To Think God as Love

One thing should perhaps be stressed about caritas. It is realistic. To love is to will the good of the other as other. To will, not what you wish for the other, nor what the other wishes, but the real good—which neither of you may yet recognize. Love is not sentimental, nor restful in illusions, [...]

My reflections on Novak’s response to Benedict’s encyclical have upset me, and I can’t quite put my thoughts to rest. Why is it, I wonder, that we don’t really believe that the way of the cross is practical enough? Why is it that we don’t believe speaking and living the truth in love is enough? [...]

Recently, Benedict published his latest encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate”, which as someone has said is the first social encyclical of the 21st century. Last week, the Catholic neo-conversative Michael Novak offered a response at First Things.  To put it bluntly, Novak’s position stunned me. You should read it in its entirety, but here are excerpts [...]

Faith, engendered by and engendering Christ’s kenotic love, grasps as presence what hope knows as absence. What is for faith already present is for hope still to come. These realities are not in competition with one another; even if they stand in tension, they do not contradict. They are simply the two necessary forms of [...]

I’ve recently come upon the ideas and work of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, in part due to poserorprophet. Also recently, I heard Zizek’s brief but brilliant commentary on Alfonso Cuaron’s film, Children of Men. My interest piqued, I sought out some of Zizek’s writing – he is deliriously prolific, it turns out – and [...]