Elizabeth Anker’s eloquent call to exercise our imaginations to keep them healthy, and dream a better world than the one being fed to us on our screens.
Today is Pi Day, 3.14… (The date sort of breaks down after the first two decimal points. It was fun in 2015 though…) Most people ignore this date. …
The Daily: 14 March 2026
As you can see, the Round of 32 knocked out both my contenders for the Golden Halo. But my guy Thomas might yet make it to the Faithful Four…. if he can knock out Peter! Which, given that most of the Lent Madness Voting Public is not Catholic, does seem at least possible.
Meanwhile, I’m amusing myself thinking “I’m putting all my faith in Doubting Thomas.”
All you holy people, pray for us!
A tip of the hat to Jess Craven for including this tidbit in her daily roundup of good news on Sunday:
In a “hugely significant milestone,” 158 captive-bred juvenile giant tortoises were released on the Galápagos island of Floreana, making their return after over 180 years of absence.
If you’re looking for good news in these awful times, I highly recommend her blog:
chopwoodcarrywaterdailyactions.substack.com/p/extra-extra-31
Theology, I think, is a web that we weave, to create connections from ourselves to the central mysteries of our faith; and also to connect those mysteries to each other. Theology’s job is to keep all the strands of the web sufficiently self consistent with each other.
Theologizing takes place in the minds and hearts and lives and communities and contexts of all the faithful.
Theology is explored, tested, and formalized by those relatively few among the faithful who have the luxuries of education, time, and resources, as well as the calling, to do so. Traditionally, this meant clergy and religious, whose vocation is the church, and who lived in community with others whose lives were ordered by the liturgy of the church and its two great commandments, love of God and love of neighbor. More recently, the vocation of theologian has been made available to the laity as well, when theological expertise gravitated to academia, where the expertise in all its related academic disciplines was gathered.
Certain of these formalizations may be promulgated by the Magisterium, the teaching office of the church, via various kinds of church documents with various degrees of authority. That’s how things become “what the church teaches.”
But to be truly authoritative, they must be received, in the minds and hearts and lives and communities and contexts of the faithful, where theologizing begins in the first place: the sensus fidelium, the sense of the faithful, who are all baptized in the same Spirit and recognize the same Lord.
All of this, of course, takes time.
………Lots, and lots, and lots, of time.
The professor of one of my ecclesiology classes said that it takes about a hundred years for the church to fully receive the teachings of a Council. (That made me feel a lot better about things, actually.) So while it is understandable to be frustrated by how slowly the Church changes, it may help to imagine the Church and its theologies as a vast complex creature with an equally vast and complex nervous system through which signals can only move very slowly.
One of the most beautiful things I was taught as a child is that the Tradition of the church is an enormous treasure chest, full of all kinds of devotions and practices and prayers that might enrich our faith.. and we could choose from them! And we don’t all have to choose the same thing, that’s why there are so many! So if I feel close to this saint, and you feel close to that saint, that’s okay, we can still be friends! If you want to say the rosary, and I’d rather pray the psalms, that’s okay too! The statues, the holy water, the medals, the scapulars, the Advent wreath, the saints, the candles, the music, the art, the silly prayers and the serious ones… there’s a place for all of it, in the church. A place for all of us.
Each one of those things is a strand of the web. Each one of those things connects to another strand and another, that eventually connect to the central mysteries of our faith, those mysteries that participate in the nature of God and of God’s relationship with creation.
This essay was prompted by a question from Guardian Moon, who asked me, “Does one theology even fit everyone?”
Yes… and no.
We don’t need to all be connected to the same strands in order to be connected to God. All the strands make a web, and the web connects us to our Triune God, and to each other.
Through Christ, and with Christ, and in Christ,
O God Almighty Father,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
all glory and honor is yours, for ever and ever.
And let the people say,
Amen, Amen, Amen!
My guy Thomas the Apostle is today’s matchup in the Round of 32 in Lent Madness today, up against the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. (The who, you might ask? So did I!) Click through to find out and vote for your fav.
Here’s my comment on today’s pairing:
All I’m saying is, they don’t call the other guy “Denying Peter”….!
I’ve always been a fan of Thomas. I think of him as the patron saint of scientists and skeptics.
And his encounter with the Risen Lord reminds me powerfully that Jesus meets us where we are, and gives us what we need.
St Thomas, pray for us!
What’s Fat Tuesday? You may know it better as Mardi Gras, which literally means Fat Tuesday in French. It is so called because, under the strict Lenten dietary rules formerly observed in the West (and still largely observed in the East by our Orthodox kindred), fats and other rich foods were off the table during the season of Lent, the Great Fast leading up to Easter.
Thus the tradition of eating pancakes on Fat Tuesday: use up those fats, so having them in the house during Lent won’t tempt you to indulge.
The ecclesial disciplines of fasting and abstinence were substantially lightened for Catholics after Vatican 2; I’m not really sure why. Perhaps they seemed too old fashioned in the 1960s and 70s, when the church was trying to embrace the signs of the times and move into the modern world. Perhaps the Council was influenced by young people who found it ludicrous that God could possibly care about what we eat.
(…which is an interesting criticism, considering that our central sacrament, the Eucharist, re-presents a meal, the Last Supper, at which Jesus and the disciples ate and drank.)
For many Catholics of my parents’ generation, being a good Catholic meant following the rules. (Note that the “Perfect Society” ecclesiology of the time understood the church as similar to the modern nation-state: nations have rulers, citizens, and laws.)
Experientially, because even the most venial sin meant you were no longer in a state of grace and therefore couldn’t receive communion unless you went to confession first, everything got flattened into a binary: yes/no, sin/not sin. This was a feature, not a bug, for many Catholics: there was rarely any need to consult your conscience: you could consult the catechism instead. Or, if you were really uncertain, ask a priest.
As a first-generation Vatican 2 Catholic, I grew up with a mixture of this approach (“a rule for everything and everything is about the rules”, one might say), and an approach that emphasized living the gospel values more than obeying the rules. The rules still mattered, but they were a means, not an end. I frequently heard from my Catholic school teachers that “pray, pay, and obey” was a thing of the past: laypeople were expected to be active moral agents, rather than obedient moral subjects.
Continue readingGoodness, very close race in today’s Lent Madness matchup!
Zeyneb Sayilgan, Ph.D is the Muslim scholar at the always-excellent ICJS. She has shared here a lovely reflection on her experience of Ramadan, the holiest season of the Muslim year because it is the period during which the Prophet Mohammed received the revelations that were later collected as the Qu’ran.
Both Ramadan and Lent begin on the new moon, although they are not always in sync because the Gregorian (Christian) calendar is a lunar-solar calendar. Both involve fasting, though in my lifetime the required level of fasting is minimal… especially compared to Ramadan!
I do encourage you to click through and read Dr Sayligan’s essay, especially if you’re interested in how music can both express and elicit religious experience.
Every year, Ramadan arrives in my home before the crescent moon is officially announced. It arrives in sound. A few days before the month begins, my daughter presses play. The first notes drift through the house, and suddenly the atmosphere shifts. The air feels softer. Our conversations grow gentler. Even the ordinary…
— Read on zeynebsayilgan.com/2026/02/20/welcoming-ramadan-2026-five-songs-on-my-playlist-capturing-this-holy-month/
Today is the last Sunday before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, and that means it is time for my favorite, irreverently serious, ecumenically welcoming Lenten devotion: Lent Madness! It’s the brainchild of a couple of Episcopalian priests, who were lamenting to each other one day “if only we could get people to pay as much attention to Lent as they do to March Madness…” and then thought “Hey wait a minute…!”
Since the saints aren’t playing elimination matches in heaven (at least, as far as we know), the winner of each matchup is determined by who wins the online voting of the Lent Madness Viewing Public. Beginning the day after Lent, you can go to the Lent Madness website, read about the saintly matchup for the day, and cast your vote to help determine which will advance to the next level.
In Catholic terms, this brings the Pilgrim Church on Earth (that’s us) and the Church Triumphant (that’s the people in heaven) into playful interaction, and encourages us to learn more about 32 faithful Christians and their stories. Of course, not everyone in the bracket is considered a saint in Catholic terms: but the Catholic canonization process doesn’t make people saints; it is simply a finding that the Catholic church is confident that a particular person is in heaven. It doesn’t make any statements about who isn’t. I think it’s especially good for Catholics like me to learn more about faithful non-Catholic Christians, and vice versa.
There’s no wrong way to participate in Lent Madness. I like to fill out the bracket without doing any research on any of the saints. This year, I’ve at least heard of almost all of them.
About some of my picks:
Gaudete Theology 