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Credo ut intelligam

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It is difficult to describe the crisis I have been living through these past several weeks. The drawing by my office door Short version : Don’t call out the Devil if you aren’t ready to bout .  Alternative short version : “Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” —1 Corinthians 1:20 There has been much bitterness. There have been feelings of betrayal. There have been feelings of being lied to while watching people whom I thought were my supporters fall away. Friends warn me about overreacting. At which I overreact. “Academic freedom means nothing if the faculty do not stand up for it.” I believed that. Someone whom I have trusted my entire academic career told me that. I still believe it—but do my colleagues? “Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.” I heard someone say that recently on his livestream. Someone whom my friends tell me I s...
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The Work of God*

I feel like Dorothy, suddenly learning that she was wearing the way home on her feet all along. On Monday this past week I posed a question: why, after all I had done over the holiday weekend (including watching The Wizard of Oz with friends), did I have such a feeling of inadequacy and emptiness? When I wrote the post, I was thinking to myself of potential answers, including some of those touched on by my readers: that it had been a holiday weekend, so I did no "real" work, only indulged myself in time with family and friends; that taking a holiday of itself can seem wasteful, particularly in this year when I am on leave to be as productive as I possibly can in my research; that even when I am at work, the feeling of "not doing enough" persists if I am doing "nothing but" reading or, when I am not on leave, preparing for class. Writing, after all, is my only "real" work. "Publish or perish," as the saying goes. If I am not writin...
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The Eternal Feminine*

Paradoxically, given the fact that I've spent my entire academic life thinking about the Virgin Mary, I very rarely say anything directly about gender. You'd think I should, right? Most people do--think that I should, that is. Because, of course, most people who have written about Mary in the past thirty or so years have. Marina Warner, Mary Daly, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Rosemary Radford Reuther: how well I remember reading their work while I was in college and being swept up into the debate on the feminine image of the divine. Reading Andrew Greeley's The Mary Myth (1977) is bringing it all back to me, and not in a good way. I'm discouraged, because I was really enjoying his treatment of Jesus and Sinai . Now, however, I am beset with sentences such as these: "I will contend that Mary is a symbol of the feminine component of the deity. She represents the human insight that the Ultimate is passionately tender, seductively attractive, irresistibly insp...
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Big Bear and the Trinitarians

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It was just supposed to be an interview... A conversation between brothers who have both been on the front lines of the culture war. But then came the quiz... ...with all the answers tending towards one sacred number. At which point the true purpose of the meeting was made clear. “This isn’t an interview.” “This is an intervention.” Milo invites three Catholic intellectuals into a livestream with the Big Bear to talk about the Trinity. Who walks out first?! For wisdom is more active than all active things; and reacheth everywhere, by reason of her purity.  For she is a vapour of the power of God, and a certain pure emmanation of the glory of the Almighty God: and therefore no defiled thing cometh into her. For she is the brightness of eternal light, and the unspotted mirror of God's majesty, and the image of his goodness. —Wisdom of Solomon 7:24-26 And the moral of the story is...? You decide! Preview on YouTube Full episode on Friday Night’s All Right at Censored.TV Unauthor...
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“Hail, Mary, full of grace, punch the devil in the face!”

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Once upon a time, there was a man named Theophilus who made a bargain with the devil. Thank God that Our Lady was able to help him! Do you want to know the full story? Listen here ! * The Prayer of Theophilus O miserable wretch that I am, what have I done and what have I wrought?...  Where shall I, unhappy sinner, go, who have denied my Christ and his holy mother ( Christum meum et sanctam eius genitricem ) and have made myself a servant of the devil ( seruum diaboli ) through a chirograph of wicked warrant ( per nefande cautionis chirographum )?  Who, do you think, will be able to pull it away from the hand of the devil, the destroyer, and help me?  Why was it necessary for me to become acquainted with that wicked Hebrew who should be burned?  (For this same Hebrew had been condemned a little while before by law and judge.) Why indeed? For thus are they honored, who forsaking God and the Lord, run to the devil....  Woe ...
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