Fulton Sheen Biography – “Cheryl C. D. Hughes’ new biography of the American Catholic Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen is a rare exception, one that illuminates the history of the 20th century and of the Catholic Church in America along with the life of its subject.” Books in Brief: August 2025 (Chronicles)
Built on the Bible – “Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life — but you will not know Him if you don’t know what the Bible really says.” Biblical Ignorance Is Killing Western Civilization (The Federalist)
Tensions over the TLM – “Parishioners of all ages have gathered outside Detroit’s Cathedral of the Most Blessed Sacrament to protest that the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) remains at the heart of parish worship.” Parishioners protest Latin Mass suppression in Detroit (The Catholic Herald)
Is This All There Is? – “The Man was burning, and I felt nothing. Around me 70,000 people danced, shouted and wept beneath the black Nevada sky.” From Spectacle to Sacrament: How Burning Man led me into the Catholic Church (America)
Dominant Tribes – “the purpose of government is not to protect rights or individuals; it’s to codify which tribe gets to plunder and dominate the other tribes.” tribal war: failure of imagination and threat misdiagnosis (bad cattitude: Substack)
Nietzsche and History – “We elevate the glories of the past so highly that no present can step outside its shadow. Or else we condemn the evils of the past so strongly that our resentment makes living in the moment impossible.” The Use and Abuse of History for Life: Parting Lessons from Pope Francis (JSC – Substack)
Man in the Garden – “The human urge to build runs deep. Archaeologists trace our race’s history through the evidence of settlements, whether dwellings for the living or tombs for the dead. Scripture, too, shows man forth as builder, but this trait is acquired, not original.” On a Couplet by T.S. Eliot (Coram Fratribus Intellexi)
More Gaza Violence – “Days after the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem expressed hope that ‘hearts can change even in the Holy Land,’ at least 20 people — including five journalists — have been reported killed in Israeli strikes on Nasser Hospital, located in southern Gaza.” Journalists Killed in Gaza Hospital Strike Following Global Day of Prayer for Peace (Our Sunday Visitor)
Small Children at Mass – “Children don’t have to go to Mass. But they should be welcomed anyway.” How to Handle Kids in Church (Catholic Answers)
The Power of Imagination – “An Imagination Age has the potential to reestablish a proper relationship between humanity and the digital, using the latter creatively to explore and propound truth in all its forms.” Are We Entering an Age of Imagination? (The Imaginative Conservative)
AI DNA Repair – “OpenAI and Retro Biosciences achieve 50x increase in expressing stem cell reprogramming markers.” Accelerating life sciences research (OpenAI)
(*The posting of any particular news item or essay is not an endorsement of the content and perspective of said news item or essay.)
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@ Man in the Garden
We read: “The human urge to build runs deep. Archaeologists trace our race’s history through the evidence of settlements, whether dwellings for the living or tombs for the dead. Scripture, too, shows man forth as builder, but this trait is acquired, not original.”
Centering on what is “original,” St. John Paul II also offered this: “The moment of transition [termed the “ontological leap”] to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation [meaning natural science and archeology], which nevertheless can discover at the experimental level a series of very valuable signs indicating what is specific to the human being. But the experience of metaphysical knowledge, of self-awareness and self-reflection, of moral conscience, freedom, or again of aesthetic and religious experience, fall within the competence of philosophical analysis and reflection, while theology brings out its ultimate meaning according to the Creator’s plans” (“Message on Evolution to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences,” October 23, 1996, nn. 4, 6).
The OSV article states that 83 of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas have been killed. Also, that only 20 of the remaining 50 hostages are still alive. The 20 deaths in the hospital would seem to have been an accident, but the hostage deaths certainly are not.
The news lists 7,000 Christian deaths in Nigeria just this year. These were murders by Muslims. Where is the comparable outrage by the Vatican and other Church officials? Condemnation of Israel is easy – most of the UN countries do so. It is low hanging fruit in that sense. Condemnation of deliberate Muslim atrocities is apparently not so easy.
I am just looking for a little balance.
@ Is This All There Is?
Tim Schultz reveals his desire for belonging coupled with a search for identity –
that within a religiously diagramed setting Burning Man. Fortunate for him that his innate desire for belonging had more meaning than bizarre efforts at self expression within an enclosed cultic setting.
Thankfully for Tim he didn’t burn himself out searching for himself in the world of Narcissus. Was it grace or chance that he was drawn to reading Augustine, Aquinas, Chesterton [to laugh is therapy]? The answer is the usual stock response, both. When God wishes to draw a soul to Himself and out of their futility he makes things happen.
@ The Power of Imagination
Proclaiming a new Imaginative Age superior to AI, the author concludes by asking: “What will give us hope is to recover the sense of what the theologians call ‘inaugurated eschatology’—the idea that God’s kingdom is gradually breaking into the present world and that God’s future is coming to meet us in the here and now.”
A transformative possibility, but then falls the shadow—as we still retire to our remote PCs or work cubicles, and market-share boardrooms, and news-cycle power-points…
After failing to imagine (and avert) the possibility of a Twin Towers disaster, the “9/11 Commission” paused at the role of restored “imagination”. Among their recommendations, this fleeting and domesticated insight: “Imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies….It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing [!], even bureaucratizing [!] the exercise of imagination” (Source: National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, The 9/11 Commission Report, New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2004, p. 344).
About an existential pause at the truly “here and now,” how to reinstate the Dark Ages’ Truce of God initiated at a Church council in A.D. 975?
@ Nietzsche and History
“History read too objectively, then, allows historical truths to be objectified. And when history becomes an object, it can—like any object—be wielded” (JSC). Fr JSC whoever he is makes an important argument regarding Pope Francis’ similarity to Nietzsche that we shouldn’t be ruled by history.
There is the fallacy in this view of making history itself, a process of events the essence of what we’re indebted to be conscious of. Rather it’s the events in Time rather than the Space of a moveable history that matters. We are indebted to absorb and assimilate the Christ event. That which is not defined as historical rather as existential and permanent transcending historical time.
“True, measuring history according to Jesus will reveal difficult voices, inconvenient memories, scars” (JSC). A very fine overview of a revealed fact in context of the moving waters of history. While admitting that what is revealed must be understood within current realities it’s that hermeneutic coherence with what Christ reveals that must remain.
Re: Tensions over the Latin Mass
This, then, is the Bergoglio legacy:
Continued suppression of the Mass and persecution of Catholics.