Month: April 2012

Charleston, South Carolina, 9.59 am

A culture of public confession may be a cause:

Mea culpas seem to have multiplied exponentially in the age of modern media at the same time that the practice of private sacramental confession has declined. And as confession as become more common and more public, it also seems to have become more trivial. Goethe blamed the rise of Protestantism for the decline of sacramental confession; the historian Oswald Spengler agreed, and thought it was inevitable that after the Reformation the confessional impulse should find an outlet in the arts. He predicted that, in the absence of a confessor, confessions would tend to become “unbounded.” And so they have. Exit Fr. Finn from the confessional; enter Oprah Winfrey, Dr. Phil, the world.

Eric Cohen reviews War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity by Stanley Hauerwas:

For Hauerwas, there is no such thing as a just war, since Christ is the embodiment of justice, and the revelation of Christ is that men should not and need not kill the other we are called to love. He believes the tragic necessity of war is an illusion. It is the denial of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice, which we have replaced with the blood sacrifices of modern war. The only answer—for him, the only Christian answer—is to "sacrifice the sacrifices of war" and to see the truth that the new reign of peace has already come. 

Cohen disagrees:

[W]hile it may be that, in the end, only God can save us from ourselves, we should bear the burdens of trying to protect history—and the sweetness of life that can exist within it—from those who would make it a graveyard of the innocent. 

(Photo: U.S. military personnel bow their heads in prayer during a casing ceremony where the United States Forces- Iraq flag was retired signifying the departure of United States troops from Iraq at the former Sather Air Base on December 15, 2011 in Baghdad, Iraq. By Mario Tama/Getty Images)

How transcendence opens up a world of possibility:

Various studies have shown that children are primed to believe in religion. Justin L. Barrett thinks we shouldn't dismiss such beliefs as childish:

[A]dults generally do believe in gods. That such belief begins in childhood and typically endures into adulthood places it in the same class as believing in the permanence of solid objects, the continuity of time, the predictability of natural laws, the fact that causes precede effects, that people have minds, that their mothers love them and numerous others. If believing in gods is being childish in the same respect as holding these sorts of beliefs, then belief in gods is in good company.