Everything but my own blog

Although I have not written much lately, I have posted a few things for the Aquinas Institute on their blog.  Most recently I put up something about Advent–read it while it’s relevant!

Otherwise, I have done technical grunt work for a local food bank.  My son and I built their website, and this week we had to move the entire site to a new web host as part of our effort to enable online donations.  Right now we’re waiting for the SSL Certificate to come through, so your browser may or may not claim that the site is “unsafe”.  It’s harmless:  we don’t actually know how to hurt you.

In the evenings, I read bits from The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, by Charles Peguy.  It makes me want to write again.  Maybe someday soon.

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Thinking about Amoris Laetitia: Should sacramental discipline change?

As promised in my last post, I would like to make a simple contribution to the conversation about communion for the divorced and remarried.  The questions competent people raise about moral philosophy are important, but I plan to take time over the Christmas break to think them through more carefully.

In any case, I think the moral philosophy questions are something of a red herring.  First Cardinal Casper and then Pope Francis mustered ethical arguments to show that the divorced and remarried may not be culpable for their ongoing situation, but it appears to me that their arguments are off-topic.  The arguments the Church has heretofore given for the exclusion of divorced and remarried Catholics from communion have not been rooted in moral philosophy but in sacramental theology.  Here’s a sampling: Continue reading “Thinking about Amoris Laetitia: Should sacramental discipline change?”

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What should the layman do about Amoris Laetitia?

To this point I have stayed out of the conversation about Amoris Laetitia.  But within the past few weeks, multiple people have approached me, as a guy who teaches theology, with questions about the uproar.  Voices not only of confusion but of alarm and even panic fill the Internet.  Should we be running around and shouting?  Or should we duck under the Catechism and wait for the storm to pass?  What should lay Catholics do?  That to me is the most pressing question:  Not what the Pope should do, not what the Cardinals should do, but what I, as a lay Catholic, should do. Continue reading “What should the layman do about Amoris Laetitia?”

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