My favourite Advent song. This rendition is particularly beatiful.

I’ll see you lovelies after Christmas.

Labels: christmas, hymn, latin, multimedia

Although I think he was an atheist, Carl Sagan is amazing. Just watch, you’ll thank yourself for it

Wow.

Labels: atheism, multimedia

John Lewis’ Christmas adverts are back on telly. They just keep getting better and better. In fact I think I’m starting to like them as much as certain red trucks…

Check out last years if you’re ever at YouTube with nothing to do.

Labels: christmas, media, multimedia

Every Christmas, my family and I each take pick a person from a list published by Amnesty International and we send them a card. Since Amnesty started to support abortions, Catholics have been discouraged from getting involved with them or their work but their annual greetings card campaign doesn’t directly involve Amnesty. They publish a nice list and you can choose, you don’t need to sign up for Amnesty or give them any money.

Anyway, I found this case and thought it was pretty sobering…

In 2005 Chen Guangcheng, a blind human rights activist and self-trained legal adviser to the poor, fell foul of the authorities in Shandong province after bringing attention to an illegal campaign of forced abortion and sterilisation which affected thousands of women. Before his arrest, Chen Guangcheng had been helping villagers prepare a lawsuit against the local authority responsible.

He is serving a four-year and three-month prison sentence for ‘damaging property’ and ‘disrupting traffic’. His trial in August 2006 was grossly unfair: his lawyer was obstructed from gathering evidence and representing him in court.

In December 2008, after 18 months of separation, Chen Guangcheng’s wife, Yuan Weijing, was allowed to visit him. She said she was shocked to see how ill he was, and is now trying to seek legal help so he can apply for medical parole. She has endured repeated harassment from the police, including physical assault, and has periodically been prevented from seeing her husband in prison.

As a Catholic, I’m sending my card to Chen Guancheng. It’s important to let him know that we’ve got his back. :)

Labels: abortion, christmas

In case you hadn’t noticed, I went away for a while. Now I’m back. Hello!

I decided the site was looking a bit old so I’ve refreshed the theme – it’s pretty close to the original so it’s not too jarring but it’s enough to make it look fresh.

I’ve thrown up some posts, too. Most of these had been saved in my drafts but weren’t finished so I didn’t publish. I’m still not happy with some of them but they’ll do for now I guess.

In case you’re wondering, yes I have changed the dates on the new posts… it’s not your feed reader messing up. This way it looks better from an archive perspective haha.

Anyway, I’m going to try to start blogging regularly once again as before. Things are much better in my life right now, I’m sure I’ll be able to find time.

Labels: pseudo-pages

The motto by which I live my life isn’t one of our saints’ famous dictums, nor is it the prophetic wisdom of a philosopher. Nope, it’s pretty simple actually…

You can’t stop the waves…
         …but you can learn to surf.

I love it. I have no idea where I picked this up but it has consistently guided me through good times and bad. However, I’ve always felt bad that this phrase seems distinctly secular, as a Christian I’m supposed to live a Christ-centred life yet this quote doesn’t even mention God. These past few months have shown me that this assumption was wrong -- Christ has always been at the heart of my life. I want to share my experiences with the online community, it’d be lovely if this helped someone when they’re braving a storm.

Free will

In philosophy I’ve looked at the problem of free will from many angles and there still doesn’t seem to be an answer. Adding God to the equation makes things more difficult; if God is omniscient then how can we have free will? Surely He knows the choices we’re going to make before we make them. If this is so then there’s little point in judgment, it wasn’t our fault that we sinned!

My phrase fits nicely here, think of God as the wave-maker. He makes those huge crashing tidal waves that can seem to destroy everything as well as the gentle splashy ones, the waves never cease and nor does God – he’s always there in our lives. But, you’re not stranded because you can surf. God doesn’t leave us to tread water or get swept away with the current, we have our surfboard and we have a degree of control. We can choose to ‘steer’ (I don’t know the technical surfing term) our surfboard left or right, or perhaps we’ll decide stand up on your board rather than lying down. You can’t choose the situations that affect you but you can choose how you face them.

Your surfboard

I said earlier that God doesn’t leave us stranded because he gives us a surfboard, so you’re probably wondering what this surfboard is? It’s the Eucharist. This became quite real for me recently, things have been pretty tough on both sides of my family and I’ve recently moved to a new university so I’m away from the people I care about. In my first week here I really was not happy, but when I attended mass on Sunday and received the Eucharist everything was better. I was moved almost to tears; it felt like I was getting a big hug from my oldest and dearest friend. I was reminded that despite being overwhelmed by my first week, my head was still above the water and I still had the real presence of Christ in my life. No matter what situation I’m presented with, I’ll have the Eucharist as my surfboard – a constant source of love and closeness to God. My faith in Christ is my base and guides me through rough and calm waters.

It’s a nice image that keeps me going – I hope it can keep you going too. :)

Labels: eucharist

There’s three main criteria if you want to be a priest: i) male, ii) good at theology, iii) Catholic. I am all three of these and you would not believe how many people ask me “oh, so you’re going to be a priest?”

Depending on who I’m dealing with, I’m either really flattered or really irritated by this. One one hand, it’s nice to be told ‘you’d make a good priest’ but on the other, it’s annoying that people think theology is a subject that only leads to the priesthood.

When I tell them I don’t want to be a priest, they usually proceed to give me a list of reasons why it’d be great; free house, free car, free clothes, free money, power, authority, respect, juicy gossip in confession etc. Whilst these would be pretty compelling in any other career, they are the wrong reasons for becoming a priest. If you wanted to be a priest, you’d want to be one regardless of these. I once tried to explain this to someone but was greeted with a blank “why-did-I-ask” stare. It seems that some people don’t understand that religious orders aren’t just like any other job; they’re something sacred.

Labels: religious life

I found this in my drafts, I thought I’d published it already!

When televisions first came out in the UK, there was one broadcaster: the BBC. In 1954, aware of the monopoly the BBC had on broadcasting, Parliament passed the Television Act creating another network: Independent Television (ITV). ITV would operate locally, providing regional news and documentaries funded by advertising. Today, however, ITV shows programming such as “the X-Factor”, “the Xtra Factor”, “WAGS boutique”, “Love Island”, “Celebrity Love Island”, “Loose Women”, “Paris Hilton's British Best Friend”, “CelebAir”, “Katie & Peter”, “Katie & Peter: Stateside” and “Peter Andre: Going It Alone”. It really isn’t worth watching.

So, I was shocked when I found myself watching “The Duchess on the Estate” on ITV1 the other week, a two-part documentary following the Duchess of York’s attempt to fix so-called ‘broken Britain’. Most critics focused on the fact that the problems faced by Britain couldn’t be solved in a two-hour fly-on-the-wall documentary, but what I found remarkable was how the government was often cited as not only the cause but the solution to the problems faced by locals. One man commented…

To be quite honest I got laid off from work last week…something needs to be done because it’s not getting any better and government after government are just leaving it and it’s getting worse and worse and worse and eventually we’ll end up like America won’t we?

And another…

Don't you think the Government wants it to carry on like this?
It keeps everyone happy.

In the first case, yes unemployment is bad at the moment but it’s not like the government’s not doing anything to help. The latter statement is completely absurd, the idea that our government tries to keep the poor impoverished is completely unfounded. In fact, I’d say that the Labour government has done more this decade to help those less well-off than has been done since the establishment of the NHS. Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA), generous student loans, Child Trust Funds, Tax Credits and the Sure Start Maternity Grant all benefit those on low-incomes – compare this to the Poll Tax under Thatcher.

What does this have to do with Catholicism?

This “blame-the-government” culture links with the idea of sin. The UK has become a “surveillance society”, where there are fourteen CCTV cameras for every citizen, at a total of 4.2m cameras. These cameras have aided in many high-profile cases, but they’ve also created a kind of “parent” in the government, someone who tells us off for littering or bunking off work.

In child development, children move from having an heteronymous moral authority to an autonomous one. That is, they move from judging right and wrong based on the praise or punishment of a parent to passing their own judgement as they grow up. With the increase of CCTV, we seem to be going backwards. Now it’s the government’s job to tell us if we’ve done wrong based on what they’ve recorded. We’re losing that sense of personal moral integrity. If we can “pull one over” on the government then good for us.

As a Catholic this is interesting because (generally) we’re bought up with a strong sense of moral integrity. We’re taught that a sin is a sin is a sin, there’s no justifying wrong-doing. There’s no need for a heteronymous authority like the government, we know when we’ve sinned and we feel guilty about it. Even if nobody knows about what we’ve done, we still feel guilty. If anything, God is the authority before which we feel guilty.

Final thoughts

I’m ending this post on a pretty pessimistic note. As I write this I’m aware that this post lacks a real point because it feels pointless to even attempt to talk about overhauling the system we have in place. I am by no means against a welfare state or government intervention, in fact I’m for it. I just think that CCTV’s prolific take-over of our streets has gone too far. I remember reading the other day of government plans to move troublesome families out of their homes and into government-run compounds (temporarily) where they’d be under twenty-four hour supervision. Where has personal moral integrity gone?

In the media: this post is part of a feature discussing how Catholicism links with, or is portrayed by, the media. View other posts in the series…

Labels: britain, commentary, media, review

Seems to me that there are two attitudes concerning sex education…

• Sex education is the teaching of promiscuity, rather than of abstinence.
• Sex education is the teaching of safety in face of promiscuity.

The Roman Catholic Church, in all of her wisdom, goes with the first one because of their ethical teaching on marriage and the family. But, as a product of the Catholic education system myself, I have to question this decision. In the past, I’ve lived a rather sheltered and naive life when it comes to sex, I’m a little embarrassed to say but up until a few years ago I thought it was possible to get an infection/disease from kissing! The very little knowledge of sex that I had came from older friends who, in retrospect, probably weren’t the most reliable sources.

At the time I was discovering new feelings, I had no idea of the dangers of exploring these. Do I not have the right to know what an sexually transmitted infection (STI) is, and how they’re transmitted? I believe you can catch some of them simply by using the same towels as other people so surely it’d make sense to give teenagers a basic overview. It’s not like teaching me that much at school would have meant I would have gone out and had sex with the nearest girl. I mean, I don’t smoke but I know all about lung cancer and other smoking-related diseases. And, you can develop lung cancer without smoking. In the same way, you can know about STIs without having sex, and you can catch some of them without it as well!

It gets a little tricky when moving into prevention of STIs. In secular schools, they’re taught how to put a condom on a banana but it’s not like that at Catholic schools since we consider condoms to be intrinsically evil. Whilst personally I would have liked to have been taught this, just out of curiosity more than anything (returning to the smoking analogy, I know how to smoke a cigarette but I choose not to), I do think it’s right that the church doesn’t teach this. Despite the fact that not doing so may encourage people to look on the Internet or ask for advice from an unreliable source, it’s asking too much – educating about STIs is one thing, but telling kids how to use condoms is another. Consider the USA, where you can shoot human-shaped targets at a firing range but are told not to shoot people – 65% of homicides in the US are committed using a firearm.

I’m not actually sure how to end this post, it doesn’t feel finished but I don’t have anything further to add. I guess I should affirm that I do agree with the church’s stance towards condoms (although I refuse to disclose my personal fidelity to this online for obvious reasons) and I’m not calling that into question, but I do think that basic education about STIs wouldn’t necessarily be the worst thing in a world as promiscuous as ours.

Labels: commentary, contraceptives, ethics

Remember before when I blogged about the Catholic Church not advertising? Well, it seems a Catholic organisation out there called “Catholics Come Home” agrees and has started producing some very nice videos. The following is amazing, it really makes me proud to be a Catholic.

I particularly love the line “For centuries we have prayed for you, and our world, every hour of every day” – I’ve never thought about it but as a collective body the Catholic Church is locked in prayer with God. There are so many of us that at any one point we (as an institution) are praying, which is a really lovely thought.

In the media: this post is part of a feature discussing how Catholicism links with, or is portrayed by, the media. View other posts in the series…