Collected here are articles and reviews that have appeared in print, as well as a presentation of my books. There are a few interviews and some sound material, notably my reading of the Gospels in Greek, a project that remains work in progress.
It can be enjoyable to be an anarchist – at least for a while, and as long as the anarchy of others doesn’t interfere with mine.
Continue reading The Church refuses to either absolutise or materialise eros and, in consequence, sexuality. That is, here and now, a counter-cultural position to assume, but the here and now will pass, the Christian vision of human nature endures.
Continue reading A conversation about freedom, fashions, maturing, the fear of death, the longing for beauty - and hieroglyphs.
Continue reading On 27 May Cardinal Hollerich, ever unafraid to say the unexpected, said that if we try to speak to people of our time about chastity we are likely to seem to be ‘speaking Egyptian to them’. I had just sent my London publisher a manuscript entitled 'Chastity', so had I in effect written a manual of Egyptian?
Continue reading When theologians and clergy speak of sexual morality and chastity, one sometimes gets the impression that they have never themselves inhabited, for any length of time, a human body.
Continue reading What is really required is a pedagogy of chaste living. Having forgotten what the word actually stands for, we've reduced chastity to an unobtainable ideal, almost a caricature: the image of a virgin in a white dress in a tower - a reality beyond reach!
Continue reading The chief task of an Episcopal Vicar for Synodality is thus to help the bishop ensure that everything that happens in the Prelature, in administration and pastoral care, is focused on the Lord Jesus Christ and his Gospel, our source of new life.
Continue reading "By all means, there is no lack of polemic in more or less engaged Catholic circles, but much that is presented as in tune with modern tendencies and needs is in fact discreetly perfumed by mothballs." A conversation about tradition and innovation, sense and senselessness.
Continue reading 'Bishops of the Lutheran Church of Norway are often criticised for meddling in politics, so one asks oneself: is the Catholic bishop also, now, trying to become more political?'.
Continue reading As you know, the Holy See has appointed me Apostolic Administrator of the Prelature of Tromsø. I am faced with a logistic challenge: the combined surface area of the prelatures of Trondheim and Tromsø exceeds that of Great Britain!
Continue reading It does make you think when you realise how quickly a cultural memory, a religious memory is lost...
Continue reading The peculiarly Christian contribution to the construction of a polis is to see it as a community marked, not only by a horizontal dimension, but by a vertical axis pointing heavenward. We're made for more than merely pragmatic and productive collaboration.
Continue reading ‘It is rare’, wrote Simone Weil in 1940, ‘to see misfortune fairly portrayed’. Confronted with the apparent ultimatum of force, we tend to ‘treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe were his natural vocation’.
Continue reading What does the Gospel mean in the midst of war? How can our faith help us make sense of violence - and of our obligations when faced with it?
Continue reading Have the people of our time lost the sense of the sublime? How, in this day and age, can one credibly bear Christian witness?
Continue reading The good news of the body’s significance and of the realisable, death-defying scope for human wholeness was entrusted to a ragged dozen people in a collective state of post-traumatic stress, not especially brilliant humanly speaking, but shorn by stark humiliation of presumption, so freed to proclaim a message that surpassed them.
Continue reading The notion of the deposit of faith is very deep in the Christian understanding of transmission. It’s an extremely helpful reminder of what a bishop’s task is, namely to keep this deposit, which is vast and expansive, and introduce people to the richness contained in it.
Continue reading Easter proclaims that what we think of as defining our lives — transience, death, any number of wounds — is not, in fact, final; that there is a balm in Gilead healing us now and effectively obliterating all that seems to sabotage joy. We find ourselves stepping into a wholly new dimension of being, if we’ve the guts for it, and the love.
Continue reading It is curious: our intensely body-conscious society in fact takes the body lightly, refusing to see it as significant of identity, supposing that the only selfhood of consequence is the one produced by subjective self-perception, as we construct ourselves in our own image.
Continue reading A conversation held during the New York Encounter touching on the state of the Church, Kafka, Ildefonso Schuster, the signs of the times, gratitude, and the call to holiness.
Continue reading Connectedness is, in my way of thinking, not necessarily positive - one can be connected to a leash, a chain, or a mobile gadget. Belonging on the other hand is dynamic, in movement, an indicator of shared purpose.
Continue reading Easter is the assurance that all the things that condition our lives negatively — sin, disease, enmity, hatred, warfare, mortality — all those things have been overcome, and can still be overcome, insofar as we conduct our lives in Christ and let ourselves be formed by Christian hope.
Continue reading What does it feel like to be created in the image of God? How do we experience it?
Continue reading He, born on Holy Saturday, had once for all anchored his life in the power of Jesus's passion, death, and resurrection. Anyone who has seen him celebrate the sacred mysteries knows how really present this power was for him.
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