June 2019

In our post-Christian culture, the gospel is no longer compelling, even in supposedly religious rural areas. The capitalistic media culture in which we live—in which everything from what’s supposed to be hard news to hard-core pornography is packaged as entertainment for the sake of profit—affects Manhattan, NYC, as well as Medora, ND, thanks to the technology of the Internet, accessed through devices that fit in farm kids’ pockets.

Whenever we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we acknowledge God’s name as “[h]allowed” (Matt 6:9)—that is, as holy or sanctified. But what do we mean by this? Do we mean what Jesus meant?

The Lord’s Prayer is like a marathon course whose last mile winds up a steep hill. Or it’s like a Himalayan mountain whose ultimate peak crowns a sheer, vertical rock face. We approach the end of the Our Father, and still we face the petition that has proven a stumbling block to many great minds in Christian history.

By becoming man, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity was able to teach us perfect virtue not only through a law but also through the example of His human words and actions, especially in His Paschal mystery.

Our culture is at a very unfortunate impasse between the Left and the Right, between Liberals and Conservatives, and it affects Catholics. To boil it down, the Left focuses primarily on ecology, and the Right focuses primarily on morality. This is not a division of labor, but an ongoing battle of misunderstanding, suspicion, and hostility.

The France that was built over the course of the thirteenth century was, as the popes referred to it, a “most Christian kingdom.” This does not mean that it had a Christian ideology or that Christianity provided the language and imagery through which the “nation” or the “State” was built.

If we have become increasingly abstracted from nature, both in our daily screen-saturated life and in the very science of biology, then it would seem very likely that we’ve become similarly abstracted from human nature. Immersed in our virtual world, we have lost our own nature and have thereby become increasingly dehumanized.

Our economy and culture have become based upon screens. This takes its toll on our health. Because we’ve shifted to a screen-based culture, more and more of us make our living sitting for long, long hours staring bleary-eyed at screens. The result: chronic headaches, backaches, obesity, and worse.

Anyone who claims that they are “spiritual, but not religious” is like the one who claims to be hungry but never eats. Eating is the natural activity that satisfies the hungry; religion is the natural activity that satisfies the spiritual. If you are truly immune from any religious practices, then you may have a remarkably imaginative interior life, but you are not spiritual.