You can't wait for an eternity

In a comment below, Steven Riddle writes:

I have said time and again that Hell cannot be eternal in the same way God is eternal because that would imply the existence of Hell-in-God.

It's true enough that hell isn't eternal in the same way God is eternal. I think you can even say hell isn't eternal at all.

As St. John puts it,

Now this is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ.

Hell exists pretty much specifically for people who don't know the only true God and the One Whom He sent. By definition, the damned don't have eternal life. And, as Rob pointed out, there isn't some dualistic or indifferent Eternity, part of which is God and heaven and goodness and life and part of which is Satan and hell and evil and death.

As I understand it, what this means is that human life in the "new earth" will be both everlasting -- in the sense of unending -- and eternal, insofar as it will be a participation in the Divine Life of the Trinity.

The damned, on the other hand, will not participate in the Divine Life, and therefore will not experience eternity, though their existence will be everlasting.

Link | John da Fiesole
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A couple of things on the last things

I had promised Steven Riddle a post explaining why, in his musings on salvation, he was getting things exactly backward by writing such things as this:

...to lose a majority of those you claim to love bespeaks either a failing love or an impotent will.

And this:

It would not seem to matter what words or actions I use to reject the majority of my offspring--either condition would suggest either a defect in love or a defect in strength.

And this:

What I did say was that it was rather a poor or impotent Almighty Father that would have a majority of His offspring reject Him. Not much of a sovereign will if you can't rein in the troops. Not really much omnipotence if all you can reclaim is 2% of your flock.

That is the point I am making. It is hard to conceive of an Almighty God with an ultimately loving intent unable to save 98% of those He would save. Doesn't speak well for omnipotence or for love.

There's not much point in my taking this up, since it's clear Steven has made up his mind. It might even be bad form to try to get him to change his mind, since he says his current opinion allows him to love God more.

So I will just propose two points, and leave it at that.

1. To treat damnation as signifying some sort of failure on God's part is to mistreat damnation about as completely as possible. For that matter, to treat damnation as something God does is to mistreat damnation no little.
2. There is no "mostly" in God. Any argument about His nature that holds if one person is damned holds if all but one persons are damned.

Link | John da Fiesole
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The invitations is extended

"...to prayer and fasting this coming Monday the 3rd and Tuesday the 4th of April, so that the Lord will restore peace, tranquility and security to Iraq, country of our beloved Abraham."

And I mean extended.

Two days, a day and a half, one day: it won't go to waste.

Link | John da Fiesole
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It's been a long month

But at last it's here.

Link | John da Fiesole
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More con than pro

As the Crunchy Con blogsite winds up, I can say that my opinion about the project has evolved from one of curiosity -- I am generally sympathetic to romantic calls to traditional life -- to frustration -- it wasn't at all clear just what they were really advocating (the manifesto? a place at the G.O.P. table? a reflection on an interesting cultural phenomenon?) -- and is settling into disappointment.

I am more convinced than ever that "Crunchy Conservatism" isn't so much "a sensibility" as Rod Dreher's sensibility, and that Rod Dreher's sensibility is essentially driven by his emotions. Although he has in the past shown a willingness to pass moral judgment on those who fail to share his emotions, "What Would Rod Feel?" is not a sound guiding principle for living a virtuous life.

I had held out some hope that, as the discussion reached the book's final chapter, "Waiting for Benedict," it would finally move beyond raising personal preferences to virtues, which seemed to constitute the bulk of the nonanecdotal discussion. Unfortunately, what Rod calls "the St. Benedict Option" consists in giving up society as a lost cause and constructing "new forms of community within which the moral life [can] be sustained." (The quoted words are from Alisdair MacIntyre.)

This is unfortunate for several reasons, not least being that, once again, Rod is thinking along these lines because that's where his emotions take him. 9/11, Katrina, EMPs, suitcase nukes: recent tough history convinces him tougher history is just around the corner. His concerns appear less philosophical than MacIntyre's, and more practical. Sustaining the moral life would be great, but the primary benefit of new forms of community would be sustaining physical life, when (today? next Thursday?) the United States goes feral.

Certainly your prudential judgment on how to achieve the good life will adopt a distinct character if you feel "the wheels are coming off." But if that's really where we're headed, then maybe now isn't the time to discuss whether the Republican mainstream sufficiently appreciates the humanizing qualities of the Arts and Crafts movement.

The attempt to present Crunchy Conservatism as something broader than Rod's sensibility wasn't helped by the fact that the other bloggers were generally reluctant to self-identify as Crunchy Cons. It may also be noted that the one most eager, Caleb Stegall, was also most critical of Rod's own positions, often posting to agree with points raised in critical emails.

In Caleb's case, I think it can be said, the problem is that Rod isn't countercultural enough -- and in fact, it takes a lot more than wearing Birkenstocks and opposing factory farming to make a man who works eleven hour days as an editor at the tenth largest newspaper in the country "countercultural" in any real sense.

The book and the blog seem to have caught Rod in motion. He feels very strongly that certain things are right and certain things are wrong, but he has not yet worked out and accepted all the implications. Hence the back-and-forth, "suburbs are bad, except when they're not," "I'm not saying it's wrong to do these things I've said are dehumanizing" kind of thing.

Caleb, who seems to have spent a lot more time thinking about his principles, is far more willing to issue blanket condemnations. Whether Rod will continue to move in that direction, winding up as Director of Propaganda for the Agrarian Monarchist Party for the 2016 election, remains to be seen.

To put all this in the context of my posts this week on tradition, I was hoping to find in the Crunchy Con discussion an argument that it constitutes an integrated pattern for living a good life. The discussion, though, was noticeably dis-integrated, the more so the closer it kept to the book's outline.

This is not to say the people interviewed in the book, or who have otherwise responded positively to it, have not formed for themselves integrated patterns for living good lives. But the attempt to synthesize these personal patterns into some larger cultural pattern has failed, as far as I can see.

The failure shows whenever something is declared "crunchy" simply because it is virtuous. The "Crunchy Con Manifesto" doesn't manifest crunchiness, particularly, and if as they sometimes say they really mean "traditionalism," they're left with a choice between the Scylla of traditionalism narrowly defined -- leading them to condemn many perfectly fine traditions -- and the Charybdis of traditionalism broadly defined -- making all the fuss over organic farming and liturgical cities irrelevant.

Can I write a post this long without making note of the, at time stunningly high, level of self-justified moralizing that attended the discussion from start to finish? Not quite.

Finally, I'll repeat that I am not a political conservative, and so I leave it to others to take up the question of what "true conservatism" is, and whether Rod's characterizations of "mainstream conservatives" are accurate, and the degree to which the Republican Party sacrifices families to the free market.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Quarantine

This post is here just to provide a comment link where anyone who wants to can debate the heretical, blasphemous, and contra-Biblical belief that the Old Testament has value only to Christians whose faith is too weak to accept the New Testament straight up, and related heretical, blasphemous, and contra-Biblical beliefs. Attempts to introduce such debate in other comment threads are unlikely to prove enduring.

Link | John da Fiesole
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A pattern of argument

You might note that, in the posts on tradition, I have so far kept things very general, following the dictionary definition of "tradition" as a kind of "pattern of thought, action, or behavior." I haven't written anything specific to religion, much less to Christianity, yet.

This approach of saying as much as I can before bringing religion into it is something I've used before, notably in the warmly received "Graph Theology of Faith" series of posts from this past Christmastide. It's not an original approach, of course, but I think it offers certain benefits that repay the effort of not jumping the gun. Let me suggest three of them.

One benefit to discussing what can be discussed without reference to religion is that it delays the inevitable religious disagreements. There are certain aspects of certain topics that a Catholic and a Calvinist are simply going to disagree on, and the longer they stay away from these aspects the more they may find aspects they do agree on. The experience of agreement -- by which the parties learn that they can learn from each other -- may make the eventual disagreement a better experience for all.

Another, related benefit is that it may reveal disagreements that are usually expressed in religious terms but turn out to have a more general basis. Two Christians may find that their doctrinal differences arise from their philosophical differences, and see that debating doctrinal conclusions directly will be fruitless, since they accept mutually incompatible philosophical premises. An atheist may discover there's more to refuting a Christian than flat rejection of his appeal to authority; the appeal may be very different for the two because, say, they have very different ideas about what human knowledge really is.

Finally, I think putting off the religious aspects of a question as long as possible helps broaden the thinking of the one who does it. With tradition, for example, you can explore questions without immediately placing them into the stock contemporary positions. Reject a tradition from your patrimony? You contemptible heretic. Not look to import a tradition? You hidebound blockhead.

In other words, it forces you to think of the subject in general human terms, not specific political terms. That, in turn, can help you understand general human nature in a way you wouldn't have considered if you started with a specifically religious context. (E.g., what are the similarities and differences between my faith in my friend and my faith in my God?) And that can help you understand how the Faith relates to all human experiences.

[None of this is to suggest that what we say outside of an explicitly religious context is unaffected by our faith. There's almost nothing I can say about anthropology, for example, that isn't ultimately grounded in what the Faith says man is, and my confidence in making the bold statement Brandon noticed in the previous post also comes from faith. But the above benefits may still obtain in such cases.]

Link | John da Fiesole
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A pattern of patterns

In a comment below, Rob offers a nice segue into this post:

Our problem is not being without tradition. Our problem is simultaneously hosting multiple traditions, which mostly do not communicate with each other, leaving us without real intellectual integrity.

I see integrity, in the literal sense of an integrated whole, as the key concept in the whole process I diagrammed yesterday. Somehow, from the sources of patrimony, dead tradition, foreign tradition, and invention, each generation -- again, considered as an individual, a community, or a culture -- should form for itself a unified, coherent way of life.

How to do that is certainly an open question, but I think it's important to start with and to keep in mind the reason for worrying about it at all. One way or another, everyone winds up with a way of life. For a person to be happy, the patterns according to which he lives his life must themselves form some sort of integrated pattern.

Link | John da Fiesole
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What if it were easy?

Eve Tushnet has some questions about forgiveness. Like most of us. One of her scattered thoughts:

What if it were easy? There is probably at least one person in your life whom you find it very easy to forgive. This is a person you love: a spouse, a friend, a parent, a child, somebody. If this person goes around being horrible to others and to you, you don't just sit there and take it--for her sake, you tell her why what she's doing is wrong. You do your best to stop her from acting wrongly. This even though she's the person you forgive quicker than anyone else.

From this experience we learn one important thing: Challenge isn't separate from love. You adore her, therefore you try to stop her when you think she might harm herself or others. Love doesn't mean, "Okay honey, do whatever you want, I don't care."

Okay... so try to apply this, analogously, to people you don't immediately love. What if you loved them? What if it were easy to forgive them?

You still wouldn't pretend like they had never done anything wrong. Forgiveness doesn't mean pretending the wrong never happened. It doesn't mean that you can't take the wrongdoing into account when trying to figure out if you should trust the other person with a confidence, or a $20 bill.

This sort of fits in with something that came up in a recent conversation, in which it was pointed out that we know how it is that God can forgive someone -- all sin is sin against God -- but it's less clear what it means for one human to forgive another. When God forgives, there's a change in the one forgiven. When we forgive, what really happens?

There's a lot that can be said about that, but we might pause for a moment to consider the words "we know how it is that God can forgive someone." How God forgives is through the crucifixion and death of His Son. So perhaps, sometimes, forgiveness can't be easy, no matter how holy the person is. Perhaps, sometimes, when forgiveness is easy, we aren't forgiving so much as declaring our indifference. Perhaps, sometimes, when we say, "I forgive you," we really mean, "You did not injure me."

Link | John da Fiesole
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Fasting, please

Two days? In a row?

Well, okay. It's for a good cause: "that the Lord will restore peace, tranquility and security to Iraq."

Link | John da Fiesole
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Stating the case

Camassia's post on how a traditionless person relates to tradition prompted me to try to clarify my own thinking on the meaning and value of tradition.

The word "tradition" comes from the Latin traditio, the act of handing over (and so is etymologically related to "treason," a handing over in the sense of betrayal). In a general sense, a tradition is some pattern of behavior that is handed over from one generation to the next.

I've put together a state transition model of how this handing over occurs:



According to the model, each generation (be it an individual or a culture) has two kinds of behavioral patterns: "living traditions," which are received from the previous generation; and "personal patterns," which have a source other than the previous generation. A personal pattern can be created by the generation, reclaimed from an ancestral generation, or imported from an unrelated source.

Each living tradition is either handed on by the generation, in which case it becomes part of the cultural patrimony, or it is not, in which case it becomes a dead tradition. Personal patterns that are handed on also join the patrimony (and if a personal pattern isn't handed on, it just quietly disappears).

Each element of the patrimony is either accepted, in which case it becomes or continues as part of the living tradition, or rejected, in which case it joins the other dead traditions.

What's particularly significant about this diagram, in terms of how people relate to traditions that aren't handed down to them, is how dynamic it is. Tradition is often represented as an ossified system, from patrimony to living tradition and back. But a little thought shows that a lot more can be going on, even in relatively static cultures, and the diagram doesn't even represent the way a living tradition can evolve across generations or be adapted or understood by a particular part of a particular generation.

Creating personal patterns, then, is an inherent aspect of tradition, and shouldn't be regarded as unique to our modern, deracinated culture. Nor, for that matter, should our modern, deracinated culture be seen as altogether traditionless.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Too sharp a distinction

In the introduction to Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI writes:

...I wish in my first Encyclical to speak of the love which God lavishes upon us and which we in turn must share with others. That, in essence, is what the two main parts of this Letter are about, and they are profoundly interconnected. The first part is more speculative.... The second part is more concrete....

It would be a mistake to read him as meaning the first part is merely speculative, that it deals with ideas without practical application.

I don't know that anyone has made that mistake, but it's easy to do, I think. Reading something like, "God loves, and his love may certainly be called eros, yet it is also totally agape," a body might be excused for thinking, "Oh, ah?" Theology, especially when written by a theologian, can seem awfully abstract and removed from the practical questions of what should be done. Heck, we even distinguish between fundamental theology -- the stuff no one understands -- and moral theology -- the stuff no one wants to hear.

Still, a measured reading of the first part of the encyclical will show that you don't have to wait till the second part to be faced with practical matters. Consider this passage:

The Eucharist draws us into Jesus' act of self-oblation. More than just statically receiving the incarnate Logos, we enter into the very dynamic of his self-giving... [T]his sacramental "mysticism" is social in character, for in sacramental communion I become one with the Lord, like all the other communicants... Union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself. I cannot possess Christ just for myself; I can belong to him only in union with all those who have become, or who will become, his own. [13-14]

Is there a term more likely to convince someone that what he's reading has no practical application than "sacramental 'mysticism'"? Yet "I can belong to Christ only in union with all who belong to Christ" is not just a theological observation, it's a fact against which we must measure our own commitment to union with all who belong to Christ.

What the Pope writes about the Eucharist in the first part of his encyclical yields a number of quite practical results. So too with marriage, so too with love as we do or should experience it. These results are evident if we consciously seek both meanings of the meaning of his words: the conceptual content and the implications for our lives.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Discussion questions for Deus Caritas Est, nn. 9-18

These are the questions I armed myself with to discuss the second part of the first part of Deus Caritas Est at my parish.

1. "The one God in whom Israel believes, on the other hand, loves with a personal love. His love, moreover, is an elective love: among all the nations he chooses Israel and loves her -- but he does so precisely with a view to healing the whole human race. God loves, and his love may certainly be called eros, yet it is also totally agape." [9]
• Can we make sense of calling God's love eros?

2. "We have seen that God's eros for man is also totally agape. This is not only because it is bestowed in a completely gratuitous manner, without any previous merit, but also because it is love which forgives." [10]
• Does a love bestowed without any previous merit and which forgives describe how we love? Is it even possible for us?

3. "God's passionate love for his people -- for humanity -- is at the same time a forgiving love. It is so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice." [10]
• Can we make sense of a love "so great that it turns God against himself"?

4. "First, eros is somehow rooted in man's very nature; Adam is a seeker, who 'abandons his mother and father' in order to find woman; only together do the two represent complete humanity and become 'one flesh.' The second aspect is equally important. From the standpoint of creation, eros directs man towards marriage, to a bond which is unique and definitive; thus, and only thus, dofulfillfulfil its deepest purpose. Corresponding to the image of a monotheistic God is monogamous marriage. Marriage based on exclusive and definitive love becomes the icon of the relationship between God and his people and vice versa. God's way of loving becomes the measure of human love." [11]
• Any thoughts on how this encyclical can be used to prepare for or support Christian marriages?

5. "The real novelty of the New Testament lies not so much in new ideas as in the figure of Christ himself, who gives flesh and blood to those concepts -- an unprecedented realism." [12]
• Is there real novelty in the ideas of the New Testament? Which ones?

6. "By contemplating the pierced side of Christ (cf. 19:37), we can understand the starting-point of this Encyclical Letter: 'God is love' (1 Jn 4:8). It is there that this truth can be contemplated. It is from there that our definition of love must begin. In this contemplation the Christian discovers the path along which his life and love must move." [12]
• How can we bring this contemplation of the pierced side of Christ into our definition of love?

7. "[T]his sacramental 'mysticism' is social in character, for in sacramental communion I become one with the Lord, like all the other communicants.... Communion draws me out of myself towards him, and thus also towards unity with all Christians." [14]
• Do we find that Communion draws us out of ourselves toward unity with all Christians?

8. "Faith, worship and ethos are interwoven as a single reality which takes shape in our encounter with God's agape. Here the usual contraposition between worship and ethics simply falls apart.... A Eucharist which does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented." [14]
• "Does my Communion pass over into the concrete practice of love?": Is this a question we use when examining our consciences?

9. "The Church has the duty to interpret ever anew this relationship between near and far with regard to the actual daily life of her members." [15]
• How do we interpret the relationship between near and far with regard to our actual daily life?

10. "'If anyone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen' (1 Jn 4:20)... Saint John's words should ... be interpreted to mean that love of neighbor is a path that leads to the encounter with God, and that closing our eyes to our neighbor also blinds us to God." [16]
• Can we function day to day without closing our eyes to our neighbor?

11. "He has loved us first and he continues to do so; we too, then, can respond with love. God does not demand of us a feeling which we ourselves are incapable of producing. He loves us, he makes us see and experience his love, and since he has 'loved us first', love can also blossom as a response within us." [17]
• Whom do we love first?

12. "Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they crave." [18]
• What can we do for those who don't know they crave a look of love?

Link | John da Fiesole
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At long last

Kathy Shaidle begreep me!

Ik denk zij laatste, ook begreep.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Friday confession

I hadn't known that popes held the title "Patriarch of the West." I don't care that Pope Benedict XVI dropped it. I don't care why he did.

Link | John da Fiesole
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The third kind of lie

In yesterday's post, I broke several cardinal rules of quoting statistics. I didn't quote the sampling error, I didn't provide a link to the full report, I didn't double-check the figures. In short, I quoted a quotation of the statistics, which means who knows how the data should be interpreted?

And that, of course, is key. We can grant that the statistics are perfectly sound, but all that means is that if you asked everyone in the population, you'd get about the same distribution you got by asking only a tiny sample of the population. Statistics tell us nothing about what statistics actually mean.

I don't know if I used too many words in my "essay or multiple choice" bit, or what. Maybe my main point can be summed up, and understood, in these words: Giving one response rather than another to a question in a telephone poll does not constitute an act of Christian love.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Essay or multiple choice

On dotCommonweal, mention is made of a recent Pew Research poll (whose results were published in the National Catholic Reporter) that suggests Catholics are disproportionately pro-torture. To the question, "Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can often be justified, sometimes be justified, rarely be justified, or never be justified?", the results were:

	Total Public	Total Catholic	White Protestant	White Evangelical	Secular
Often	15%	21%	15%	13%	10%
Sometimes	31%	35%	34%	36%	25%
Rarely	17%	16%	16%	16%	16%
Never	32%	26%	31%	31%	41%
Don't Know/Refused	5%	4%	4%	4%	4%

One in four Catholics surveyed gave the answer of the Church. No one who reads Mark Shea's blog can be wholly surprised by this, though I would have guessed somewhat more than half would have answered at least "Rarely."

On dotCommonweal, Grant Gallicho writes:

How did this happen? U.S. Catholic bishops have been anything but silent on the issue.

Which, as excerpted, is an amusing little non sequitur, considering the encouragement and celebration of ignoring U.S. bishops that exists in many corners of the Church that otherwise have little in common. (And yes, his broader point is, "This is a teaching moment that must be seized." But then, so is every moment.)

Apart from the sheer pleasure of ignoring the bishops, though, I would guess that the approval of torture by the Church hierarchy in the past accounts for a significant amount of the Catholic shift away from "Never." It's far easier to say the former practices were moral than to say exactly how immoral practices could exist within an infallible Church. (The disproportionate number of Catholics who answered "Often" is more puzzling to me; perhaps Catholics are more likely to assume those wielding the sword know what they're doing.)

It has also been noted that four in ten "seculars" gave the correct answer, leading one dotCommonweal commenter to remark:

Sadly it is has been clear for a while that many humanists are so much more charitable than Christians.

I am not sanguine about this conclusion. Your answer to a multiple-choice poll is hardly evidence of your charity. Opposition to torture can be based on many things other than a genuine love of neighbor -- to say nothing of love in Christ of neighbor, which is the fullness of Christian charity.

It is possible for a person to choose the charitable thing without possessing the virtue of charity. A "secular" may oppose torture because he thinks that evil is an illusion, or that no one is responsible for his actions, or that the U.S. is the source of all evil in the world, or that if torture isn't opposed today the theocrats will be torturing seculars tomorrow, or that physical suffering is the greatest possible evil.

It is also possible for a person to choose against charity while yet possessing, albeit imperfectly, charity as a virtue. One may mistakenly believe justice demands torture when it might save lives, or that not torturing in that situation would be to fail to love those whose lives would be lost. One may regard torture as just punishment, perhaps even a sort of tough love toward the victim, who can thereby atone (whether he wants to or not) for his involvement in whatever crime led to his torture.

I suspect, then, that had the poll respondents written essays defending their answers, the picture would not have been quite as stark as the reported statistics paint. Not altogether heartwarming, maybe, but not as stark.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Midterm pining

With the midterm elections in the U.S. a little over half a year away, and the 2008 presidential campaigns revving up, it's about time for the biennial discussion among American Catholics about political homelessness.

This time around, I'm thinking about a fresh break with the "one from column R and one from column D" approach to constructing the ideal political party. What do you think of an Agrarian Monarchist Party?

I'm neither an agrarian nor a monarchist, and I think both groups are overrepresented by folks touched in the head, but I have to think the food (raised and prepared by the agrarians) and drink (imported and decanted by the monarchists) at the party meetings would be fantastic.

Link | John da Fiesole
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An invitation to decline

There's something fundamentally screwy about any conversation that all but requires, as the price of participation, a Homeric boast of one's own personal virtues. It seems to me two such conversations are occurring at the Crunch Con blog and at dotCommonweal.

Something about the way the whole Crunchy Con debate has been formulated invites people to testify on such matters as whether they love their children and whether they think of anything other than their material possessions.

Something about the whole "Commonweal Catholic" discussion (which is by no means all of the discussion at dotCommonweal) invites people to preen over their intellects; they're thinking Catholics, you see.

I suppose that invitation exists whenever the topic is (or is taken to be) whether a particular group is superior to everyone else. Those who belong to the group are inclined to demonstrate membership in terms of their own superiority; those who do not belong are inclined to prove the thesis false by example of their superiority.

The results are often not very edifying.

Link | John da Fiesole
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The crowd there heard it and said it was thunder

What can those who have eyes to see -- which ought to include everyone who is baptized -- actually see these days?

Can they see the literally blind literally regain their sight, the literally lame literally walk?

Well, maybe, sometimes. I've met the woman whose eyesight recovery is being considered for the canonization of Bl. Margaret of Castello. Most people probably know someone who knows someone who experienced a medically inexplicable recovery.

Of course, materialists will be quick to point out that "medically inexplicable" refers to what the medical community happens to know today, not to what actually does have a material cause. And almost anything can happen to happen; it has to happen to happen often enough before it's something science can say something about.

Far more often, I suspect, those with eyes to see see things that leave materialists, not sputtering about what Science might learn in the next decade, but chuckling over the enduring superstitions of the simple-minded. All the little coincidences, ironies, synchronicities, and irruptions that come your way and remind you that God exists, that He is with you, that He loves you, that He calls you to Him: what will the materialist make of these things?

What do we make of them, when the pious old ladies at church tell us how, after a novena to St. Anthony, they've never had a problem finding a parking spot? What, for that matter, do we make of such things when our New Age sister-in-law starts talking about meeting the reincarnation of someone or other, or lucidly dreaming about a car crash that actually happened?

There's a scale of credulity, and everyone believes he occupies just the right spot between blind superstition and blind incredulity. But how do the incredulous tell us from the superstitious, and vice versa?

Let me make three suggestions.

First, we see by faith, which opens us to seeing a lot that science can't quite make out, and which prevents us from falling for certain superstitious traps. We might keep in mind, though, that with a faith-enhanced vision we can't prove we're seeing what is really there.

Second, I may not be shown everything you see, nor you everything I see. The subtle messages, the gentle whisper God so often speaks to us in, may not be intended to be overheard.

Third, we should not become attached to seeing God, even as our vision of Him becomes more acute, or we might be caught blind in a dark night.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Discussion Questions for Deus Caritas Est, nn. 2-8

Here are my notes for a discussion of the first part of the first part of Deus Caritas Est. The numbers in brackets refer to the section number of the encyclical containing the quotation.

1. "...we cannot simply prescind from the meaning of the word in the different cultures and in present-day usage." [2]
• What other words do the Church and the world use differently? (E.g., "tempting," "sinful," "truth")

2. "The Greeks -- not unlike other cultures -- considered eros principally as a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a 'divine madness' which tears man away from his finite existence and enables him, in the very process of being overwhelmed by divine power, to experience supreme happiness." [4]
• Does our culture think of love as intoxication or "divine madness"?
• What does the culture say love enables man to do?

3. "An intoxicated and undisciplined eros, then, is not an ascent in 'ecstasy' towards the Divine, but a fall, a degradation of man. Evidently, eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns." [4]
• What does the concept of "a degredation of man" imply?
• What happens when we don’t acknowledge that there is a beatitude for which our whole being yearns?

4. "... love promises infinity, eternity -- a reality far greater and totally other than our everyday existence." [5]
• What else in our culture makes such a promise?

5. "Purification and growth in maturity are called for; and these also pass through the path of renunciation." [5]
• What does "the path of renunciation" mean?

6. "... man is a being made up of body and soul... Should he aspire to be pure spirit and to reject the flesh as pertaining to his animal nature alone, then spirit and body would both lose their dignity. On the other hand, should he deny the spirit and consider matter, the body, as the only reality, he would likewise lose his greatness." [5]
• Why is this true, and how can we know it is true?

7. "Eros, reduced to pure 'sex', has become a commodity, a mere 'thing' to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity. This is hardly man's great 'yes' to the body." [5]
• Can the culture see the truth of this?

8. In the Song of Songs, "Love now becomes concern and care for the other. No longer is it self-seeking, a sinking in the intoxication of happiness; instead it seeks the good of the beloved: it becomes renunciation and it is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice." [6]
• Do we desire to love in this way?
• What would make us desire to love sacrificially?

9. As it grows, love "seeks to become definitive... both in the sense of exclusivity (this particular person alone) and in the sense of being 'for ever'." [6]
• What has happened to our concept of love?

10. "Love is indeed 'ecstasy', not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward -- looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God." [6]
• Does this mean we can take 1 John 4:7b -- "everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God" -- literally?

11. "Yet eros and agape -- ascending love and descending love -- can never be completely separated. The more the two, in their different aspects, find a proper unity in the one reality of love, the more the true nature of love in general is realized." [7]
• Is this a new idea for you?
• How is this teaching lived in the Church?
• What might happen if the Church taught this clearly enough to the world?

12. Man "cannot always give, he must also receive. Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift." [7]
• How important is it that love be received as a gift?

13.To "become a source from which rivers of living water flow... one must constantly drink anew from the original source, which is Jesus Christ, from whose pierced heart flows the love of God." [7]
• What does it tell us, about love and about our faith, that Pope Benedict identifies "the love of God" with the water (of baptism) and blood (that washes away sin) that flowed from Jesus' side?

14. "We have thus come to an initial, albeit still somewhat generic response to the two questions raised earlier." [8]
• What are the two questions, and what are the answers?
i. "[A]re all ... forms of love basically one"? [2]
ii. "Did Christianity really destroy eros?" [4]
• What does all this mean for us this Lent?

Link | John da Fiesole
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Allergies



God's little way of reminding you that physical beauty can co-exist with moral evil.

Link | John da Fiesole
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St. Patrick's Day Trivia

If you tell a child who attends a Catholic elementary school that, whenever St. Patrick's Day falls on a Friday, the celebration of St. Joseph's Day is transferred to the following Monday, which makes it like a four day weekend, except he has school on two of the days, the child will not be impressed.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Helpful distinctions

Recent discussions call to mind two distinctions that are sometimes helpful.

One is the distinction between distinction and separability. That two things are not separable -- that you can't have one without the other -- does not mean that they cannot be distinguished. The two sides of a coin, for example, cannot be separated¹, but they can certainly be distinguished.

The other is the distinction between two meanings of the question, "What does this mean?" One meaning, which you might call the proximate meaning, is simply the literal sense of whatever the "this" is; the second (remote) meaning is what follows from the truth of the literal sense. You've seen, perhaps, the "Far Side" cartoon of the two fishermen on a lake, with mushroom clouds rising from beyond the mountains. The proximate meaning of those clouds is that a nuclear war has destroyed civilization. The remote meaning is expressed by one of the fishermen: "I'll tell you what this means, Norm -- no size restrictions and screw the limit!"

The first distinction would apply when discussing the names of God. In His simplicity, God is His essence and His existence (on a good day, I can make some sense out of that). Not only are God's justice and mercy inseparable, God is both His justice and His mercy. Nonetheless, we can distinguish between His justice and His mercy², and still more between justice and mercy as creation participates in them.

The second distinction would apply in the ongoing look at the question, "What does 'God is love' mean?" The proximate metaphysical and theological meaning of the statement, "God is love," is definitely one worth exploring. But it's perhaps noteworthy that in the encyclical called "God is Love," Pope Benedict XVI is not much concerned with this proximate meaning. The letter is really about what follows from what follows from the fact that God is love, which is to say, it's about what follows from the fact that God loves.

Certainly our understanding of the remote meaning reflects back on our understanding of the proximate meaning, but love more than any other matter for reflection is something that must end in action. In bumper sticker terms, love is act, not fact.

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1. Yes, you could get a precision saw and cut the coin in half, but that effectively destroys the coin, and even then you'd be left with two coins, each with two sides.

2. You can even oppose God's justice and mercy, as Pope Benedict does in Deus Caritas Est 10: "God's passionate love for his people—for humanity—is at the same time a forgiving love. It is so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice." But such opposition is conceptual; the Pope continues, "Here Christians can see a dim prefigurement of the mystery of the Cross: so great is God's love for man that by becoming man he follows him even into death, and so reconciles justice and love."

Link | John da Fiesole
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Simply, love

In a comment below, Steven Riddle brings up a subject I've been sort of poking at in my own mind:

Let's talk about the implications of St. Thomas's assertion (which I believe to be true) that God is simple, not composed of parts, and unite that to the concept that God is Love, without making love simplicity and without reducing God merely to the human notion of love, because although God is simple and God is Love, God is uniate and a lot more things than love. As with a diamond, we can choose to view the whole or look at a single facet and call that the whole.

I've been intrigued by the implications of the encyclical and aspects of Thomistic philosophy since the encyclical came out.

By "poking at it," I mean "telling myself there's are some implications I have no clue at all about." That said:

Brandon Field replied to Steven:

When I read what St. Thomas wrote about God's simplicity, I recalled a reflection that you wrote a while ago about the fractaline nature of the Eucharist: any part contains the whole. This is what I understand St. Thomas' concept of simplicity to mean. So, could it follow that any act of love -- no matter how "small" -- contains some sort of fullness of love? At least in as much as we mean agape love, this might be related to the Little Way of St. Therese. Perhaps any act of sacrificial love contains God, not just a part of God -- since He can not in His simplicity be subdivided -- but God.

I'll buy that, except for that verb "contains." Though we know what we mean (or at least what we mean to mean), the Eucharistic species doesn't really "contain" Christ's Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity, in the ordinary meaning of the word. Or even in an extraordinary meaning of the word.

Instead, we talk about Christ's "presence in" the Eucharist, or that the Eucharist "is" Christ's Body and Blood, for some sacramental sense of "presence" and "being."

So we might say that God -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- is somehow wholly present in every act of sacrificial love, and adopt an understanding of the Scriptural formula, "if we love one another, God remains in us," that is broad (i.e., not limiting the "love" to some sort of super-refined act only bilocating saints perform), non-tautological (i.e., not defining the "love" as "the sort of love through which God remains in us"), and literal (i.e., our loving one another, in and of itself, really and for true, means that God remains in us; no conditionals or exceptions necessary).

Now, to fold it back toward Steven's point that God is a lot more things than love, we might ask whether God's presence in an act of love is somehow essentially different from God's presence in any other act. As I've been mentioning, we read that "God is light" in the same epistle that gives us "God is love," so there's reason to be cautious about making theological claims based on grammatical data. For that matter, isn't "God Is" even more fundamental than "God is love"?

Link | John da Fiesole
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Discussion Guide for Deus Caritas Est

For what it's worth, here's the outline I used for a parish discussion introducing the papal encyclical:

1. A Surprising Theme
   • Everyone knows God is love
   • Doesn't sound very Grand Inquisitorish
   • Doesn’t sound very meaty theologically
   • Why did he choose it?
   
   
2. "God is Love"
   • What does "God is love" mean?
   • What does it mean to you?
   • Read selections from 1 John 4:

     Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love. In this way the love of God was revealed to us: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him. In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also must love one another.
     
     We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us. God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him. In this is love brought to perfection among us, that we have confidence on the day of judgment because as he is, so are we in this world.
     
     We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, "I love God," but hates his brother, he is a liar; for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. This is the commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.

   • What's the difference between "God loves" and "God is love"?
   
   
3. St. Augustine
   • "God is Love"/"Love is God": draws a parallel between 1 John 4:7-8, "love is of God... God is love" and John 1:1: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
   • Read from Homilies on the First Epistle of John, VII:

     "Love is God." What more could be said, brothers? If nothing were said in praise of love throughout the pages of this epistle, if nothing whatever throughout the other pages of the Scriptures, and this one only thing were all we were told by the voice of the Spirit of God, "For Love is God;" nothing more ought we to require.
     
     Now see that to act against love is to act against God. Let no man say, "I sin against man when I do not love my brother... and sin against man is a thing to be taken easily; only let me not sin against God. How do you not sin against God, when you sin against love?

   • Does "God is Love" mean "Love is God"?
   • What do you think of St. Augustine’s argument that sinning against man is sinning against God?
   • Read from Homily VIII:

     Love could not be more exceedingly commended to you than that it should be called God.

   • How is love commended to us today, and how do we commend it to others?
   
   
4. The Catechism on "God is Love"
   • Read from the CCC:

     218 In the course of its history, Israel was able to discover that God had only one reason to reveal himself to them, a single motive for choosing them from among all peoples as his special possession: his sheer gratuitous love. And thanks to the prophets Israel understood that it was again out of love that God never stopped saving them and pardoning their unfaithfulness and sins.
     
     221 But St. John goes even further when he affirms that "God is love": God's very being is love. By sending his only Son and the Spirit of Love in the fullness of time, God has revealed his innermost secret: God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange.

   • How do we share God's "innermost secret" with each other and with the world?
   
   
5. Pope Benedict, in a letter to Famiglia Cristiana
   • Read selections:

     Initially, in fact, the text might seem a bit difficult and theoretical. However, when one begins to read it, it becomes evident that I only wished to respond to a couple of very concrete questions for Christian life.
     
     The first question is the following: Is it possible to love God?; more than that: Can love be something that is obligatory? Is it not a feeling that one has or does not have? ...
     
     The second question is the following: Can we really love our "neighbor" when he is strange or even disagreeable? ...
     
     Finally, this question is also posed: With her commandments and prohibitions, does not the Church embitter the joy of "eros," of feeling ourselves loved, which pushes us toward the other and seeks to be transformed into union? ...
     
     In the second part there is talk of charity, in the service of the communal love of the Church toward all who suffer in body or soul and are in need of the gift of love. Two questions arise here above all: Can the Church leave this service to other philanthropic organizations?
     
     The second question: Would it not be better to promote an order of justice in which there are no needy, and charity would become something superfluous?

   • Do we already know the answers?
   
   
6. The Introduction itself
   • Note backward procession of Scriptural references, from 1 John to John to Deuteronomy
   • "Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person": recall the question, "Do you think of yourself as a disciple of Christ or a Catholic?"
   • Christianity is an encounter with love, so Christians must "speak of the love which God lavishes upon us and which we in turn must share with others."
   • Can we speak of our own experiences in such rich terms as "lavishes"?
   
   
7. Things to look for in the encyclical
   • The essentially "ecumenical" character of the Gospel of Love; what non-Catholics, non-Christians, and non-theists might agree with
   • Historical development in Revelation – "The real novelty of the New Testament lies not so much in new ideas as in the figure of Christ himself, who gives flesh and blood to those concepts" from the Old Testament (n. 12)
   • The twofold "response to the gift of love with which God draws near to us" that goes all the way back to the Garden

Link | John da Fiesole
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The Irish Eating Song

Fans of Whose Line is it, Anyway? will know the tune:

Ooooh,
Ai de di de di de di de di de di de di!

This year finds St. Patrick's Day
Falling on a Friday,
Which, it being Lent in March,
Ye'd think 'twas a fish-fry day.

Are we dispensed from abstinence?
Well, here's a little clue:
Me bishop's named McCarrick.
Tell me what you guess he'd do?

Ooooh,
Ai de di de di de di de di de di de di!

Lyrics may (but probably won't) be continued in the comments, one line at a time.

Link | John da Fiesole
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More good men and women

And while I'm on the subject of Dominican vocations, let's not forget the Third Order.

Third orders in general are something of a mystery, with "What do you do?" and "What's the point?" being two of the biggest questions people have. The prayer and study angles are fairly straightforward, but in the case of the Lay Fraternities of Saint Dominic, how do we handle the preaching part?

That's a question we're still asking of ourselves.

They say that, if you've met one Dominican, you've met one Dominican. There are differences between members of the same chapter, between chapters in the same province, and between provinces. With that in mind:

Lay Dominicans live out the Preaching charism in all different ways. Some do churchy things -- teach RCIA or CCD, or work directly for the Church. Others choose a personal or group apostolate; I know of one chapter that sponsors an annual winter coat drive, another that writes letters to politicians, newspapers, and so forth on the moral matters of the day.

Some Lay Dominicans have no particular activity they regard as an apostolate; instead, they go out into the marketplace, as all lay Christians are called to do, but through their formation they go out as Dominicans, offering the fruit of Dominican style contemplation (prayer (Mass, Liturgy of the Hours, Rosary, etc.) and study (particularly the thought and spirituality of the Order's great saints).

Still others serve the mission of the Order through prayer. The idea that the job of each and every Dominican is to go out and preach is both a novelty in the history of the Dominicans and (I suspect) a minority view. Preaching is the mission of the Order, of the community as a whole; it's not the aggregate of tens of thousands of individual missions.

In my chapter, we have people who serve the Province by running the Third Order bookstore (the only such bookstore in the U.S.), helping with the provincial magazine, and serving on the Provincial Council. (A word of warning: competence (or even, in my case, regular attendance) runs the risk of being elected to all sorts of offices and councils; the upside is, they all come with terms of office that do eventually expire.) One member is a DRE for a nearby parish; another is devoted to presenting the thought of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (yes, a Carmelite; the Holy Spirit blows where He wills).

As a chapter, we have sponsored various programs hosted at the parish where we meet. There is also a new initiative throughout the Province whereby each chapter is to sponsor a Bible study program; we'll be starting that up in the fall.

Do all these things really amount to preaching?

That's a subject of lively debate within the Order. There's the position that says pretty much every activity counts as preaching. There's the position that says only speaking to an audience counts. And everything in between.

My personal position is this: The charism of preaching expresses itself in many different ways. However, "preaching" properly speaking is speaking the Word to an audience that is physically present in the same room, and this preaching properly speaking is a unique and privileged means of expressing the charism, one without which the Order of Preachers ceases to be an order of preachers.

Beyond that, we don't record points or keep score. What "counts" is the salvation of souls.

Finally, anyone who's curious about the Order should be sure to ask any other Dominicans they meet or know these same sorts of questions, since they're sure to get at least a different slant, if not a diametrically opposed answer. If you've
asked one Dominican, you've asked one Dominican.

Link | John da Fiesole
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More than a few good men

I see the brothers in formation at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC, have revived the vocations blog for the Province of St. Joseph. Look for an update every week or two. (The students also have their own site, and their own PDF newsletter, the Dominican Review.)


Coming soon to a pulpit near you: the novices and student brothers of the Eastern U.S. province.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Shows what I know

I figured there wouldn't be many, if any, comments on the previous post, since I didn't think it was coherent enough. Maybe the four dozen comments reflect the readiness of people to respond to love, however imperfectly expressed.

Link | John da Fiesole
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As though we understood good

I'm beginning to believe God is love.

I've been struck by the inchoate notion that to speak of "the problem of evil" is to miss the fact that the problem we are truly facing is the problem of good. The real question isn't, "How can an all-powerful, all-good God permit bad things?," but, "How do we face the fact of an all-powerful, all-good God?" To theologize by thinking in terms of evil, as though we understood good, is like doing zoology by thinking in terms of objects that create elephant-shaped shadows, rather than in terms of elephants.

Okay, it's not very much like that at all. I said it's an inchoate notion.

But if God loves, then His love isn't just human love ramped up a million times, or even to infinity, any more than His existence is just a superduper form of our existence. It isn't just present in the things of creation as seasoning or leaven. It isn't really present in a manner similar to anything other than itself.

It's odd that something so explosive, something that simply replaces everything that is not itself, should be so easy to overlook, to ignore, and to forget. Love is weird stuff.

Link | John da Fiesole
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The way of the cross, iii

I suggested that Matthew 16:24 describes a three-step process:

Then Jesus said to his disciples, "Whoever wishes to come after me must

1. deny himself,
2. take up his cross, and
3. follow me."

(And before any Carmelite gets the heebie jeebies, let me explain that this is a logical process, where the subsequent steps depend on the presence of the prior steps, not a chronological process, where each step occurs in sequence in time.)

I also suggested the first step amounts to deposing one's own will as the center of one's existence.

If these suggestions are sound, then in order to take up your cross it is necessary to depose your own will as the center of your existence. Why might what follows from such denial of self be considered the taking up of a cross?

Well, what does the taking up of a cross signify? I'd say it signifies the somehow voluntary acceptance of a foreseen path of suffering. It's not merely the stoic acceptance of an instance of suffering, but of a whole route of pain and sorrow, a route whose details may be unknown but whose end, Golgotha, can be seen from the start.

If, as the old love song has it, this world is a vale of tears, then pretty much every path through it is one of pain and sorrow. What distinguishes carrying a cross is the willingness (which is not simple resignation) to suffer, and to some extent the choice of a path that does not minimize suffering.

I'd say that what denying yourself contributes to taking up your cross is this: At every moment you bear your cross, you are tempted to set it down. "Setting it down" means bucking against the suffering, or even abandoning the path for one of less suffering. If you have not denied yourself, if your own will is still the center of your existence, two things follow. First, there is nothing but your own willpower keeping you from setting down your cross, and at any moment you might change your mind. Second, the cross you are bearing is in some sense defined by your will; it is a cross you design for yourself, rather than a product of the fallenness of the world itself.

Note, finally, that in what I've written about both denying yourself and taking up your cross, there is nothing explicitly Christian. You can depose your will in favor of all sorts of things -- of the Party, of a charismatic leader, of social forces. And you can choose a path of suffering from all sorts of causes; you can suffer for your Art, or for your children, or for the sheer cussedness of it.

Thus the final step of the process: "Follow Me." If we are following Christ, the first two steps become specific. It is God's will that becomes the center of our existence. It is the suffering of a Christian that we shoulder, with its twin character of internal self-discipline and external buffeting.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Lenten Discussion Series in Silver Spring, Maryland

We have come to believe in God's love.

Is your Lent not penitential enough? Then come and listen to me lead a discussion on Deus Caritas Est at St. Andrew Apostle Catholic Church in Silver Spring, MD, this Tuesday, March 7, beginning with Evening Prayer at 7:30 p.m.

Link | John da Fiesole
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