Honestly this is really fair in a constructive way. Like… we can be curious. Complication might be a obfuscation, but digging deeper might be helpful, even if it’s to improve how we teach things.

help. lol.

My family really struggles with this. Partly… they’re obstinate. I get it (same). It REALLY makes me think hard about our structures of catechesis. Cuz the US bishops (minus, you know, at least one) are sticking to the overt, normal doctrines of the church here. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

I’ve been so insanely busy. Not even in a special way. Nobody is happy in Spring semester as a regular thing, everyone is more tired. But I am the most tired, obviously. Whatever your problem is… I don’t have a specific one at all, but I’m more tired than you.

Was lucky enough to find this at a local comic shop today. Can’t wait to read it. Thanks to @catholickungfu.bsky.social for introducing me to this series.

Something I appreciate about Vatican officials is that you can often corner them as pastors into different kinds of compassion. They’re usually in “doctrines and norms” mode, their job, but you can ask them about distressing things and they’ll prioritize treating the distress. A pastor thing.

Found this.

Just imagining kissing the cross in Broadview on Good Friday. It's good. Just a lot to consider.

Evil multiverse Hans Urs von Balthasar.

SUPERGIRL youtu.be/s1-pfiVMKAs?...

I think at its most positive register, the Vatican teaching wants to (1) consider the body as something given by God, like the rest of existence, (2) include gender as an element of the given. But this becomes complicated extremely quickly (which, imho, isn’t bad, just hard).

I’ve only glanced over it but I’m reading this today. (in Spanish because I’m better at it than Italian) www.vatican.va/roman_curia/...

Not to infer that a niche microblog largely filled with anxious hall monitors doesn't have its finger on the pulse, but they realize they live in *America* right

I feel like Cerebro, the podcast, manages to pull off a miracle? It’s fan culture (X-Men), and it definitely is about relating to the X-Men from an (American) queer perspective. And they’re all so thoughtful that it doesn’t really come off as anything but playful and interested engagement with texts

I adore how much Blaise Pascal fucking *hates* imagination. "It is that deceitful part in man, that mistress of error and falsity, the more deceptive that she is not always so...[.] [S]he gives no sign of her nature, impressing the same character on the true and the false."

I mean… at least it’s vaguely consoling, if conservative Catholics are essential in dismantling the American democracy, I’ll have gone down bitching about it the whole way. And I’m one of them. Proof, in a tiny way, that it’s not the dead white men forcing the living ones to be assholes.

We’re mad at Notre Dame about abortion but not for incubating this post-liberal stuff.

Helpful ideological summary of one of the most prominent Catholics in the US right now. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/o...

Oops it’s the daughter of Saul. She makes fun of David for dancing. David gives an ironic counter, admitting that he IS embarrassing, thank you. Netflix drama behavior.

Aucun sociologue, anthropologue ou autre créature bizarroïde apparentée n'a d'idées à ce sujet?

After DOJ admitted 17 violations of no-transfer orders (2 every 3 weeks) in DNJ, Judge Farbiarz orders local ICE director to sign affidavit acknowledging each future order. Implies that new violations will constitute criminal contempt on a “willful blindness” theory. 1/3

You can't throw God a surprise party.

You can always ask the beautiful if you are being detained or are free to go. Know your rights.

Cc: @catholickungfu.bsky.social @deanast.bsky.social

aesthetic arrest.

Madonna of the Magnificat, 1483. Truly splendid in every way. By Sandro Botticelli, whose birthday was today.

One of the bigger problems with American hegemony is how morally childish Americans are. I struggle with this with Trump voters I know. They want their right, which they exercised, to be good to have used that way. But maybe they did a monstrous thing with their right.

I want them to snap their fingers and dance around like it’s a scene in West Side Story.

So here's a fun thing: - to be "beautiful," in Balthasar's usage, a thing has to have "form"; Balthasar often uses the synonym morphē (shape), which underlines that "form" is a quality of material objects. - in Christianity, the divine nature is *not* material.

I have never seen this meme. I am delighted.

…because each human person is of inexhaustible worth, every person warned away by whistles and kept alive through food deliveries and underground midwives and released through the exhaustive labor of lawyers and activists is an inexhaustible victory, that counts and will never stop counting.

She was! And said so repeatedly! For decades! Like many famous modern Catholics, near the end of her life she was less able to fully own being Catholic or religious, but also never really disowned Catholicism. I think Cornel West would point out to people, “Did you know she’s Catholic?”

I often has this thought when Joan Rogers would ask that people not think her husband Fred was a saint, where saint meant “morally pristine person,” but I always wanted to ask “is that what a saint is?”

I guess I understand the request not to “make a saint” of Toni Morrison. Depends on what a saint is, though, I think. And — since Morrison was Catholic — I think letting Catholic literary self-picture remain without her as a genuine force is also bad. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/m...

ATTN: The Ghost of Foucault is my new band name, I called it, now to spend 3-5 years learning how to play an instrument

It’s interesting how the ghost of Foucault kinda lives underneath the dream that exposing things as exercises of power invalidates the meaning that constrains acts. It’s not really Foucault. It’s his ghost. And the ghost is grad school years wearing an old timey mustache, disguised as Foucault.

I've been trying to convince colleagues that they can engage with the Catholic mission at SLU without being Catholic or marched out in the streets for disagreeing with Catholicism. I guess it's selfish to feel this does not help, but dammit, it doesn't. www.pillarcatholic.com/p/notre-dame...

My mentor John O’Malley,SJ, (of blessed memory) used to say that the university was the only institution in the West that had never been reformed

Every new story is worse and worse, guys. Worse and worse. apnews.com/article/chil...

I'm not a political scientist, but... y'all out here on the Internet are fucking wild and *also* not political scientists. God bless.

In have long thought that the image of the dove in St. Peter’s is a powerful sign that no matter how hard we try to foul up the church (and we have tried), the Holy Spirit will as l always be present if only we trust.

I feel this. She gets it.

I’ve read a lot of hot takes on here about a clearly very awful bill in Congress but I also have almost zero capacity to guess which bills are successful and which bills are for the theatre of posing bills. Should I be alarmed, not alarmed? People being upset on the Internet is not an answer.

Wrote a bit in reply to this that might interest a few of you legislative process sickos out there

I wish these clowns would reject that specifically twentieth-century achievement called “the internet”, log off, and go and do the following productive things: pray, help poor and other vulnerable people, read books, think, work, learn other languages, and chat with other people who do such things.

More and more I feel that theologians aren’t allowed to have our stupid grudges anymore until we realize that Online Catholicism — and and increasingly prominent cadre of scholars — has its own special industry devoted to rejecting all of the 20th century’s achievements.

My tendency toward affectionate irreverence definitely does not always work out for me. Whatever the topic, honestly. But it’s so fun to be affectionately irreverent toward basically everything…

my entire life I felt a gradual sense of progress & change but I never felt like I was in ‘the future’, but post like 2020 I 100% do feel like that like a major news story right now is the company that thinks it’s product is sentient refusing to turn it into a killbot, that’s Future News

On that note if someone asks me for a "Catholic video game" I'm gonna recommend Persona 3. Only half-joking.