Flashes
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A passive voice is how we hide from the wars we choose
We have constructed an entire vocabulary of evasion around war. Violence “erupts,” conflicts “spiral,” casualties get “reported” — all passive, all subjectless. Leo XIV punctures that fog by insisting someone chose this, restoring human agency and accountability to every act of destruction.
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The dire straits of Anzac Day
Every year Australia and New Zealand remember soldiers who died on a Turkish beach. In 2026 that remembrance collides with a new war over a strategic strait, raising urgent questions about whether nations ever learn from past losses.
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Finding clever ways to slow-walk synodality
A pattern is emerging across dioceses where emphasis falls on spiritual process rather than structural outcomes. By foregrounding the journey and downplaying the vision for shared governance, bishops can appear synodal while avoiding real institutional change.
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Doing theology in times of political crisis
The collision of political sovereignty and ecclesial authority exposes fundamental questions of legitimacy within a fragmented normative landscape. Appeals to tradition obscure irreducible complexity, crisis functions as rhetorical apparatus, and the inexorable dynamics of imperial decline reconfigure authority itself—compelling discernment between authentic moral critique and instrumentalised religion.
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The hidden theology of “our young people now leave us”
What is the spiritual impact on the congregation when children and youth depart for their groups near the beginning of a service? Why are the adults who remain in the main church building typically the ones who are seen to remain in worship and teaching?
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What authority does the clerical church have?
The Gospels and Acts consistently portray Peter as someone who fails at leadership. The early church preserved that record deliberately. If Jesus intended a rigid hierarchy built on Peter’s authority, the community that knew him best left little evidence of it.
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Fake symbols lead to fake worship?
Bread is baked. Wafer is boiled. No one would serve a communion host alongside soup at a dinner table. The gap between what we call ‘bread’ and what we actually use reveals how far convenience has drifted from the gospel’s original gesture.
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Peter’s failures were preserved for a reason
The word “constitutive” was applied freely across Church documents to evangelisation, charity, canon law, and even the male-only diaconate. The one thing it was never again permitted to describe was the Church’s relationship to justice.
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From hiding to mission
Pope Francis’ call to proclaim the Joy of the Gospel is not simply a programmatic slogan. For the Church in Nagasaki — and everywhere — it signals a fundamental reorientation: from protecting what has been received to offering it openly to the world.
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When religion detaches from reason it becomes dangerous
A church whose symbols and leaders serve political interests loses its function as a unifying sign: structural resistance, not verbal disagreement, is the appropriate response.
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