Category: Seven Quick Takes

Appar­ent­ly there’s a cri­sis of pre­mar­i­tal kiss­ing afoot, and Trad­dy blog­gers must call it out, or legions will end up in the Sec­ond Cir­cle. Or some­thing. I actu­al­ly guf­fawed, and loud­ly, when I saw this post over at ProLife365. “There Kuk­la goes again,” I said. “Stop­ping abor­tions by stop­ping kiss­ing first.” Then, on the Face­book dis­cus­sion, Mic­ah Mur­phy (who admits to scrupu­los­i­ty even about the poten­tial sex­u­al temp­ta­tions of hand-hold­ing, one of the most dan­ger­ous sins of this present age), direct­ed me to the always-cred­i­ble Dr. Tay­lor Mar­shall.

If, in this age, our words do not bite and slap and kick, then we are doing it wrong. Flan­nery O’Connor said it: “You have to push as hard as the age that push­es against you.” A world that wants to be lulled to sleep needs to be shout­ed awake. And it’s okay to be out­raged by error and write with pas­sion. I’d rather read a writer who’s angry than a writer who’s in a coma. I like cur­mud­geons. Jerome has his place. There is also a place for shout­ing from the rooftops and say­ing, “Damn it, this is mad­ness, and I will not take it, and I will do every­thing I can to call it out.” Even if you’re killed for it.

Yes­ter­day marked the pope’s first full year in office. Good job, Pope Fran­cis. In one full year, the num­ber of doc­trines you changed was zero. Still, and no sur­prise, the fringe was out, hand-wring­ing and snip­ing. On one blog, I read that the pope we should have had would have been “a father and a sov­er­eign.” But instead of a sov­er­eign, we got a pope who obsti­nate­ly decid­ed to “do things his way.” That explains it. A sov­er­eign nev­er does things his way; he does things my way. I mean, who does this Fran­cis think he is? The pope? The Jews want­ed Mes­si­ah to be an earth­ly sov­er­eign too.

A Third Order Bene­dic­tine makes a promise to live the charism of the Bene­dictines in his dai­ly life. He reads from the rule of St. Bene­dict every day. He prays the Litur­gy of the Hours, the dai­ly prayer of the Church, every day. He prac­tices lec­tio divina—the con­tem­pla­tive and prayer­ful read­ing of Scrip­ture — every day. He promis­es to serve his parish as he is called. His prayer and his con­tem­pla­tion, and his ser­vice to his church, sanc­ti­fy his dai­ly work, and draw him deep­er into rela­tion­ship with God and into the uni­ver­sal call to holi­ness.

I am quick to under­stand, but insan­i­ty out­paces all sense & defies all rea­son. Where is the rea­son in think­ing of one­self as a species of starfish or sponge? And why leave out the Q’s? Do they have no place? Shouldn’t it now be “LGBTQA?” I’m not sure the Q’s should be sent to the back of the bus or told to drink from a dif­fer­ent foun­tain. Or what about the oth­er let­ters? Why is the mag­a­zine anti‑S? What is wrong with H? It is time to stamp out inequal­i­ty in alpha­bet­i­cal per­son­hood. I have had enough of the Z‑ophobes. We should wel­come all the sex­u­al per­ver­sion that can be embraced by 26 let­ters.

It is a New Year, and with every new year come the res­o­lu­tions. The rea­son peo­ple make res­o­lu­tions at the start of a new year is because last year’s res­o­lu­tions failed. Some use that as an excuse not to make res­o­lu­tions: If I’m not going to keep them, why make them? That sounds like a hard-earned wis­dom, but the same log­ic applies in the con­fes­sion­al. Who says, “I do not firm­ly resolve with the help of thy grace, because my last firm res­o­lu­tion brought me back to the same line”? So here, before 2015’s mea max­i­ma cul­pa, are my res­o­lu­tions for the blog while 2014 is still young.