Religion

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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At least 231 children in a choir that was run by the former Pope’s brother, have allegedly been beaten and sexually abused for decades. The famous Catholic boys’ choir in Germany was condcuted by Pope Benedict’s elder brother, Georg Ratzinger, from 1964 to 1994 when most of the claimed abuses took place. The journal.ie  reports: The Domspatzen, a 1,000-year-old choir in Regensburg, Bavaria, was dragged into the massive sexual abuse scandal plaguing the Catholic Church in 2010, when allegations of assaults that took place several decades ago went public.

If you missed Ross Douthat’s excellent post “Catholicism at Year Zero,” please make sure to read it now. It does a superlative job of explaining why progressive-vs-orthodox dialogue (such as it is) within Catholicism goes nowhere. There are lessons here for all small-o orthodox Christians. Excerpts:

Did we just cross "the tipping point" for faith in the American dream?

Having fallen consistently from almost 90% particpation in the labor force in 1948 to just 68.5% in 2015, it appears that crossing below the 70% participation rate has pushed American men to their limit of faith in career politicians.