“Theology” Articles

That’s what I asked myself when I first glimpsed the Latin title of Pope Leo’s recent Encyclical: Magnifica Humanitas. The meaning of those words seemed to me clear, at least in English: “Magnificent Humanity.” But then immediately I was puzzled. What “Humanity”? We cruel, self-destructive creatures? And “magnificent”? What is the Pope talking about? Do the Pope and I live on the same planet? With our persecutions of each other, our greed, our racism, our wars, our trashing of our environment—“magnificent”?

I recently went to a group exhibition put on by New York City’s Arthouse 2B, a Catholic artist collective. Now I need to admit that, as a Catholic, I have reservations about self-consciously Catholic art. I do not object to it per se; it just seems that whenever we get together like this the results are… lame. So I was delighted and surprised when my favorite work in the exhibit was a piece of straightforward devotional art: Yukiyo Nagata’s “Offering.”

On the Poetry Foundation’s website page for Pattiann Rogers, we read that “She is noted for her ability to link the natural and scientific worlds in works filled with sensual imagery, spirituality, and a sense of awe.” And also that her books from 2004 through 2017 “continue to explore theological possibilities as revealed through the natural world.” Today, I want to follow this theme in a single volume: Generations (2004).

Ever since I first read Pattiann Rogers’s poem “On the Way to Early Morning Mass” (in her 2001 collection Song of the World Becoming), I’ve been enthralled by it. But I haven’t tried to move through it slowly, line by line. That’s what I want to do in this post.

I want to talk about seeing angels and about speaking with angels. I myself have not seen an angel. I have also not spoken with angels. I’m not even sure what an angel is. I’m not just saying that I doubt the existence of angels, I’m saying that the whole concept of an angel, even as a literary or biblical trope, is obscure to me. Nonetheless, I can’t stop thinking about angels.

Finding myself in another difficult season of life, needing to discover anew a Christian virtue ethics, I’m delighted that the Davenant Institute is publishing Traherne’s Christian Ethics, modernized and introduced by Colin Redemer, in four very portable volumes, of which the first two are now available.

For Plato, the fleeting, sensible things of this world (Doxa in Greek, from dokein, “to appear” or “to seem”) are no more than poor copies of their permanent, ideal forms (eidos in Greek) above, a sharp distinction called “Platonic dualism.” Saint Paul, however, gets a bad rap as a radical dualist, having for so long been viewed through a distorting Platonic—and later, a Cartesian—lens.

Paul Farmer died in his sleep Monday, February 21, and we will not see his like again soon. Dr. Farmer, a physician, medical anthropologist, author, and tireless champion of the world’s poor had been working in Butaro, Rwanda, at a hospital he helped build. For someone who was never quite comfortable anywhere but among fellow human beings in urgent need, it was a fitting place to end an astonishingly fruitful life.

Several years ago, stretching a lunch break from my office in a courthouse downtown, I happened upon the full text of Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel lecture in a favorite used-book shop down the street. A beat-up little booklet, Russian and English on facing pages, our burly author on the front, staring into the camera with what I’m willing to suppose is inimitable frankness.

What really engages Rowan Williams in the three short plays included in Shakeshafte & Other Plays is the costly dynamic of artistic expression— a cost paid dearly by the artists represented in those three plays: by Shakespeare (in the first of the plays, Shakeshafte), by David Jones (in the second, The Flat Roof of the World), and by Jesus (in the third, Lazarus).

Fr. Slater’s book on Bernard of Clairvaux is precious to me not simply as a good friend’s fine accomplishment. It is, for me, preciously timely. That’s because I had just been puzzling once again why it is that Bernard plays such a climactic role in the unfolding of Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

I can say, with joy and gratitude, that Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete was one of my mentors, and for a brief and very charmed time in my life, as I studied theology at the Pope John Paul II Institute in Washington DC in my early twenties, my way of seeing reality was permanently and dramatically changed by him. He gave me an infinite horizon.

He liked to be called El Santo (Spanish for “the Saint”). In almost anyone else on the planet it would be considered a sort of spiritual vanity or pretension. But in the case of Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, it was both a joke and a piece of deep theological wisdom.