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If. Chapter 6 of Pope Francis’ encyclical Fratelli Tutti is on “Dialogue and Friendship in Society.” It’s 10-11 pages, and while Chapter 2’s meditation on The Good Samaritan is the real heart of this work, for just a snapshot of what this pope is about, this short chapter is a good Cliff’s Notes. (For those…
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It’s a feature, not a bug. This is personal on a couple of levels, even for this outlet. My daughter has, for the most part, two career goals: to work for Walt Disney Imagineering as an Imagineer, creating future theme parks, and to be an entertainer at a Disney theme park. As you might have…
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You know, Jesus didn’t just “pretend die.” I think there’s a natural strand in us that wants a God who always wins. That’s kind of the deal, right? If God is really in control, all-powerful and way beyond anything we can imagine as good, true, beautiful, then how can God ever suffer? How can God…
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Nothing unites like a common enemy. One of the things that Pope Francis points out in Fratelli Tutti is that we can’t really encounter another in a fruitful way (both as individuals and on a broader social or national scale) unless we know and love who WE are. For me to appreciate what is cool…
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I’m not a demographer or social scientist or anything like that, but if I were, I would try to get a grant for a longitudinal study of people born between 1998-2004 or so. Full disclosure: my daughter is in this mini-generational cohort and my wife teaches college students who are also in this cohort. But…
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Where the heck is Matt? Chapter 4 of Fratelli Tutti dives deeper into the issue of immigration and, more broadly, into the balance between being rooted in who you are and being fully open to someone who is different from you. This balance is one that Pope Francis recognizes as one we face as individuals,…
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Who are we a part of, and who do we make ourselves apart from? Who do we treat as family, and who do we treat as a vending machine? I’m always struck by the way we think of people that we’re technically a part of as something that we’re apart from. Here’s what I mean. …
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How bad are we? How good can we be? Those are the sorts of questions we don’t usually ask ourselves when we talk about big issues like politics and economics, but what we think about those things usually boils down in part to what our answers to those basic questions are. We might have better…
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Maybe sometimes the real risk is losing the trees for the forest. This week I stumbled into an essay by David Brooks in The Atlantic about the “moral convulsion” we’re going through. It’s a pretty depressing read; it’s not as long as a papal encyclical, it just feels that way. But as is always true…
