Ask Nathan Anything

[DC Al Fine]

Here's a few I've been meaning to ask you:

1) I recently learned that the Catholic church officially teaches predestination. However, when I went to dig into it a bit more, the only writers I could find that dealt with it were Augustine and Aquinas. Can you recommend any more recent Catholic writers who reflect on the topic?

2) Ignoring the sex abuse crisis and hot button political/doctrinal issues, what are the areas where you have the most criticism for the Catholic church and her Bishops in America? On the flip side, what do you think they are doing well?

3) Thoughts on the future of the church in America? (either Christianity as a whole or specific movements)

4) Favourite political party anywhere in the world? (must have seats in a national legislature, no fringe parties allowed)

[DC Al Fine]

Thank you for the answers. Would you mind elaborating on the bolded part below?

Here's a few I've been meaning to ask you:

1) I recently learned that the Catholic church officially teaches predestination. However, when I went to dig into it a bit more, the only writers I could find that dealt with it were Augustine and Aquinas. Can you recommend any more recent Catholic writers who reflect on the topic?

One of the classic treatments of compatibilism in Catholic theology (since compatibilism is what Catholicism teaches) is Luis de Molina's, in which, in addition to knowing basic axioms and necessary truths ("natural knowledge") and knowing the past, present, and future ("free knowledge"), God also has a "middle knowledge" of what His creatures could have chosen. The classic proof text for Molinism is Matthew 11:23. I think the prominent online apologist Dave Armstrong has written about Molinism recently. There's another understanding as well, one that hews closer to the classic Augustinian/Thomistic framing (Molinism is primarily associated with the Jesuits whereas this other understanding is primarily associated with the Dominicans; Aquinas of course is the ur-Dominican theologian), but I don't understand it as well. It's possible TJ might.

2) Ignoring the sex abuse crisis and hot button political/doctrinal issues, what are the areas where you have the most criticism for the Catholic church and her Bishops in America? On the flip side, what do you think they are doing well?

It's hard to ignore those things because the sex abuse crisis in particular affects my understanding of practically every aspect of what the American Church is going through right now. I guess I think the bishops are too quick to shutter struggling parishes, although I don't know enough about the economics of parish consolidation to know what could be done differently; I know that there are some cases within the Diocese of Springfield where parishes have been merged but continued to use two or more of the old church buildings for different purposes, which strikes me as a good way forward in places where it's feasible. Conversely, I think most of the bishops are doing a good job of pivoting away from focusing like a laser on two or three hot-button issues and towards more direct care for souls and bigger-picture views of what's happening in this country as American society, especially in traditional Catholic areas of strength like New England and the heavily Mexican-American parts of the West, secularizes.

3) Thoughts on the future of the church in America? (either Christianity as a whole or specific movements)

Not bright, but not at risk of outright extinction either. As I said in a thread in US General recently, I personally feel a little more at home in the boutique witchcraft and e-conversion age than I let on, and I do think historical Christianity will be able to survive in this ecosystem, but it's probably going to have to survive mostly by means other than vertical propagation from parent to child; in other words, I suspect that the so-called Benedict option is almost the exact opposite of what historical Christianity in America will actually look like in fifty or a hundred years. I'm not really happy about this either, because a lot of e-converts (to any religion) turn into political extremists of some kind or another.

4) Favourite political party anywhere in the world? (must have seats in a national legislature, no fringe parties allowed)

This is really hard because there are parties that I really like by comparison to other parties in their country but not by comparison to parties elsewhere in the world. Meretz would be a perfect example of this; I wouldn't think especially highly of them in most countries, but in the Israeli political spectrum I like them a lot. I'm tempted to say the same about some of the more moderate Christian parties in the Low Countries for the opposite reason (those countries' creepy normalization of things like child euthanasia as opposed to Israel's creepy normalization of things like tub-thumping ethno-jingoism), but I don't know enough about those parties to commit to a positive opinion of them. UK Labour also used to be high in my estimation until it became clear that the antisemitism problem is really not being dealt with adequately.