Article: The Editors of Commonweal on the Vatican s New 2024 Declaration (REVIEW ESSAY) - The Editors of the liberal lay Catholic magazine Commonweal published Dignity and Gender: Evaluating Dignitas Infinita on April 18, 2024. In the present essay, I continue my recent reflections in my OEN articles on the Vatican s new 2024 Declaration of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith titled Dignitas Infiniti, which was released on April 8, 2024.
Article: David Brooks Accessible New 2023 Book (REVIEW ESSAY) - Pope Francis (born in 1936), the first Jesuit pope, has urged people, not just practicing Catholics, to engage in encounter and dialogue. Those people who respond positively to his urging to engage in encounter and dialogue might find David Brooks accessible new 2023 book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (Random House) informative and instructive and encouraging.
Article: Daniel P. Horan, O.F.M., on Ecophobia (REVIEW ESSAY) - Today I sing of Father Daniel P. Horan s superb column titled Considering the spiritual roots of ecophobia amid climate change (dated September 21, 2023) at the website of the National Catholic Reporter.
Article: Walter J. Ong versus Pope Francis (REVIEW ESSAY) - In recently published remarks, Pope Francis characterizes conservative anti-Francis American Catholics as being backward-looking not forward-looking as he sees himself. But he himself is not sufficiently backward-looking regarding the Doctrine of Discovery. The American Jesuit scholar Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) suggests that we need to be both backward-looking and forward-looking.
Article: The Roman Catholic Church as a Cultural Empire (REVIEW ESSAY) - As a follow up to my recent OEN article Robert P. Jones on the Doctrine of Discovery (dated September 15, 2023), I now want to discuss further his new 2023 book The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: And the Path to a Shared American Future (Simon & Schuster) and certain other related works concerning the Roman Catholic Church.