“Thy nativity, O Christ our God,
has shown to the world the light of wisdom;
for by it, those who worshipped the stars
were taught by a star to adore Thee
the Sun of Righteousness,
and to know Thee, the Orient from on high.
O Lord, glory to Thee.”— the Nativity Troparion (hymn) of the Orthodox Church
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A reader writes about the recent controversy at the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship gathering at Urbana (see here and here for background):
Monsignor Charles Pope writes that the Traditional Latin Mass (which he supports) is a boutique phenomenon among American Catholics, and looks likely to stay that way:
Some years ago (as far back at the early 1980s) we who love the Traditional Latin Mass often said (or it heard said) that if we would just return to the beautiful Latin Mass our churches would again be filled.
Sometimes it seems that this is John Rawls’ world, we’re just living in it: conducting our political and social debates as though we were behind a veil of ignorance, as though we can only trust the judgments made in perfect abstraction from any actual lived contexts. The debate about the future of Larycia Hawkins at Wheaton College is a classic example, where a complex, embodied, richly personal situation gets translated into the terms of disembodied theological debate.
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