(OPINION) This week I want to talk about a pair of concepts that are typically used side-by-side in Christian circles, and which also strike me as among the more misunderstood and egregiously misused principles in the church lexicon. Understood rightly, they’d benefit everybody. Those two words are “sin” and “repentance.” Taken together, they suggest the idea that we’re all sinners who need to repent.
Read More(OPINION) In the movies, the penitent enters a confession booth, kneels and whispers to a priest behind a lattice screen, “Forgive me, father, for I have sinned.” This drama was, for centuries, at the center of Catholic life. But in recent decades, the number of Americans who go to confession has plunged to a shocking degree that church leaders have struggled to explain.
Read More(OPINION) Is gambling evil? Among Christians, there’s a notable split on gambling between tolerant Catholics and Protestants, who’ve been mostly hostile. The two largest U.S. Protestant bodies, which disagree on many things, are both resolute in opposition.
Read More(OPINION) No generation in history has had so many distractions to deal with. No generation in history has had so many temptations. No generation in history has had so much entertainment and defilement available right at our fingertips (quite literally). That means that it is much harder to live consecrated, undistracted lives for the Lord — lives that are free from the contamination of sin and the saturation of the world.
Read More(OPINION) Sin and guilt remind us eros didn’t die, but it’s disfigured. It’s not ruined as Nietzsche claimed. Eros can be redeemed as it’s both/and — a virtue since God created it while a vice since we corrupted it. Human desires, including eros, are inherently very good.
Read More(OPINION) For centuries, Irish Catholics have heard priests deliver sermons about sin, hell, repentance, grace and heaven. Times have changed, and an 80-year-old priest in County Kerry didn’t get the memo. The problem was that Sheehy’s Oct. 30 sermon stressed ancient Catholic doctrines on behaviors many modern Catholics refuse to call “sins.”
Read More(COMMENTARY) "Fake news" - and the overuse of the term itself – has become so pervasive that even Pope Francis felt strong enough about it to address the phenomenon plaguing our Facebook feeds and Google searches. The added layer of technology and the changing dynamic within journalism has made this an issue that could have severely negative consequences on our political and economic systems going forward.
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