fbpx

Category: Commentary

Modern Art and the Church

In a video titled “The Idolatry of Modern Art,” Catholic YouTube personality Brian Holdsworth expresses an opinion regarding modern art that I’ve also heard from other tradition-minded Catholics. His opinion is that modern art is “intrinsically incompatible with Christian worship,”...

The New Theology of Dissent

Anti-Francis Catholics frequently identify themselves as “orthodox” or as strict adherents to Church teaching. While doing so, they must reconcile those claims with the fact that they have chosen to reject the official teachings of the current pope as heretical...

Faggioli and the limits of reform

“Be attentive to that old and always new temptation from the promoters of Gnosticism. They wanted to make a name for themselves and expand their doctrine and fame, so they always sought to say something new and distinct from what...

The Mission Field and the Culture War

Are we witnessing the ugly end of culture-war Catholicism? The conservative Catholic media landscape—born out of a battle with social liberalism that goes back at least to Pat Buchanan’s popularization of the term “culture war”—seems to have entered a decisive...

Realities Are More Important Than Ideas

There is a possibly apocryphal, but persistent, story that when Galileo was forced to recant his position on heliocentrism and a rotating Earth, he left the room muttering “and yet, it moves!” Questions of historicity aside, the meaning of the...

Criticizing the Critics

In a recent piece for National Review, Francis X. Maier (a long-time advisor to recently retired Archbishop Charles J. Chaput) presents an argument against the “derisive and condescending” dismissal by Pope Francis’s supporters of his critics. Maier even suggests that...

Contra Viral Genocide

First Things has published several articles in the past few weeks dismissing the attempts by churches and governments to reign in the COVID–19 pandemic, suggesting they are overreactions. In R.R. Reno and Bioethics of a Pandemic, Dr. Pedro Gabriel addresses...

R.R. Reno and the bioethics of a pandemic

In recent days, we have seen the rise of many articles in American media (and particularly in Catholic publications), questioning the public health regulations implemented around the world to prevent the spread of COVID-19. One of those articles stood out, both...