- Details
- Written by Edoardo Albert
- Category: News Archive
- Details
- Written by Edoardo Albert
- Category: News Archive
Can you figure out which culture Archbishop Chaput is talking about in this speech?
This society is advanced in the sciences and the arts. It has a complex economy and a strong military. It includes many different religions, although religion tends to be a private affair or a matter of civic ceremony.
This particular society also has big problems. Among them is that fertility rates remain below replacement levels. There aren't enough children being born to replenish the current adult population and to do the work needed to keep society going. The government offers incentives to encourage people to have more babies. But nothing seems to work.
Promiscuity is common and accepted. So are bisexuality and homosexuality. So is prostitution. Birth control and abortion are legal, widely practiced, and justified by society's leading intellectual.
Find out if you're right . H/T the Insight Press blog.
- Details
- Written by Edoardo Albert
- Category: News Archive
Thursday is All Saints' Day and a Holy Day of Obligation - which means we're meant to go to Mass. There are services at Our Lady at 8am, 10am and 7.30pm.
Friday is All Souls' and, while not a Day of Obligation, many people want to pray for their dead. There are Masses at 8am, 10am and 7.30pm.
The churches in central London all say Masses through the day, with services particularly concentrated around lunch time and in the early evening, so finding a service you can attend should not really be a problem.
- Details
- Written by Edoardo Albert
- Category: News Archive
- Details
- Written by Edoardo Albert
- Category: News Archive
The shrillness of Dr Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens might suggest that atheists have little grasp of philosophy and less of history, but at least Theodore Dalrymple can honestly appreciate what he he doesn't believe in.
The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.