Catholic Reading Wednesday

With many thanks to our wonderful and insightful curator, Karen Celano, you can explore faith-related news topics each Wednesday! Karen writes this week in Catholic news:

In Pro-Life Thought:
(1) In First Things, Nora Calhoun writes about how her experiences as a midwife and as a caretaker for the elderly have shaped her convictions about the value of human life. She speaks to the importance of human embodiment, writing that “there are things that can be learned – can be said – only in the language of bodies.” The bodies of babies reveals that “it doesn’t matter how early the human heart beats. . .Being of human descent is enough,” and the bodies of women in labor teach that women “don’t need to be protected from the children conceived within their bodies.” She urges pro-life Christians not to “confine [themselves] to ideas” and to engage in actual “corporal works of mercy” – acts of mercy based not on theoreticals but on the act of caring for physical bodies. Otherwise, she says, we risk “los[ing] the riches vocabulary of human dignity, one better expressed in embraces and diaper changes than in words.”

(2) It is a commonplace concept in modern Western culture to suppose that birth control is a necessary concomitant to economic development and environmental protection. We are told that the world is “overpopulated” and that this is wreaking havoc on the economic growth of third-world countries and on the natural world. This assumption has trickled down into our personal lives, as many couples forego having large families for the sake of “financial security.” But in Ethika Politika, Artur Rosman writes of the dangers of this assumption, arguing that as a culture we have replaced a concept of fertility as the reproduction of children with a concept of fertility as “an endless multiplication of stuff." Such a culture, he warns, “will not prove. . . to be kind to each other, the rest of the world, and the environment.” He argues that Catholicism can be a sign of contradiction against this cultural trend, “reconfigur[ing] the parish as a site of fertile resistance to capitalist (in-)fertility.”

In Politics:
Last week, a major conference met to discuss the persecution of Christians in the Middle East. In attendance were many Christian leaders from around the region, as well as Senator Ted Cruz. In First Things, Mark Movesian argues Cruz made a major – and offensive – faux pas by using the platform to speak not about Christians but about Israel, and then declaring to the disappointed crowd – many of whom had experienced persecution themselves – that if “you will not stand with Israel. . .then I will not stand with you.” Mark Shea speaks of the Christian community's frustration that Cruz could not seem to transcend politics in order to support Christians facing persecution, and that his remarks took the focus off of Christians in distress.

On the Liturgy:
The New York Times reports that “houses of worship” are becoming increasingly informal: “More and more Americans worship in congregations where drums are played, words or images are projected on screens, and praise is expressed via upstretched hands.” On the one hand, some such as Fr. Thomas Reese argue that the Catholic Church should get on board with these changes, “revis[ing] liturgical practices to allow people to celebrate their Christian faith in ways that better fit contemporary culture.” On the other, however, some like Rod Dreher in The American Conservative argue that liturgy is about transcendence of (not capitulation to) culture, and that liturgical reform should not be based on a desire to empower the community to express not its own culture but rather its conception of “the transcendent and eternal.”

In Philosophy/Theology:
In The Week, Damon Linker takes on popular scientific atheist Sam Harris’ new book Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion for rejecting the Western philosophical and theological tradition in his search for spirituality, turning instead to a modified form of Eastern spiritual practices. Linker specifically questions Harris’ rejection of the concept of a soul, which Linker feels is a key component of Western philosophy’s attempts to answer questions about the meaning of life and “lasting fulfillment.”

Opinion:
As evidenced by the news, as in any big family, Catholics disagree and even argue all the time. Have you ever found yourself frustrated by fellow Catholics? Fr. Dwight Longnecker has some advice.