Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 32

How Monks Helped Invent Sign Language

Deacon Steven Greydanus alerted me to this interesting piece in National Geographic. Dom Pedro Ponce de León, “the first teacher for the deaf,” was a 16th-century Spanish Benedictine who hit upon the idea of teaching the deaf to communicate using a system of hand gestures similar to ones used by his fellow monks during periods […]

Heartwarming stories

I’m ambivalent about a lot of heartwarming stories. No. Not the one that read “High school junior makes a dress from his prom date because she couldn’t afford her dream gown“. Grisly as that sounds, it was just a typo. He didn’t really carve up his date and turn her into a dress as punishment […]

A reader struggles with scruples about remote material cooperation with evil

The reader writes: I’m sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if you could shed some more light on the matter boycotting businesses and enterprises that in some way support something evil – and yup, that’s spurred by the recent developments in Georgia. I tried to find a conclusion on my own and, well, […]

A reader has a question about the notion of “penal substitutionary atonement”

He writes: I just read your article “Taking apart the false theory of penal substitutionary atonement” Isn’t this a direct contradiction of the teaching of the Catholic Church from the Catechism? The Catechism states the following: Jesus substitutes his obedience for our disobedience 615 “For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by […]

Simcha Fisher on Catholic and Enjoying It! tonight!

Catholic and Enjoying It will be on the air live at 7 PM Pacific (10 PM Eastern) every Monday night.  We will be discussing life, the universe, and everything from a Catholic perspective and giving ourselves up to general jollification for the hour.  You can listen here and you can call into the show at 1-866-333-6279 […]

A non-Catholic reader struggles with scandal in the Church

They write: Mr.Shea, I want to start by saying the I appreciate your writings, especially on poverty. I was coming to the conclusion that American churches alignment with Ayn Randian economics was related to “faith alone”/antinomian theology, which claims that the Christian life ought to require no sacrifice, and you expressed these thoughts very well […]

Being as How It’s Around Graduation Time…

…being as how I enjoyed Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens and really enjoyed his response to some white supremacist snowflake who could not cope with a depiction of Adam and Eve being black… You know, it’s when people who proclaim themselves as “white supremacists” turn off Good Omens after the first few minutes, and then come […]

The Narcissist Hijack

When we think of ugly and unpopular social sins, we usually think of people who embody the utter worst, compare ourselves to that, and conclude that we are fine since we are not the utter worst. So the person who routinely starts sentences with “I’m not a racist, but…” and delivers himself of some racist […]

Abortion Defenses Hoist on Their Own Petard

Dear Abortion Supporters: When you spend decades repeating the mantra “blob of tissue” and somebody with some science shows up to point out you are full of crap, you should face the fact that you made a mistake relying on woolly rhetoric instead of science. I have watched for years as abortion supporters have offered […]

On the Canonization of Anna Kolaserova and the concept of a “martyr for purity”

News item from last summer that just washed up in my feed: OXFORD, England – A 16-year-old peasant girl will be beatified as a martyr in Slovakia, seven decades after she was shot in front of her family for resisting rape by a drunken Soviet soldier. Anna Kolaserova “embodies the faithful layperson living in their […]