Look, I’m not going to beat around the bush here. “The Chosen”, a show that retells the Gospels as a multi-season long TV show, is not just a great faith-based show. This is easily one of my favorite shows ever. It’s not just faithful, not just made with love and care, not just moving and […]

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I start the year with a bit of a posting spree; work restarts tomorrow and things will slow down again. Now that the pandemic is (ahem) over, I thought I’d go over what I was saying about it, my current thoughts, and what I was thinking at the time. I was wrong not to be […]

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The Pope emeritus has died. His retirement, somehow, lasted longer than his papacy. What to make of Benedict XVI? He strikes me as a man who meant well but didn’t really know what to do. We were very blessed to have two of the greatest theologians of the 20th century as popes one after the […]

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The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a famous essay where he pointed out – in my opinion, correctly – that it is impossible for a human to know what it’s like to be a bat. We can know every mechanical detail of a bat’s anatomy and get detailed descriptions of what it perhaps might be like […]

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For once, quite a lot. See if you can spot the theme, he asked sarcastically. Nonfiction: “Jesus and the Jewish Roots of Mary”, by Brant Pitre. Brilliant, if you’re at all interested in the “Whys” behind Catholic Marian dogmas, this is for my money THE book to read. “The Case for Jesus”, by Brant Pitre. […]

Read more "The Books I Have Read This Year"

Reading Thomas Aquinas’s unfinished treatise on kingship “De Regno”, I was struck by his section on what to do when ruled over by a tyrant. This is what he says at the end of this section (emphasis mine): [51] Should no human aid whatsoever against a tyrant be forthcoming, recourse must be had to God, […]

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Recently I’ve been thinking of various news stories I’ve seen recently pop up about abortion, ones about the so-called “hard cases”. You know the drill. “This mother of four really loves children, and is going to have an incredibly high risk pregnancy where her child will almost certainly die, but her cruel state won’t let […]

Read more "When Aslan is not a tame lion"

Recently I was on a Catholic Apologetics forum and left. The discussion started like this (I am paraphrasing, and intentionally not using names, so you can take my assertions to be as factual as you want them to be): Random Person: Protestant Christians are our brother Christians Guy who seemed to be establishing himself as […]

Read more "Rethinking the Motu Poprio"

“The Quick and the Dead” is a western directed by Sam Raimi, most famous for his Spider-Man and Evil Dead films. I confess to not having seen the Evil Dead movies, but the first two Raimi Spider-Man films are first-rate, and the third is far from worthless. So on the recommendation of Brandon Watson* I […]

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I am tempted to take absolutely lunatic, brain-dead pro-abortion arguments like notabilia’s about as seriously as I take the philosophy of materialism, or accounts that the moon is made of cheese. In other words: Not at all. Unfortunately, I can’t. If notabilia is to be believed, it isn’t just random atheist internet bloggers who think […]

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