Two things I meant to mention in my morning post:
1. Better late than never: My most-recent blog column in The Register: Hipness in the Catholic Blogosphere. Registration required, but here's an excerpt:
Although it might be difficult to find many heroin-shooting Catholics, I don't think it's a coincidence that Catholicism crops up throughout America's jaunt with hip. Mark Twain wrote an excellent biography of St. Joan of Arc. Andy Warhol prayed at church almost every day, financed his nephew's studies for the priesthood and worked in a soup kitchen. Even the highly orthodox and chaste Flannery O'Connor (the “Hillbilly Thomist”) gained hip currency for a while.
Perhaps the best example of all comes from Jack Kerouac, the central figure of the hippest hip movement of all, the beatniks.
Kerouac said the word “beat” is a religious word with a relation to the beatific vision. He said he first realized this in the early 1950s when he saw a statue of the Virgin Mary turn its head in his hometown church's basement. It's no coincidence that he habitually sprinkled religious terms – holy, soul, mystic, immortal – throughout his greatest work, On the Road.
2. Neat article in Touchstone about Protestants and contraception. The intro:
It is a reckless analyst who risks reopening sixteenth-century disputes between Roman Catholics and the Protestant Reformers. I do so in the interest of a greater good, but my purpose is not to say who was right or who was wrong. I would simply like to explore why the Protestant churches maintained unity with the Catholic Church on the contraception question for four centuries, only to abandon this unity during the first half of the twentieth century.
