A Guy in the Pew

Nicholas Knisely, the Dean at my church, Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Phoenix, was a theoretical physicist before he became a priest. He has a post today at the Daily Episcopalian that explains Pope Benedict XVI's views on relativism versus absolutism, and notes that it is far more sophisticated than most observers understand. Noting that President Bush expressed his gratitude for the Pope’s teaching that "there's right and wrong in life, that moral relativism has a danger of un-dermining the capacity to have more hopeful and free societies," Dean Knisely then explains that President Bush got it all wrong: But a deeper question remains. Given that relativity is experimentally verified in the physical world, how should it be used in the realm of ideas? Do we want to argue that because relativity is a characteristic of physical reality, that it must also be a characteristic of morality? Should it be a fundamental characteristic of theology as well? (If that’s true, th...

I think that immigration may be the sleeper issue of the year for the Christian community in the United States. I have been amazed at teh harsh and uncompassionate views on the issue that are taken by many professing Christians. Don't get me wrong, I agree that the United States needs to protect our borders, but we also need to take into account compassion in dealing with the tweleve million or so undocumented immigrants living among us--many of them for years. The Pope spoke out on this issue this past week and was immediately denounced by the likes of Tom Tancredo and Lou Dobbs for doing so. I thought that the response of the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board was just about perfect: It's not everyday that a backbencher in Congress draws international attention by insulting the spiritual leader of one in four Americans. But Colorado Republican Tom Tancredo, the anti-immigrant obsessive, wasn't about to miss his moment. Pope Benedict XVI called on U.S. bi...

Given that the current Pope and I are decidely on different sides of several theological issues, you might be surprised to konw that I am an admirer of this Pope--a critical admirer, but an admirer nonetheless. I hhighly recommended on this blog his Jesus of Navareth . I have therefore been following his visit to the United States with great interest. Be sure to check out my posts on the Lead today and tomorrow for some of my posts on that vist. Yesterday, David Gibson had some very intersting observations about the Pope: Call Pope Benedict XVI a "cultural Catholic" and you're likely to get puzzled looks if not angry rejoinders. Cultural Catholics rank right down there with "cafeteria Catholics" in the opinion of those who argue that only a deep experience of Christian faith and a tight embrace of church teachings can make one authentically Catholic. To a great extent that would also be the perspective of Benedict, whose Augustinian view of man's fallen s...

The Get Religion blog asks the same question that I asked earlier this week: why did the Pope lump the Anglicans in with other Protestants in claiming that the Protestants are bot a church because they are not in the line of apostolic succession. After all, Anglicans are quite proud that this is not the case: What a week for the Anglicans or the Episcopalians or whoever is near you who claims ancient ties to the Archbishop of Canterbury. First there was the silence about Anglicanism in that much-covered Vatican document, the one that grants the Orthodox a unique, if wounded, status as a sacramental “Church.” In the past (please correct me if I am wrong), the Anglicans have usually received some kind of nod in Vatican documents to their historic roots and claims to apostolic succession. But in the new Vatican statement , there is silence. Does that mean that the Church of England is covered in the following reference? FIFTH QUESTION Why do the texts of the Council and those of the Ma...

Okay, no one can beat Mad Preist for humour on all things religious, but this does come close: NEWS FROM THE HOLY SEE Office of Information and Public Affairs Vatican City, Rome FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Vatican Recall Hotline: (800) ASK-RATZ July 10, 2007 VATICAN CITY—Pope Benedict XVI today announced a voluntary recall of the following consumer products. Consumers should stop using recalled products immediately unless otherwise instructed. Name of Products: African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.), Amish, Anabaptist, Anglican, Baptist, Calvinist, Christian Science, Congregationalist, Episcopalian, Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Huguenot, Jehovah's Witness, Lutheran, Mennonite, Methodist, Moravian, Mormon, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Puritan, Quaker, Seventh-Day Adventist, Shaker, and Zwinglian Christian sects (frequently labeled "Protestant"). Name of Products: Albanian Orthodox, Bulgarian Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox, Czech Orthodox, Cypriot Orthodox, Estonian Orthodox, Finnish Orth...

Pope Benedict XVI's announcement that the old Latin Mass (the Tridentine Mass) can be used has generated some strong words from the Anti-Defamation League. Why would the ADL be concerned about the version of the Latin Mass used by the Roman Catholic Church? Well, the version of the Latin Mass approved by the Pope (the version approved by the Pope is the Latin Mass as revised by John XXIII in 1962) includes this Good Friday prayer for the conversion of the Jews: For the conversion of the Jews. Let us pray also for the Jews that the Lord our God may take the veil from their hearts and that they also may acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ. Let us pray: Almighty and everlasting God, You do not refuse Your mercy even to the Jews; hear the prayers which we offer for the blindness of that people so that they may acknowledge the light of Your truth, which is Christ, and be delivered from their darkness. By way of comparison, here is the version of the prayer that had previously been approve...

It has been a while sionce I posted a Father Matthew video, so here goes. Father Matthew describes his vacation to Italy--including an audience with the Pope.

As I said earlier, the issues of faith, science and reason are my new theological obsession. As a starting point, it seems to me that we need to decide the extent to which a Christian faith even claims to make claims that can be verified by evidence--science or otherwise. Apparently, there are some who think not. For example, here are some recent comments on this subject at Episcopal Cafe, all by quite thoughtful people with far more theological training than me: Science and theology are very different disciplines. Science is propositions seeking to be disproven while theology is metaphor seeking affirmation by the heart. Science could disprove all my religious constructs and stories and I would still have faith. Stating a view of how God operates in the world sounds too much to me like an empirical statement. The phrase "God acts" is, like "God exists," unfalsifiable. Faith is not about propositions. Saying God acts indirectly is, in a sense, playing the same game ...

In 1993. Rabbi Jacob Neusner, a professor of the history and theology of Judaism at Bard College and a senior fellow at the college’s Institute of Advanced Theology, wrote the book A Rabbi Talks With Jesus , in which he imagined being present at the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus taught Torah like Moses on Sinai. As he describes in a delightful essay in the Jewish Daily Forward, Pope Benedict XVI actually responded to this conversation in his new book: In my 1993 book “A Rabbi Talks With Jesus,” I imagined being present at the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus taught Torah like Moses on Sinai. I explained why, for good and substantial reasons based in the Torah, I would not have followed Jesus but would have remained true to God’s teaching to Moses. Much to my surprise, Pope Benedict XVI, in his new book “Jesus of Nazareth,” devotes much of his chapter on the Sermon on the Mount to discussing my book. “More than other interpretations known to me, this respectful and frank dispute betwee...

J. Peter Pham, director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Virginia, has a very interesting review of Pope Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth. The entire review is well worth a close read, but here are some highlights: As JESUS OF NAZARETH unfolds, it is clear that its author has little patience for popular modern Christologies portraying Jesus as wise teacher on a par with the founders of other religious or philosophical movements, or as a preacher of tolerance and understanding, or even as a political revolutionary. No wonder the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger investigated the Christological writings of Jesuit theologians Jacques Dupuis and Roger Haight and more recently issued a warning about those of another Jesuit, Jon Sobrino, who in its view transgressed into those respective faulty understandings. (In the interest of full disclosure, I was a student of Dupuis, whose official defender...