In arguing the case for the divinity of Jesus, scholar Brant Pitre attacks the foundations of modern Biblical scholarship, challenging the late dating of the gospels and their subsequent anonymous authorship. Attending Bob Jones University made me skeptical of fundamentalists. Attending Oxford University made me skeptical of liberals. I came to question the Bob Jonesers’ [...]
The first thing everyone says when they see the new church we are building in Greenville, South Carolina is, “It’s beautiful!” This is not the response I hear when they look on the utilitarian, fan-shaped Catholic auditoria that dominate our suburbs. The instantaneous and unsolicited observation that our new church is beautiful should not be [...]
One of the reasons I sometimes wax nostalgic for the Middles Ages is for the religious spectacle. This was an age of the dramatic gesture: St. Francis standing barefoot in the snow or the penitent Henry IV crossing the Alps barefoot while wearing a hair shirt. It is the age of the passion and mystery [...]
As the Christian faith of Americans continues to erode, Christians may well be labeled enemies of the state, and clergymen may again have to hide in secret spaces in order to avoid persecution. If you visit Oxburgh Hall in England you can tour one of the ancient country houses occupied without break since 1482 by one of [...]
Poor old Pippin and Merry have been captured by the orcs. Separated from their friends, wounded and strapped to the vile creatures for the long run to Isengard, Pippin suddenly feels sorry for himself. He thinks that he should never have left the Shire. He has set off the sounds in Moria that alerted the [...]
On Presidents’ Day, in the week that the Republican presidential candidates were crisscrossing my home state of South Carolina, I stumbled across an essay in a magazine that tells how you can find the gigantic busts of forty-three American presidents standing broken and decaying in a farmer’s field in Virginia. The essay is full of dramatic [...]
Black is my color. As a priest, everyday I step into my uniform and become one of the Men in Black. But once, when one of the schoolchildren asked why priests wear black, I did not have a good answer, except to say that the color was considered a somber and serious contrast to the [...]
In a recent post, English priest-blogger Fr. Ed Tomlinson likened the threat of secular modernism in the church to Tolkien’s Balrog. You may remember the great demon pursues the members of the Fellowship as they are fleeing the mines of Moria. The final confrontation is at the Bridge of Khazad-dum. Gandalf defies the Balrog crying, [...]
There seems to be a kind of symbolic religious literary code written into human experience. What all stories and myth, including the pagan ones, then point to is the Christian Truth. The Greeks told the tragic story of Orpheus, the son of the great god Apollo. Orpheus was the master of music, the prince of [...]
A Catholic friend of mine is fond of referring to the Protestant Reformation as “the Deformation.” Well, perhaps. Certainly the Reformation in England was a deformation. Henry VIII’s stripping of the altars was not only a monumental act of iconoclastic vandalism, but the cultural revolution brought about by his break with Rome—which included the dissolution of [...]
One of the mysteries of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is the character of Tom Bombadil. Who is this odd, hill-leaping, silly-song-singing, farmer in the dell? Is this cavorting, yellow-booted bumpkin a darling that Tolkien could not kill, a rustic mechanical who simply had to have a part in the great saga? Was Bombadil [...]
Is it possible that the popular Indiana Jones trilogy is a cleverly-structured, well-thought-out, theologically-astute analogy of the Christian spiritual quest? I do not suggest that it is an allegory, and I realize it is always possible to read too much into popular film and fiction, but might there be more meaning there than meets the [...]
Having spent twenty-five years of my life in “the damp lands,” I can affirm that while the Americans cannot be beat for Thanksgiving, the English cannot be beat for Christmas. Yes, it is true. The dour snobs in the land of Scrooge know how to pull out all the stops and celebrate Christmas in style. [...]
Artist’s rendition of future Our Lady of the Rosary Catholic Church The first meeting I had after being appointed to my Catholic parish was with a leading lay man who turned out to be the chairman of the Building Committee. The people had been planning to build a new church and was I [...]