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Classroom Technology as the End of Education
As recently as half a decade ago, popular opinion regarded educational technology as a panacea for struggling schools and the key to reimagining American education. The New York Times was feting Khan Academy and the Washington Post continually lauded the possibilities afforded by “ed tech.”[1] In 2013, Google Classroom was still in its infancy, and the “flipped classroom” was more a novelty than a...
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Renewing Nouvelle Théologie
There was a depression over the Atlantic. It was travelling eastwards, towards an area of high pressure over Russia, and still showed no tendency to move northward around it. The isotherms and isotheres were fulfilling their functions. The atmospheric temperature was in proper relation to the average annual temperature, the temperature of the coldest as well as of the hottest month, and the a-periodic...
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Gripping the Book of Nature’s Reality
There’s a repeating image in José Ortega y Gasset’s first book, Meditations on Quixote, of a bird flying through and then falling from the sky. When we first see the bird, it is gliding over a “miasmic swamp,” a metaphor for the “past falling dead within our memory.” The bird then becomes a truth hunted by great scientists and falling lifeless at their feet....
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The History of Natural Right
Given this revisionary account of the development of natural law (click for previous instalment in this series) in western intellectual history, how does it relate to the story of natural rights? In the case of Aquinas, as with many other medieval theologians, and the canon law itself, the Christian exaltation of individual uniqueness and liberty led to a greater recognition of subjective rights in...
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Chief Obstacles to Good Spiritual Direction
I recently had a conversation with a group of friends about the state of parishes. During the conversation, one of them said something like, “What people really need is spiritual direction. That’s what people want, and what they need. That’s what parishes need to provide for us. Imagine how things could be different.” This corresponds to my experience working with parishes all around the country....
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The Anti-Catholicism of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks
The publication in the last few years of several volumes of the Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte)—consisting of Heidegger’s unedited ruminations from the early 1930’s to the early 1940’s on Being, human being, destiny, religion, ethics, and politics—has had about it the character of a sensation. It was thought that if we are to find beneath the complexities and opacities of Heidegger’s expression regarding his...
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Confessions of a Feminist Heretic
During the advent of my first pregnancy, in 2012, I was comfortably settled into my own unique brand of postmodern feminist Christianity. I remember lounging on the couch amidst waves of debilitating nausea, watching news coverage of the controversial Contraceptive Mandate, rolling my eyes in anger and disgust at those regressive Catholic priests in their prim white collars, telling women what to do with...
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When the State Kills
Going through old albums can really pull you into a remembrance of things past. For instance, when I came across my old Metallica album, Ride the Lightning, it took me back to a time when we unironically used Polaroid cameras, watched time-travel movies on VHS in which 2015 was considered the very distant future, and—as indicated in the album’s title—the state still killed people...
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The Political Pawning of Saints
It is fitting that Pope Francis canonized Pope Paul VI and Archbishop Óscar Romero together. Although through the eyes of United States politics Romero is often labeled a “liberal” and Paul VI pegged as a “conservative,” Francis’s canonization of these significant figures at the same Mass is no cheap compromise, no attempt at constructing a “big tent” Church. Francis has no delusions of tossing...
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Church Life Journal’s Best of 2018
Dear Readers, Thank you for blessing Church Life Journal with your support this past year. We reached more readers with our theological explorations than we could have ever imagined. We couldn’t have done it without all your generous shares, retweets, and personal recommendations. Please keep them coming. My special thanks also goes out to Tim O’Malley for his sage meta-advice on running the journal’s many...