Mike Lamb

@tomsdigest.bsky.social lex orandi lex credendi amirite?

intercessions from this evening's prayer of the whole Church weigh in on the controversy 👀

i'm afraid it's gonna take a great deal more pain for them to actually start to get a clue

the revolutionary & counterrevolutionary fantasies in the Church must stop.

algorithmic sorting is driving a lot of it nowadays.

"go outside & touch grass"

"anthropocentric vs theocentric theology" pretty clearly indicates a christological problem

i actually like that it's quieter here. feels easier to keep social media's role in my life right-sized.

X is noisy for me... can't imagine what it was like for you

lmao it's like all the meanings apply here

inshallah homie

& i mean that in its fullest sense

this doesn't scale. media & internet comms do.

& that's the story of a lot of the last ~60 years. media coverage of VII, post VII, EWTN.

media as the religion: interpreting the world for us, providing shared symbols & grand narratives, borrowing material from Catholicism at its convenience.

it's an extremely lossy data transfer & the medium is the message.

if media (or social media) is allowed to filter & drive the message (as you demonstrated with Rahner's interview), it will become something impoverished.

the failure is pastoral: we don't teach actual persons well, beyond basics

debates about VII seem to miss this entirely.

yes, nuance is hard & lots of ppl seem uninterested in it. that doesn't vindicate the view that simple & clear is always automatically better.

it's like saying we should only have social media post-length communications bc it forces brevity & clarity

I can't stand the way guys like Rahner get strawmanned, when so much of the important ideas they had have never even actually trickled down to diocesan clergy & laity. only in bastardized form, if at all.

lots of Concilium theology's ideas were important, but trickled down to the masses without all the nuance & so mutated into milquetoast excuses to do whatever. "Hierarchy of Truths" was one of them

...a time to Concilium, and a time to Communio...

we want to be curious about the kairos for a real person.

what can this person hear? what channels of grace can reach them?

even more important than being able to "start with Jesus" is the ability to start from anywhere & get to Jesus

this is what kairology should mean

I liked Fr. Tomáš Halík's "The Afternoon of Christianity", but one note of caution:

i don't think "kairology" should be limited to a "signs of the times" rehash. you'll just arouse the same old biases against it.

kairology is about ministering to a concrete a person, not vibes in society.

reminds me of this poem that's popular in Men's circles: "The Lessons of the Wound" by Bruce Balin

God's is the "soft hand" that can "rub the salve of compassion and understanding" to give healing to wounds.

He knows all your longing. your groans are not hidden from Him: the One who understands

"My wounds are foul and festering,
the result of my own folly
...
O Lord, you know all my longing:
my groans are not hidden from you"

He knows my longing better than i do.

beneath the tapestry of lies & deceit that clouds my view & protects & justifies laziness, malice, contempt, etc

supposedly the TAN books version edits out some of her more universalist-sounding content.

you know anything about this? trying to figure out what's a better English version

the only other possibility i can think of is synodality catching on & creating an ecclesiology with more local flexibility.

but that's at least as much of a can of worms, so seems likely to need to be slow-rolled as well

US is one thing, but if episcopal conferences where the Church is growing aren't interested in change & are willing to throw their weight around on this, it won't change any time soon

this is still a hill to die on for a large percentage of the Church, & the Theology of the Body generation probably needs to pass away without further magisterial reiterations of that rationale for subsequent generations.

looks like decades at least until some better development is clear

after the backlash to FS, which was just Francis trying to show maximum mercy/compassion within current constraints, i'm not sure how they're getting there any time soon.

time is greater than space, but seems like it would need more time than Francis or these cardinals have

would be interested to hear more about why you think so.

i'm not particularly enthralled with many who claim to be Great Aquinas Understanders, but still paradoxically feel a pull lately to engage more deeply with his work.

“In chronos there is no illumination. Temporality is fallen. There is a darkness that cannot comprehend and participate in the operation of grace. In chronos there is only Macbeth’s ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.’”

Graham Ward