Category: Texts
Wholeheartedness – “Being Found at Your Post”
I remember being convinced that I had a vocation, but that was long before I was able to question how much of my conviction was self-importance and a need to be special. Years of peeling away and undoing would be required if ever I were to fall into the hands of the living God.
Pope Francis, Decriminalization of Homosexuality, and the Question of “Sin”
His point, Francis said, was to insist on decriminalization. And of course, as Pope, he upholds the normal teaching about the sinfulness of sexual acts outside marriage (irrespective of orientation), with all the usual caveats that are necessary concerning different circumstances, and occasions when there may be no culpability at all―but chief among all of…
Re-thinking Sacramentality After René Girard: Desire, Sign and the Intelligibility of Crisis
Presentation given at the 2022 meeting of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, held in the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana from 29 June to 2 July 2022. As is well known, René Girard did not write about either the sacraments or ecclesiology. He was much more interested in tracing the ways in which Jewish and Christian texts…
Truth, penitence, and the Gospel of forgiveness: a view from the other side
An initial contribution to a reserved discussion Castellano • Français James Alison’s contribution to a “Chatham House Rules” Catholic – with ecumenical participation – discussion about matters gay. Neither the names of other participants, their contributions, nor the host location are to be shared given the potential for violence against some participants if it were…
Evangelisation, Diversity and Conscience – some brief notes
On diversity and evangelisation: the new “we” which is what Catholicism is all about, the “we” out of every people and nation and tribe and tongue, depends on all of us learning to preach the Gospel in the first person.
Belonging and being Church: what’s Catholicism all about?
Belonging matters more than life or death. It gives us our approval, who we are to be. It is the hardest thing in the world to receive your approval and thus your sense of belonging from “Your Father who is in Heaven” rather than from those who can give you a quick fix.
How to recognize a tantrum
So many Catholics are dodging the tantrum and hewing to Our Lord. The responsum is unlikely to dissuade us from blessing God as we find God blessing us.
Pope Francis backing same-sex unions isn’t a surprise. But it’s still a big deal
There are no major points of doctrine at stake, nothing in the Creeds, putting at risk the shape of our salvation. And there are no real scruples about the apparently hostile Biblical texts since fundamentalist readings are in any case officially disapproved by Church authority.
The dangerousness of the good
The word “Christian” has been sullied. It is no longer the adjective it should be, describing a series of attitudes and ways of being reminiscent of Christ, but a noun which carries with it a fake claim to righteousness, a pretext for freedom from social and legal responsibility, a justification for harsh positions unsubmitted to…
Some musings concerning the phrases “objectively disordered” and “intrinsically disordered (or evil)” in current Church discourse regarding LGBT issues
Unless you can convince gay people that gay sex is automatically wrong because they aren’t really gay, and therefore aren’t acting according to their real nature, you have failed to maintain the prohibition.