Just to catch you up on what I’ve been writing this past week:
Something very unusual happened in the French Catholic Church: After an archbishop made a horrible decision, his fellow bishops rebuked him— in public, eventually— and he rescinded the decision. Fraternal correction works! And I wonder aloud why bishops don’t correct their erring colleagues more often.
https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/rare-victory-for-fraternal-correction/
During the week I was re-reading (not for the first time, or the second or third) the delightful Right Ho, Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse, and I couldn’t help asking:
President Trump raised eyebrows by saying that he wants to go to heaven. I felt compelled to ask whether he has any better reasons for seeking peace in Ukraine. I mean, he’s not going to win the Nobel Peace Prize— unlike one of his recent predecessors.
Then on the CatholicCulture site I dug just a bit deeper into the same question, questioning why secular journalists find it so shocking that the President is concerned about his own salvation.
This week we passed the 75th anniversary of the death of Black Elk, the Lakota Sioux leader who became something of a cult figure in the 1970s with the publication of the book, Black Elk Speaks, in which he explains the heritage of Lakota spirituality. What you might not know is that Nicholas Black Elk became a Catholic, spent roughly half of his life as a (very effective) catechist, taught that Christianity fulfills the spiritual longings of the Lakota heritage, and is now a candidate for beatification.
When Black Elk Speaks,...
In his book Black Elk Speaks, which was published in 1932 but became popular in the 1970s, John Neihardt says that the noted Lakota Sioux medicine man was born in December. Actually he was born in the summer of 1863. But don’t blame Neihardt, or the many online references that follow his lead, because Black Elk himself said that his birthday was in Dece…
In the Substack Seminar on just-war teaching, I provide a quick outline summary of just-war principles (which is something surprisingly hard to find), and begin to explore some of their implications. I’m hoping that, as folks try to apply those principles to current and past conflicts, we’ll soon have a lively discussion going in the Comments section. So join in!
Finally on this week’s Home Front podcast, Leila and I make some predictions. I predict how the war in Ukraine will end (the way we always knew it would). She continues her campaign to alert people to the dangers of artificial reproduction, warning that there soon will be— and probably already is— a busy black market in human babies.
