Michael Martin's Blog, page 20

The Invisible Church

The tragedy of the McCarrick Scandal—perhaps even greater than the reprehensible evidence of systematized abuse and the complicity if not indifference of a number of bishops and priests over his duplicitousness, not to mention their all-too-apparent hypocrisy—is that it calls the ontology of the Catholic Church itself, the Mother Church of all Christian denominations, into question. As I told a theologian friend, “It’s as if the Church is not the Church.” This, in fact, may be the question ma...

Sophia and the Technological Colonization of Reality

The movements of celestial bodies, the sprouting of life from a seed, the intricate social structures and behaviors of a bee colony, the wondrous unfoldment of gestation—all reveal a wisdom that speaks to more than the randomness of cosmic and evolutionary accidents. Likewise, the unmistakable beauty of the natural world, its colors and forms, discloses an inherent goodness in Creation. But all of these would be for nothing were there not beings to receive and contemplate them. Sophia is the...

Educational Atrophy: The Idea of a "Catholic Education"

Educational reform movements are as common as toadstools after a storm. In most cases, they are nearly as ephemeral. Unless, that is, the government gets involved: in which case they are as resilient and as toxic as plutonium. And the government always gets involved. It is no wonder, then, to find Ivan Illich argue that “The escalation of schools is as destructive as the escalation of weapons but less visibly so.”[1] When it comes to education, the hand that rocks the cradle is also the hand...

Nobody Wants the Messiah to Come: Art and Eschatology

Christendom died a long time ago. The Oxford Movement, the Gothic Revival, and Traditionalism all failed to restore the golden age when Christ was King (a title only used ironically in the Gospels but embraced with fervor during the too long centuries of Christianity’s flirtation with political power). More recently, in its spectacular failure, “The New Evangelization” has proved itself neither new nor evangelization. Instead, it simply appropriated the modes and attitudes of the master cultu...

Goethe and the Possibility of a Catholic Science

We live in times charged by the political. This is true in the arts and sciences no less than economics and the sphere of rights. It is also a quality that permeates religion. This may be due to what seems to be a deeply held human need to form allegiances, to belong, to find protection from a hostile environment. As Wilhelm Reich observed, the inhabitants of that most hostile of environments, the desert, “armor” themselves (or are armored by evolutionary processes) and their forms—as in liza...