Judges and lawyers tend to think that some systems of absolute commitment and belief are religions and others aren’t.  Anthropologists would laugh at this idea.  In the broad sense, they all are.  The important thing is what kind they are.

I received this letter at the beginning of autumn, when the Covid regulatory regime was somewhat stricter.  We have had vaccines for some time, the Omicron variant seems much milder, and recovery from it seems to provide some protection against more serious strains.  Nevertheless, restrictions are tightening again, so the exchange may still be of interest.

The Fathers of the Church don’t say much about the New Year, because there is no such day on the liturgical calendar.  For the Western Church today, the first day of January is the Solemnity of Mary, a feast day commemorating and honoring the great blessing to us of her motherhood.

Just a thought on this lazy after-Christmas day – a thought about the lazy demand for short cuts.  One of the most popular supposed short cuts is imagining that we can make our decisions easier by bypassing value judgments and assigning numbers to everything.  Call this the numerical fallacy, or the fallacy of false precision.

But this Only Son of God, the Father Almighty, let us see what He did for us, what He suffered for us.  "Born of the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary."  He, so great God, equal with the Father, born of the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary, born lowly, that thereby He might heal the proud.  Man exalted himself and fell; God humbled Himself and raised him up.