I along with my wife, and seven others were confirmed into full communion with the Catholic Church at Easter Vigil on Saturday evening. It was a beautiful service full of celebration and joy. We all felt truly loved and welcomed.
It sounds cliche but I really feel like I have come home.
Some people are proclaiming that Pope Francis is in Hell. Others are saying he is in Heaven. To do either is to sin. Only God knows the result of anyone’s particular judgment. Whoever makes either proclamation is putting themself in God’s place.
Only Holy Church can declare someone to be in Heaven after a lengthy and exhaustive process. She never proclaims anyone is in Hell. And it is not for us to say.
The only appropriate response to anyone’s death is to pray for them. Charity demands it.
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I wrote this a few weeks back when Pope Francis was in the hospital. It will come up a lot now that we are in the sede vacante period.
Let us first pray for the repose of the soul of Pope Francis, that he may see the face of God in eternity forever.
Then, let us pray for the Cardinal-electors, who will be discerning over the next 15-20 d…
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There is one God and one Christ, and one Church, and one Chair founded on Peter by the word of the Lord.
—St. Cyprian
I admire JK Rowling enormously. Why? Because having attained professional success and wealth beyond the imagination of most of us, she could have taken the easy option and kept her head down. Instead, she put herself on the frontline to defend her fellow women, knowing that she would become a hate figure in the eyes of many. That takes guts and principles. Give her the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.
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Remember when Francis became pope, how enchanted the world became with someone in that position who seemed to be deeply Christian? Christian in the way of Jesus, not religion. People know what that is supposed to look like, feel like, smell like. It’s why they are so understandably cynical about the church because they know the differenc…
I’m going to say something that shouldn’t be controversial but will be. If you are a Christian, you can support border control and immigration being legal vs illegal. You CANNOT celebrate deportations and get off on the cruelty, and be a real Christ follower. Period
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Now is the time to pray for Pope Francis, that God grant him a merciful judgment. It is not the time to praise or denigrate him. Nor is it time to speculate on who the next pope will be. Leave all that to worldlings and pray for his eternal salvation.
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Substack is in danger of collapsing under its own weight. There are just too many worthy accounts here now to expect readers to cough up $5 for every writer they want to read. There needs to be some kind of subscription/revenue sharing mechanism so subscribers aren’t constantly asked for money for every damned article they’d like to read. Sell tokens. Punchcards. Come on, SS, INNOVATE ALREADY.
Arches National Park in Utah 😍
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If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And, which is more, you'll be a Man, my son!
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The real issue with stereotypes isn't that they are false but that people tend to apply them in situations where they are inaccurate because of conditionization on other information.
Whether or not it's true that on average blacks tend to be less conscientious workers or asians more conscientious [1] isn't really that important when making a hiring deciscion. What you'd want to know is whether -- conditional on the information you have -- that variable still has the supposed relationship. People aren't good with conditionalization so they tend to make the assumption that the relationship continues to hold but it's quite plausible that the relationship is actually reversed once you know information like what college someone went to. And that's really what makes stereotypes so pernicious -- they aren't dispelled even with evidence that should suffice.
And it's such a tempting mistake to make even mathematics grad students can't help but feel the pull [2]. That's what makes stereotypes dangerous regardless of whether they are true in some context.
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1: I'd be quite surprised if conscientiousness wasn't usually less for people raised in low income situations generally so it's plausible if -- controlling for nothing else -- this shouldn't be expected merely from average income statistics.
2: Even math graduate students who intellectually know better can't help but emotionally feel that if women are on average worse at math it calls into question the abilities of the women in a graduate math program. Yet, of course, what's true on average for women tells you nothing about what's true for women conditional on scoring well in math classes/tests/getting accepted into a given program.
I don't bring this up to claim it's true or false merely to note how difficult it is to emotionally grapple with conditionalization.
I suppose that, in some way, it might be similar to masculine guys being more likely to be straight and feminine gays being more likely to be gay, and yet if a masculine gay tells you that he’s gay or a feminine guy tells you that he’s straight, you would simply refuse to believe them based on these stereotypes alone in spite of what they are personally telling you.
