Interlude: Love makes things plausible

Show notes

• Trump on the cross (you’re welcome for making this a link rather than pasting the image here…)

• ~20% of Americans are Catholic

• Dominican friars

• Is there a Christian revival happening? Here’s one discussion…

• Recent notable Christian conversions:

  • Paul Kingsnorth

  • Martin Shaw

  • Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  • Russell Brand

• MAGA comes for Catholicism

• Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (probably the second-most referenced text on this pod, after Ivan Illich’s Gender)

• “The church is not a select circle of the immaculate, but a home where the outcast may come in. It is not a palace with gate attendants and challenging sentinels along the entrance-ways holding off at arm’s-length the stranger, but rather a hospital where the broken-hearted may be healed, and where all the weary and troubled may find rest and take counsel together.”  ~James H. Aughey

• Title IX changes

• Boy Scouts to change its name

• Civil war deaths. From Wikipedia: “In total, the war left between 620,000 and 750,000 soldiers dead, along with an undetermined number of civilian casualties, making the Civil War the deadliest military conflict in American history.”

• Not Goebbels, but (head of the SS) Himmler’s speech. Here’s the part George was referencing (emphasis added):

  I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It’s one of those things that is easily said: “The Jewish people are being exterminated,” says every party member, “this is very obvious, it’s in our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, we’re doing it, hah, a small matter.” And then they turn up, the upstanding 80 million Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. They say the others are all swines, but this particular one is a splendid Jew. But none has observed it, endured it. Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person — with exceptions due to human weaknesses — has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of.

• Foot washing as part of the George Floyd aftermath

• Guttmacher Statistic on Catholic Women’s Contraceptive Use: “In April 2011, the Guttmacher Institute published the results of an analysis finding that 99% of all women of reproductive age who have ever had sex—including 98% of such Catholic women—have used a method of contraception other than natural family planning.…Among women who are currently at risk of unintended pregnancy, 88% overall—and 87% of Catholics—use a method other than natural family planning. …Among all women who are at risk of unintended pregnancy, 69% (including 68% of Catholics) are currently using a highly effective contraceptive method—male or female sterilization, the IUD, the pill or another hormonal method. Another 14% (15% among Catholics) are relying on condoms, and 5% (4% among Catholics) are relying on other methods, such as withdrawal. Only 1% of all women at risk of unintended pregnancy (2% of Catholics) use natural family planning, the only method of contraception sanctioned by the Catholic hierarchy.”

• George on the mess at Columbia

• Trust fund kid man (40! so just barely!) arrested in Hamilton Hall takeover

• Who knew? Bill W’s (and AA’s) Catholic connection (via a Jesuit priest).

• “The Ballad of the Two Sons (Luke 15)” by The Porter’s Gate: a story of the prodigal son who strayed, the older (bitter) brother who stayed, and the gracious father who loves them both…