Rage Bait – “Online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media account.” And the Oxford Word of the Year 2025 is… rage bait (Oxford University Press)
Fertility Decline – “The West’s demographic dearth is capturing the attention of growing numbers of public officials.” The Fertility Crisis Will Not Be Solved by Economics Alone (First Things)
Theists and Atheists – “Yesterday, the Yule Blog featured an essay about how theists and atheists are not all that different from each other; we are almost all transcendentalists in the sense that almost all of us find some kind of moral, ethical, and even spiritual meaning as we encounter the world.” Day 6: Personal Meaning (Providence)
Islam as a Governing Project – “Islam diverges significantly from Christianity, and in some ways that Karl Marx might have appreciated” Islam and Communism (Catholic Answers)
Return of the Strong Gods – “The ruler bears witness to the meaningfulness of reality, and in doing so he augments its meaning, opening up the world to the dimensions that would allow a properly human existence to unfold.” The Crisis of Authority (Communio)
Dead Sea Scrolls – “Long before the biblical canon was formally defined, these texts were copied, guarded and revered as sacred.” The Scriptures Jesus Knew: Stepping Into the World of the Dead Sea Scrolls (National Catholic Register)
Microscale Robots – “Engineers at Penn Engineering have created robots barely visible to the naked eye that operate without tethers, magnetic fields or joystick-like controls.” The world’s smallest programmable, autonomous robots (Penn Today)
Sacred Images – “All of it is oriented toward a kind of spiritual service, to try to provide a kind of mental framework for Christian life, that can actually be inhabited by modern people.” A Year of Sacred Images; An Inheritance We Can Still Inhabit (The Sacred Images Project)
(*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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@ Dead Sea Scrolls
Yes. In terms of historiographic evidence of what the previous dated extant texts revealed they are significant. As are the texts such as Daniel that foretold Antiochus Epiphanes and the abomination of desecration in the Jerusalem Temple. The Hellenization of Israel. The struggle for retaining Hebraic Jewish identity under Hellenic and Roman occupation.
Nevertheless, what is indicated is the strength of the Christ revelation, which proved to be the irrepressible truth of the events and message. Additionally, providence had the two major cultural affiliations Greek and Roman as part of adopting and furthering Christ’s revelation to the known world.
@ Return of the Strong Gods
“Some people experienced traumatic shock when some church
leaders questioned customary notions about the solidity and scope of
hierarchical church authority itself” (excerpt book review Paul Misner emeritus Marquette. Transcript unavailable on this website).
This edited edition describes the meltdown of significant doctrine among which is the requirement for confession of sins and repentance. What the new breed of young theologians suggest as remedy is a form of ecumenical dialogue within the Church inclusive of dissenting parties to authority itself.
Insofar as my brief overview it seems that Leo XIV may have this form of resolution in mind for the January cardinals consistory. Again as opined previously success in that format is questionable. Contention of the opposing parties is too strong for strong God’s. We require a Vicar of Christ who doesn’t fear either the truth or its implementation.
@ Islam as a Governing Project
Catholic Answers demonstrates three close parallels (not equivalencies) between the Caliphate and the Marxist state, the hierarchy of “belonging” under each ideology (suppressed dhimmis under Islam), and the conflict model of society (under Islam, dar al Islam versus dar al Harb, and under Marxism the dictatorship of the Proletariat).
At a different scale than that of two all-consuming ideologies, yours truly simply draws attention to the really small stuff or early turning points too often missed. The Butterfly Wing that now and then shapes history. Take the smallest and individual-level genetics of Islam, for example:
The Muslim theologian-philosopher Al-Razi walks right past such a tipping point (very similar to the “eureka” of Archimedes!). He writes: “It therefore follows that everything other than God is created in time, and hence preceded by nonbeing. This also means that all things came into being through God’s creative act and His power of bringing things from nonbeing to being. From this it follows that everything other than God is His slave and possession [not a ‘slave’, but free, but then….]. It is therefore impossible that anything other than He is His offspring [!]” (Ayoub citation in Irfan A. Omar [editor], “A Muslim View of Christianity: Essays on Dialogue by Mahmoud Ayoub,” Orbis, 2007).
“He is His offspring”–as in the mystery of the Triune One and the distinct but consubstantial Second Person…?
A similar and missed turning point, from Muhammad himself probably two years before is death: “If the Merciful had a son, I would be the first to adore him (Qur’an 43:81).
Within each human soul is either an openness to the infinite and absolutely true, or, because of the ongoing Fall—our imagined and alternative universes. No wonder Newman defined papal infallibility as “not to enfeeble the freedom or vigour of human thought in religious speculation, but to resist and control its extravagance” (Apologia Pro Vita Sua).
SUMMARY: Not extravagant ideologies but, instead, the intimately small stuff–the whole Real Presence in each consecrated host.
@ Dead Sea Scrolls: Hey Martin Luther, about those seven books you didn’t think should be included in sacred scripture… But in all fairness, I should perhaps include St Jerome in my note, but in the end, St Jerome did submit to the Church.
For Return of the Strong Gods, “Contention of the opposing parties is too strong for strong God’s” should read for strong Gods.