The Little Friar

Saturday is October 18th, the Feast of St Luke the Physician.  It is the Feast Day on which members of my religious order (the Order of St Luke) annually reaffirm our vows.  Among those vows, is one I'm constantly challenged into which I might live -- namely, that "I will live for the Church of Jesus Christ". That's a difficult vow to live into.   It's difficult because I live in America.   America , of course, names that historical nation-state of practices born in blood.  Human  life was sacrificed -- blood was spilt -- for it.  The blood of the solider consecrates and baptizes the flag and the nation.  And because blood trumps everything, because there is no holier and more sacred thing than human life, the flag and the nation is the most sacred thing in the world to an American.  I experience this viscerally whenever I'm asked to stand at an athletic event for the national anthem.  All around me there are grey haired men, many w...

I'm a pacifist.  No surprise there to my regular readers.  But I'm a pacifist only because I'm a Christian.  Following Jesus makes all the difference in the world.  It is the difference of my life.  That said, I'm never all that shocked when being a pacifist is seen as being ungrateful.  The line usually goes like this:  "You've received so much freedom at the hands of the American defense of those freedoms by violence.  How dare you question it?" I'm not surprised because such is the way the world works.   My undergraduate thesis was Christians as the Romans Saw Them:  Textual and Epigraphical Evidences .  In it, I advanced a thesis that's easily enough demonstrated:  The early Christian practice of "holy ingratitude" was the primary reason the Romans hated the Christians.  And it explains the escalating social Roman pressures exerted upon Christians that exploded in persecution.   What is the practice of "holy ingra...