@chezami
Mark Shea, Author of THE CHURCH'S BEST-KEPT SECRET: A A PRIMER ON CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING https://markpshea.com/product/the-churchs-best-kept-secret-a-primer-on-catholic-social-teaching/. Blogger at https://markpshea.com. .
The food supply for the orphans that Mercy for Life is helping has been chaotic this week. Consequently, they need $480 to cover both this week's and next week's food. The children run out of food this Monday. Please help this urgent need today! www.paypal.com/paypalme/Mer...
The Work of Mercy: Bury the Dead, Part 2
The ambiguity of our position as fallen creatures is on full display in how we treat the dead. In the Old Testament, burying the dead is as much a pious work of mercy as it is in the Christian tradition. But as in the Christian tradition, it is also…
The Work of Mercy: Bury the Dead, Part 1
“The body,” I was taught growing up, “is just the shoebox for the soul.What matters are the shoes, not the box. So when it’s time to go to heaven, we throw the box away.” Along with this good solid dose of gnostic thinking came a certain aesthetic that…
The Work of Mercy: Ransom the Captive, Part 2
Not surprisingly, the way Jesus described his mission was precisely in terms of slavery and ransom for the captive. It is worth quoting the passage in full, for it reveals how radical Jesus’ approach to the issues of power and slavery were: And James…
The Work of Mercy: Ransom the Captive, Part 1
It’s been a while since the Crusades. As a general rule, when our president goes abroad, he does not get waylaid and find himself in the hands of brigands who send back to the vice president wax-sealed notes saying, “Give us forty thousand ducats and…
The Work of Mercy: Visit the Sick, Part 2
The conviction that Christ makes clean what was unclean animates the Christian tradition and urges on us the duty to visit the sick. This conviction also links, in the Catholic tradition, two sacraments in particular as the “sacraments of healing”:…
The Work of Mercy: Visit the Sick, Part 1
We moderns can be awfully smug when it comes to Old Testament taboos. Many people assume such taboos were nothing but superstitious, prescientific attempts to avoid disease—as though the Israelites meant to ask, “How do I avoid trichinosis?” but kept…
The Work of Mercy: Harbor the Harborless, Part 2
Yet we are commanded to harbor the harborless. We can become personally involved, and we can supply financial support. For instance, a small non-denominational church in Seattle started sponsoring refugees in the 1980s. I remember it well because it…
Mercy for Life needs $470 for next week's food and medical costs. Please help this urgent need today! www.paypal.com/paypalme/Mer...
The Work of Mercy: Harbor the Harborless, Part 1
One of the most exasperating bits of exegetical trendiness to afflict First World Catholics for the past thirty years or so has been the endless recirculation, like that of a bad penny, of the “True Meaning of the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes”…
The Work of Mercy: Clothe the Naked, Part 2
Other considerations enter in too. On the one hand, clothes symbolize our external lives—the junk that doesn’t matter in the end. So Jesus tells us that the body is more than clothes (see Luke 12:23). But on the other hand, clothes also express the heart…
The Work of Mercy: Clothe the Naked, Part 1
Nake is an extinct English verb meaning “to strip clothes off.” To be “naked” is therefore to be in a state of having had your clothes stripped off. Why does this bit of pedantry matter? Because it speaks volumes about what our ancestors regarded as the…
The Work of Mercy: Give Drink to the Thirsty, Part 2
It is worth noting that when the early Christians thought about thirst—and especially the thirst of “the least of these my brethren” ––there was one thing they could readily connect these sayings to: After this Jesus, knowing that all was now…
The Work of Mercy: Give Drink to the Thirsty, Part 1
A religion that practices infant baptism is a religion that doesn’t have very rigorous membership requirements. No Herculean feats necessary to prove your mettle. No ritual bath in bull’s blood. No gashing yourself with knives or holding your…
The Work of Mercy: Feed the Hungry, Part 2
The solution to corrupt systems in developing countries is not to tell the poor person to kill his child so that we rich Westerners can have carbon credits. It is to demand that the rich Westerner, Third World tyrant, or exploitative corporate system give…
The Work of Mercy: Feed the Hungry, Part 1
Norman Borlaug is not the sort of name you think of when it comes to world-historical heroism. A Norwegian Lutheran son of Iowa, he grew up on the prairie, went to college during the Depression, studied the thoroughly unglamorous subject of agriculture,…
Introduction to the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy, Part 2
Now, as Catholics, we must note that the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats is not the only thing Jesus has to say about salvation. So we mustn’t pretend the parable is fatal to the sacramental vision. He who gives us the parable…
Introduction to the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy, Part 1
Jesus told the Parable of the Sheep and Goats. This does not seem like a news flash until we turn away from observing the obvious and begin to talk about soteriology, a three-dollar word for that branch of Christian theology…
Hey! It’s Lent! So let’s learn about the Works of Mercy!
Back in the day, I wrote this here book here called THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here). It was published in 2011 and was my first foray…
Three Points on Health Care
Here is a perennial "gotcha" from the MAGA orc playbook: The answer is threefold and therefore too complex for the MAGA mind to comprehend. But I will share it with people not blinded by MAGA ideology and therefore capable of thinking: 1: They aren't getting free health…
A conversation with a reader whose adult kids are MAGA
She writes: Mark, I need some advice/help. I have daughters who are lovely women but they are excoriating me over voting for Harris, even now. Even after all the hatred and active undermining the pro life movement that Trump/Vance do. I sent…
Seeing Things as They Are vs. Seeing Things as You Are
Jesus famously teaches his disciples that they are to love, not merely their neighbor, but even their enemies (Matthew 5:43) and uses a curious figure to illustrate a key principle in carrying out that command: “The eye is the lamp of the…
The biggest tell in the MAGA rhetorical toolkit…
...is that they always always always always always always reach for the language of rape and rapists to express themselves. Perhaps the only thing the "pro-life" MAGA cult loves as much is to reach for the language of mockery of the disabled to…
Chatting with an Exvangelical friend about women’s ordination
I have a friend who is an old figure in American Evangelicalism who, with great integrity and at considerable cost to himself, has walked away from the MAGA Evangelical freak show in favor of being a disciple of Jesus. He is very open…
A little essay on the Baptism of Jesus
I think it’s worth taking a look at the meaning of this strange incident (surely one of several in the gospel that show the historicity of these accounts since no one would invent it.) John the Baptist stands on the cusp of a new revelation of holiness in the…