Giddy

Recently my most active social media account has been Twitter.  Please follow me here.

Usually, I'll admit, it's a bunch of retweets and funny/Catholic stuff.  I tweet on the edges of "Catholic Twitter" and its subgroups "weird Catholic Twitter" and "Pierogi Twitter" (running afoul of this when I tweeted about Cornish pasties. I'll never make that mistake again!)

All of this to say:  I don't make a big splash on Twitter.

Until earlier today when I retweeted some from Princeton professor Robert George about religious freedom.  Then this happened:

WOOT WOOT!  That' right, folks.  He responded.  My heart is a-flutter.

He's also right.  Religious freedom is for everybody, and Christians should defend it for others as well as themselves.  The original tweet involved Muslims being banned from a public pool here in the United States.  This should not happen, ever, based on religion. Muslim, Sikh, Catholic, atheist, etc--everybody has the right to religious freedom.

That's one of the reasons why one of my favorite St. John Paul II quotes comes from Redemptoris Missio #39: "The Church proposes, she imposes nothing."  In my pre-convert days I scoffed at that very line, and now it's one of my most favorite Catholic things.  Funny what religious freedom can do... 

TFW Rogue One Reminds You of Silence

TFW--That Feel When...

No, really, when watching Rogue One with my kids recently I recognized a connection with Silence:

Galen Erso and Father Rodrigues face the same dilemma:











How do you resist silently?

Answer:  They respond differently.  Galen actually does something.  Depending on the book or the movie, Rodrigues does little or nothing.  But at the moment of decision, they face the same demoralizing, annihilating reality:  they can resist immediately and surely suffer, or they can submit outwardly and seek another avenue of resistance.  

Agonizing Beauty

Reflections on Scorese's Silence, part I
Warning:  Spoilers follow.

This will be the first of two posts on Martin Scorcese's Silence, a movie long-in-the-making version of Shusaku Endo's 1966 novel.  The second post will appear once I see the movie.  So what follows is a discussion of the novel and what some critics have made of the movie.  Here is a good overview of the movie and its content.

First, as expected from a talented director like Scorcese, the movie's visuals are stunning. After extensive success in Japan, Christianity found itself ruthlessly outlawed and persecuted in the seventeenth century. The movie follows two young Jesuit missionary priests who, hearing that their mentor has apostostasized, travel to Japan to confirm the rumors. 

Part of the shoguns' torture juxtaposed excruciating pain with the simplest, and pain-free, gesture. All arrested Christians were given the opportunity to apostasize by stepping barefoot on an image of Jesus (hence the fumie, literally "the stepping-on image").

source:  2011 blog post

Come on--what could be easier than that?