
Our complaint: we highly doubt that Jesus was an emotionless, monotonic, near-catatonic English guy per several of the bad, 1960s movies. Who would have followed someone like that–someone utterly lacking… Read the rest
At the Right Place
Tonight we were on our Church’s campus and observed the following summary traffic offenses.
- Multiple drivers traveling the wrong way on a one-way ramp;
- Multiple cars parked in a clearly-marked fire lanes; and
- Several cars parked directly beside a fire hydrant. (The way it is situated, it is possible for three cars to violate the same hydrant, and that’s how many took the opportunity for the minute we drove past.)
What was the cause of the mass civil disobedience? Why, an overcrowded, Lenten penance service with six… Read the rest
The “Oppressed”
Poor, poor, pitiful me!
This morning’s Gospel included Luke 4:18.
That’s where Jesus returns to Nazareth, goes to the synagogue, and reads aloud from the scroll of Isaiah.
What interested us was (our paraphrase of) one of the lines from Isaiah: “He has sent me… to let the oppressed go free.”
We wondered: of the subset of the folks who were listening, how many of our (relatively fortunate and middle-class) fellow parishioners thought, “Yes, Lord, that’s me. I’m oppressed. Please help. Please set me free. Please stop the oppression by my spouse-children-parents-classmates-bosses-teachers-neighbors-creditors-clients-patients-etc.”… Read the rest
Dark Matter and God
There is an excellent column in today’s edition of The Wall Street Journal entitled, A Dark Matter Breakthrough?
In it, the physicist Lawrence Krauss writes about dark matter, which may or may not exist. It does exist in many theories that seem to require it to eliminate otherwise incongruent observations, and there may be empirical evidence that supports its existence, or not.
If it does exist, it may have a mass that is ten times greater than visible matter.
When we read articles like his, a few things come… Read the rest
Government Takeovers and Ungraceful States
William McGurn has an excellent column in today’s edition of The Wall Street Journal. It is entitled, “My Big Fat Government Takeover.“
In the column, he decries those in favor of governmental solutions to all man’s ills, and he mentions that lack of humility of those like President Obama and his ilk, who believe that a few “smart” people with centralized power can solve the nation’s (and the world’s) problems. (Yet, they can’t prevent party-crashers to a state dinner. Good luck with that.)
We want to emphasize the hubris… Read the rest
Living with Yourself…Forever
Today, we went to a funeral Mass for a friend’s father, and the priest had an excellent homily. It was the kind that one can only give if he well knows the decedent, and in this case, it seemed that the priest had known our friend’s dad for over twenty years due to the latter’s deep involvement in the parish.
During the sermon, the priest merged details and anecdotes of the man’s life with the typical (and very useful) Catholic emphasis on hope and redemption, rather than sorrow and despair,… Read the rest
Best Sentence that We’ve Read in Awhile
And a Brief Mention about the Decline in Numbers of Religious Personnel
“Interfering with people’s property, labor, and exchange–except where necessary to uphold justice and sustain society–is a violation of the sacredness of the person.”
That’s from an essay by Greg Forster, “Sacred Enterprise,” in the Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2009. (Unfortunately, it’s only available on-line to subscribers.) He goes on to write, “And increasing the total amount of available wealth is morally good, so it is wrong to stifle economic growth or to force potentially productive assets to… Read the rest
