June, 2023 - Frog in the Pot

The first preadolescent thought that I had about my received Catholic faith’s relationship to the outside world was this: Gee, my friends–Jeff, David, Don, Mark, Tim–are all going to hell when they die.

My family was the only Catholic family in my wooded country neighborhood among the corn fields and pastures outside of town. I had learned that all of the several other families there were Protestant. According to what I was being taught in my religion classes at St. Margaret Mary elementary school, since my friends had not been saved by Catholic baptism as babies, they were all condemned to an eternal afterlife of hellfire. I was pretty sure that they did not know this. Continue reading “How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part II: Discovery”

If recent political developments in the U.S. are any indication, the answer could appear to be yes.

Last week, the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, was indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice on 37 felony counts for illegal retention of classified national defense documents and obstruction of justice. The first 31 charges assert violations of the federal Espionage Act.

This week he was arraigned in the federal district court in Miami for the charges. His taking of very sensitive national security documents when he left the White House in January 2021, and his attempts to hide many of them from the federal government’s efforts to retrieve them, constitute the most blatant political crimes against the nation’s security in American history. Continue reading “Can an American Political Party Commit Treason?”