The Little Friar

" What good will it do you to be able to talk profoundly about the Trinity, if you be wanting in humility, and so displease the Trinity?  It is certain that learned speeches do not make a man holy and just; it is a virtuous life that makes him dear to God.  I would rather feel sorrow for my sins than be able to define it.  If you knew the whole Bible by heart, and all that philosophers have said, what use would it all be to you without the love of God and grace?" -- Thomas a Kempis, Imitation of Christ , 1.3

Contrary to popular thinking, I struggle to be patient.   Being graceful  doesn't come easy for me.  Those are practices of the Christian virtues that have taken time -- a long time -- to be practices in my life.  I try, but I fail as often as I succeed.  That's because, as virtues, being patient and graceful take time .  And they take work .  The virtuous life, as Aristotle and Aquinas knew, isn't for men (or women) who don't have courage -- the determination to keep at it, despite the bumps in the road.  I'm thinking about patience today, because I've been sick for over a week.  Kendra and I have also been between that proverbial economic "rock and a hard place".  Those things take patience. Everyday life takes patience.  But most importantly being Christian takes patience.    Then I begin thinking of the parable Jesus tells in Matthew 13.24-30.  It's called the "Parable of the Wheat and Weeds".  I call it the ...

As a minister and college prof, I've often been asked advice on drinking.   And I sometimes am put in a tough position in responding.  For example, A few  years ago I was on a panel discussing "good decisions" out in front of Spring Break.  Alcohol was a major topic.  At the time, according to the Student Handbook, no student, even those of legal drinking age, was allowed to drink alcohol, on or off campus.  Obviously, there was no way to enforce this policy.  Yet we knew that plenty of students would be drinking over Spring Break.  Hence the need for the panel.  But how were we to address this reality?  Because if we openly admitted the reality of students' drinking this admission would seem to condone violating the code of conduct in the Student Handbook.  That is, if you said, "Hey, we know many of you are going to drink, so if you do here's some advice ..." you would be seen as encouraging rule-breaking, or at least going easy o...

As a parish priest and as a college professor on Christian campuses, I'm often asked my opinion as to if "behavior X" is or is not a sin.  Inquiring minds want to know.  And the interest is usually more than philosophical. There have been times -- not as many as you might imagine -- that the "is a sin/isn't a sin" binary judgment is the best way I've found to answer a question.  More often than not, though, life is so complex and the Christian ethical witness is so diverse that -- in so many of those moments -- it's a struggle to give a definitive answer.  In those times -- which, again, is often -- I find the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament to be a better framing than the Protestant worry about escaping the wrath of an angry God . Specifically, some things might not be sinful, but they can be decidedly stupid .  Some things don't make you a bad person, but they can mark you as foolish.  And some things aren't as immoral as they are...

Over the past few weeks, Americans have been faced with a dialogue about race yet again.  What's more, we're missing the opportunity to reflect on the ways in which our very real racism is having very real effects on our selves and our culture. And for Christians I blame the sin of self-deception. The Bible clearly warns against self-deception.  Take, for example: The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17.9). The pride of your heart has deceived you, you who live in the clefts of the rocks and make your home on the heights, you who say to yourself, 'Who can bring me down to the ground?' (Obadiah 1.3). If anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself (Galatians 6.3).  In the past, warnings about self-deception were everywhere.  Nowadays, though, it's faded from view -- particularly in our Christian communities. Christians worry about a great many vices but we rarely warn against self-...

I'm not a supporter of Barack Obama for any number of reasons.  Not least of which is his support of Reinhold Niebuhr .  I'm a Christian pacifist, and I think being a pacifist is made possible only because I'm a follower of Jesus Christ.  Being a follower of Jesus Christ, I think, is the only cure for the realism that pervades our culture's thinking about violence and war. Realism is a political theory that views politics as a realm shorn of all moral and ethical constraints. Sometimes called "power politics", a realist politics is not motivated by concerns for the common good or virtue, but rather by self-interest, necessity, and most of all, maximization of power.   According to realism, politics is seen as limited only by power constraints, not by ethical constraints about what may or may not be just.  Realism can be summed up as "they that have odds of power exact as much as they can, and the weak yield to such conditions as they can get...