Death is inevitable. For the bulk of human history, this has been a universally acknowledged and widely emphasized truism. Victorious Roman generals, as they paraded through the city in triumph, would be accompanied by someone whose job it was to...
The contributors to Where Peter Is are happy to see that the magazine Vanity Fair has published an article called “Deep State, Deep Church: How QAnon and Trumpism have Infected the Catholic Church” by journalist Kathryn Joyce that describes for...
Pope Francis’s recent encyclical, Fratelli tutti, presents fraternity as a necessary, Christocentric ingredient of and precondition for the betterment and advancement of society. Though the language of “fraternity” has not made many appearances in previous social encyclicals, and struck many...
In the past five years or so, discussion of Catholic political currents, especially online, has increasingly included an ideology called integralism. Prominent and influential jurists and law professors such as Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule have increasingly begun describing themselves as integralists;...
Last Friday Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan, announced that he is resigning due to a flare-up of chronic illness. Abe, a hawkish nationalist and close international ally of US President Donald Trump, is Japan’s longest-serving Prime Minister. He had...
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaski are infamous examples of mass destruction of human life during wartime. Two dates this month—August 6 and August 9—mark the 75th anniversaries of the bombings. On the first of the two anniversaries I...
I had never heard of Warrior Nun until my fellow Where Peter Is contributors started talking about it earlier this month. I watched the trailer (language warning) and it looks utterly absurd. People dressed like nuns and priests, and a...
In my last essay, I took aim at Pelagianism, a heresy from Late Antiquity, which Pope Francis has frequently targeted in its perceived modern forms in his teaching. In this essay I will discuss Gnosticism, the other major heresy whose...
In the late fourth and early fifth centuries AD, a monk and theologian known to history as Pelagius advanced a novel understanding of the relationship between free will and grace. Pelagius, who hailed from somewhere in the British Isles and...
So far in the “Loneliness Today” series we’ve had eight installments looking at different facets of the phenomena of loneliness and social isolation in the Church and the world today: The youth encounter in Tokyo last fall Loneliness among the...
The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he...
The previous installment of “Loneliness Today” touched on the potential spiritually beneficial aspects of loneliness. It discussed the literary or symbolic place (topos) of the “desert” and cited Simone Weil’s controversial assertion that Christianity seeks a supernatural use for suffering...
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