Milch’s recollections evince how, often as not, it works the other way around. Sometimes the glory of being one’s self, to still be loathed, must be clad again and again in filth.
— REVIEW: Life’s Work by David Milch • Commonweal
I only mean to suggest that our wounds will remain ours, extrinsically and gratuitously and mysteriously receiving not just some meaning, but even and perhaps especially dignity.
— The Monstrosity of Christ’s Resurrection • Church Life Journal
The truth is that all babies die. The difference that makes a difference is when. It is, as we say, a matter of time.
— [Untitled] • Macrina Magazine
As much as the shame I felt at the bottom of a shower one November morning initiated this peregrination of mine towards ‘physical fitness,’ shame has not been what sustains it these years later. Shame (or its cousin, disgust) could propel me into brief paroxysms of exercise, but these did not last.
— Three or Four Spiritual Paradoxes I Met at the Gym • Church Life Journal
Like the cancer in his lungs, Walter White becomes a cancer in Breaking Bad’s fictional Albuquerque universe.
And yet, for all that, Walter White is still Breaking Bad’s functional protagonist.
— Walter White's Chaotic Beauty • Church Life Journal
Still, if Christian living and its attendant community would engage, penetrate, and Christianize a culture and society like ours, one that possesses a robust and developed superstructure, Lonergan thinks it must develop a theology of comparable robustness in the face of contemporary questions.
— On Lonergan Part II: Getting to the Roots of Modern Culture • Genealogies of Modernity
The medieval ideal of science with which St. Thomas made such great achievements selects for the abstract, the essential, the universal, the necessary…Still, it achieved this knowledge by cleaving reality in two.
Servus Servorum: Theology’s Queenship and Modern Science • Church Life Journal
Where beliefs are changed, they may be reconsidered and reevaluated. Where the very meaning and value of believing is changed, the criteria by which one will reconsider and reevaluate becomes a rather sticky question.
Bernard Lonergan on Modern Culture and the Crisis of Belief • Genealogies of Modernity
There can be, in other words, no duty to suffer. Thus, this solution to the negative partisanship problem implies that perennial Pauline paradox: a politics that cannot be legislated.
The Negative Partisanship Problem • Church Life Journal
The difference between the enabling co-dependent and the mortician, of course, is that the mortician is not fooled by their own handiwork and knows the limits of its efficacy.
The Putrid Soul • Church Life Journal
When ‘nothing’ helps, we have to believe that just being ourselves is worth doing.
When Nothing Helps • Church Life Journal
Malick, through Diehl’s lucid performance, show us Jägerstätter’s freedom in his unwillingness to do what is wrong and willingness to do whatever that requires.
A Terrible Freedom • The Living Church
With that, in the admixture of spontaneous violence and its principled application, by the grudging recognition of tenuous law at a society’s far margin, through the ambiguity of human motive and conduct, we witness how not just the evocation of fellow feeling, but also the invocation of God’s mercy—by a gun-slinging, horse-stealing outlaw, no less—spared a group of men in the dark of the Montana Territory the indignity of forgetting their humanity for a while.
Deadwood’s Violent Theological Realism • Church Life Journal
I try not to flinch from the Gospel’s depiction of Christ’s anger. They show with Christ’s luminosity that love is so often ferocious. Have we not lately felt in ourselves the ferocity of love?
What Did Pope Francis Mean to Say with His Strange Abuse Crisis Letter? • Church Life Journal