The Arrow's Path

I swear this priest was reading my thoughts .

I admit that I am always morbidly fascinating at watching #HashtagWars play themselves out on social media in particular. Social media is the perfect echo chamber for would be loudmouths, hucksters, race-baiters, trolls, and various other parishioners of what I call the First Self-Righteous Church of America-Twitter Diocese. Whether it be Confederate flags, LGBTQWERTY rights, or Zoos shooting random Gorillas, there is a constant cacophony of of faux-moral outrage that flows forth like a fountain of bilge from a sewer main explosion. Some of the causes are perhaps worthy of discussion, while some of them are just ridiculous topics that really amount to a cosmic waste of the Divine time. As of this writing, there has been a dreadful spat of police shootings of civilians, righteous indignation, and retaliatory shootings of police in Dallas and elsewhere. The sad goings-on has led to some ghastly racial tensions and near riots in both the real world and virtual world. The news this week ...

Sad .

Great stuff on the Universe and the brute fact of atheism .

The Wall Street journal recently did an interesting, if bizarre, experiment that is called the Red Feed/Blue Feed . Basically, it's premise being that Facebook, due to its scripting bots, tracks what news you look at, and caters to your political whims by putting things in your feed that the all knowing bots (peace and blessings be upon them) think might be of interest to you. So the Wall Street Journal bemoans, this is further polarizing our society because it pushes people into Facebook bunker mentality. I have been looking at this. I am not certain if this is a bad thing or not. I say that because on the one hand, I think it is good that we have a democratization of news sources, both liberal and conservative and anything in between. Back in the pre-internet days, it was the bias of the Big Three news networks and whatever the NY Times was into, which was basically all monochrome news from an elitist New York slant. They often ran all the same stories in (oftentimes) the exact ...

"Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue." -Care to Guess Who Said It?

I will attempt to gear up for another theology series in the next week. Stay tuned.

Ah, those clans .

The Lord is Risen Indeed! Alleuia.

That the dead might know salvation, who in limbo long had dwelt,  into Hell with love he entered; to him yield the broken gates, as the bolts and massive hinges fall asunder at his word. Now the door of ready entrance, but forbidding all return, Outward swings as bars are loosened and sends forth the prisoned souls, by reversal of the mandate, reading its threshold once more.  But while God with the golden splendour lighted up the halls of Death,  while he shed the dawn's refulgence on the startled shades of night,  radiant stars grew pale with sorrow in the lurid ashen sky, And the sun took flight from heaven, clad in dusky mourning robes,  left behind his fiery chariot, hid himself in anxious grief, For a while salvation's Leader gave himself to realms of Death,  that he might the dead, long buried, guide in their return to light, when the chains that had been welded by that primal sin were loosed.  Then, in steps of their Creator, m...

Again, I profusely apologize for my failure to do more with my Islam and Christianity series during Lent. I have been bogged down in other things, and this has been put on the back burner. I have a lot of blog entries in my head, but sadly, they continue to stay there. One of the main points that I wanted to make in this series on a topic that I think Islam gets right and Christianity, at least in the Western modern form, has completely and/or conveniently forgotten is the idea of social justice and usury. In fact, usury in Western society has become so accepted as "business is business" that to look at newer definitions of the term in a secular dictionary, usury is defined as "the illegal action or practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest ( source here )." Notice how the definition is couched in terms of "unreasonably high" interest. If one goes back a few centuries and looks at definitions of the term before modern finance, on...

I apologize for my delay in the latest in my Lenten series on Islam. I am concurrently doing a bible study at my parish on a completely different topic, which has required more prep work that I was expecting. As such, my research for this blog series has remained in my head and not written down. In any event, I thought for this post I would go in a bit of a different direction. I have another topic on Islam and Jesus that is in the hopper, but I am going to have to whittle it down, as it is way too long. That topic could be a mini-series unto itself. Keeping with the general Catholic buzzword for the year of mercy, I thought it might be interesting to discuss the issue of the Sanctity of Life in both Islam and Christianity. This topic may stretch you a bit, if all you know of Muslims are the crazy people who blow themselves up in the Intifada against Israel or something. Personally, I think Palestinians do their cause a disservice by engaging in suicide bombings because for most o...

I’m not sure God wants us to be happy. I think he wants us to love, and be loved. But we are like children, thinking our toys will make us happy and the whole world is our nursery. Something must drive us out of that nursery and into the lives of others, and that something is suffering. -C. S. Lewis

(For my first two entries in this Lenten series that explain why I am doing this, go here and here .) There are several topics of theology that I want to cover in my (hopefully not vain) attempt to bring some clarity on the teachings of Islam to my readers. I was debating at this juncture how best to dive into this topic, and I concluded that perhaps the best place to start is the concept of God. Muslims refer to God as Allah.The term Allāh is derived from a contraction of the Arabic definite article al- "the" and ilāh "deity, god" to al-lāh meaning "the deity" or "the God." Despite claims to the contrary, this does not refer specifically to God as an "Islamic" God like a Baal or a Poseidon. Allah cannot be pluralized and references a key concept in Islam that God is unique and can have no partner. The term Allah is very closely related to the Aramaic name for God, Allaha, and the Hebrew, Elohim. In Islam, God is the creator and ...

There has been much ado (mainly in certain American Christian circles) since the French Paris Terror attacks about whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Before I continue on my blog series on comparative religion, I suppose I should put down up front where I am on that issue. I personally have issue with saying Muslims worship another God because if you posit that they worship another God solely on the fact that they don't have an understanding of the Trinity, then you logically have to say that Jews worshiped another God too. If you go there, it's Marcionism all over again. I just can't go there personally. Muslims claim to worship the God of Abraham. Scientific tests of genetics have concluded that modern Jews and Arabs do have a common ancestor. To me, it is not my place to tell God who is or is not in the "Children of Abraham" club; that is for God and God alone to sort out. Any child of Abraham, no matter how much I may disagree with them about...

In years past during Lent on this blog, I have done various series on different theological topics. I have not done a good series in a while, mainly because I just have not had the inspiration and/or time. However, I think I have hit upon a topic that might interest people. Perhaps it is more precise to say that what I have in mind is of interest to me, and maybe the topic will be for you. With all things social media, I find it difficult to guess what will generate the most discussion and what will flop, as it seems to me that the more innocuous and mundane a post, the more discussion it will generate. For instance, Facebook back around New Year's had an app that let me see my top 3 most liked postings of the past year. I was astounded that my number one post with both the most comments and 'likes' was a picture I had posted back in August of my home grown tomatoes. I was quite surprised, which can only lead me to believe that either I am the greatest tomato grower in the ...

These new projections by the Congressional Budget Office are truly horrifying . "The projected deficits would push debt held by the public up to 86 percent of GDP by the end of the 10-year period, a little more than twice the average over the past five decades. Beyond the 10-year period, if current laws remained in place, the pressures that had contributed to rising deficits during the baseline period would accelerate and push debt up even more sharply. Three decades from now, for instance, debt held by the public is projected to equal 155 percent of GDP, a higher percentage than any previously recorded in the United States."

Fr. Longnecker puts it succinctly : Democratic Socialism is not necessarily the deal breaker.