Steven Parmenius

             I have psychosis not otherwise specified with schizoaffective tendencies. To this day I haven’t a clue what lies beneath this label and it has never been explained to me to my satisfaction. I do know a couple things however. The first is that this whatever it is has landed me in the hospital on two occasions. The second is that a certain dosage of drugs like Seroquel taken daily make it go away almost completely. A third thing I know is that if I do not take these drugs the symptoms return much worse than before. Seroquel withdrawal is worse than the thing one is given Seroquel for whatever that thing is. Further the symptoms of Seroquel withdrawal are the very same thing as the symptoms of psychosis not otherwise specified. In fact, I do not know, and cannot apparently know if pyschosis NOS is even still there whatever ‘there’ means in this context. This is because the drugs control my brain chemistry in a way that replaces my natural brain chemistry. This means that wi

An Open Letter to Certain Christians One of the Christian duties outlined by St. Thomas Aquinas is fraternal correction. This duty can be discharged privately in any area of life but it can also involve public protest as is exemplified, for instance, by Hebrew prophets such as Amos. It should involve protest at some points especially when people are preferring illusion to truth. This is because people prefer illusion to truth only when they prefer illusion to love. It is much easier to delude ourselves about the world when the alternative to doing so is to show charity to people we would rather not show charity to, whether because of an ethnic or class difference or because of a religious divide. This is why I want to examine the false beliefs many of you are propagating concerning immigration and the refugee/migrant ‘crisis’. Some mistakes are innocent such as when I do an equation in algebra incorrectly. Other mistakes are not as when I believe the worst of my neighbor because I

     Dear social conservatives. Unlike your liberal critics I do not think you are fools or oafs. This is because I have some familiarity with the hermeneutic traditions, like Thomistic natural law, through which you frame your responses to ethical questions. Plus, I know many of you and know you are people of principle and maintain your convictions in the face of contempt before which most of us would wither.   This is why it brings me no joy to tell you to go tend your gardens, as Voltaire says, because your cause is lost. I can remember in the nineties when there was much talk about statements like “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” which laid out a rationale for traditional Christians of all stripes to unite to fight various perceived ills like abortion or the increasing acceptance of same-sex love. This statement was grounded on a delusion from both sides. Many Catholics thought, complacently, that conservative evangelicals, while rough around the edges, could be educated o

                                                             P ortrait of an Internet Atheist        A friend of mine once informed me that she was raised a Catholic not a Christian. On the face of it this seemed silly as Catholics are, last I checked, Christians. However, I knew exactly what she meant. Christian has come to mean a certain thing and it is idle to complain about this fact. By Christian she meant a science-hating, MAGA hat wearing, violently xenophobic person negatively obsessed with other people’s sexual lives. What is more she meant a protestant science-hating, MAGA hat wearing, xenophobe.   A Christian is a conservative evangelical who votes for the Republican party in the U.S. and the Conservative party in Canada. The word atheist is currently undergoing a corresponding transformation. [1] It may now be as idle to consider Jean Paul Sartre an atheist as it is to consider Meister Eckhart a Christian. These words, as words often do, are taking on a life of their

  Catholics and Puritans             I am a catholic who lives in a society of puritans. By this I mean absolutely nothing confessional or religious but refer to two fundamental mindsets. North American culture overwhelmingly embodies a puritan mindset making catholicity a somewhat lonely stance. One is forever trying to explain to puritans things that to catholics seem utterly basic. This is only tangentially connected to the religious and cultural movements of the 17 th Century we label puritan and is not meant in any way to minimize their historic importance or profound intrinsic interest. In fact, looking at the past in this kind of censorious way is a hallmark of puritanism as I here define it. To mark this distinction, I will use lower case throughout for catholic and puritan as states of mind and upper case when I refer to historic Catholicism or Puritanism. At any rate many confessional Catholics are utter puritans and many confessional Protestants are true blue catholics