Glossary

A short glossary of the words and traditions I lean on most. If one still puzzles you, please write to me and ask.

Faith ⁊ Theology

Independent Catholicism is a diverse family of expressions of Apostolic Christianity, defined by keeping the sacraments, creeds, and liturgy of the Catholic Church outside of communion with the Pontiff of Rome. Independent Catholic bodies generally maintain holy orders that the Vatican considers 'valid but illicit.' The family is broad. It includes the so-called 'Old Catholics,' who opposed Vatican I (and who are themselves internally divided between those who affirm the queer community and ordain women, and those who do neither). It also includes Sedeprivationists, who believe John XXIII and his successors are Popes 'materially but not formally'; Sedevacantists, who believe the Holy See has been empty since 1958; and Conclavists, who elect their own Popes.

For clarity, the perspective I come from is the inclusive wing of Old Catholicism: I oppose Vatican I, affirm Vatican II, acknowledge the Pope as the valid Bishop of Rome, and pray for visible communion and unity for the entire Church. As a member of the Church in the West, I consider myself under the Pope's indirect jurisdiction, though not his direct jurisdiction. I hold that Ecumenical Councils, not the Pope, are the supreme authority of the Church, as promulgated in the decree Haec sancta synodus at the Council of Constance, which mended the Western Schism. This stands in contrast to the Ultramontanism adopted at Vatican I. It is, however, in keeping with Pope Saint Gregory the Great, who held that all bishops are equal in their office, refused the title of Universal Bishop, and styled himself instead Servus Servorum Dei, 'Servant of the Servants of God,' insisting that the Church's structure remain collegial rather than monarchical.

Christian humanism is the conviction that human beings are free, equal, creative, and made in the image and likeness of God; that the entirety of the human experience is sacred, including its joys, sorrows, and tragedies; and that every person is endowed with an inherent and inviolable dignity.

Personalism is the philosophical conviction that the person is the fundamental reality, the starting point of all serious thought whether about God, society, economics, or morality. Not 'the individual' as an interchangeable unit, not 'the worker' as an economic class, not 'humanity' as an abstraction, but the person: unique, irreducible, relational, and never merely a means to an end. Personalism holds that every system, whether economic, political, or ecclesial, must be measured by what it does to and for persons, and that any system that treats a person as nothing but a cog, statistic, demographic, or a resource has failed at the root.

Coinherence is the English term for perichoresis, the Greek word the Church Fathers used for the way the three Persons of the Trinity dwell within one another in love, each fully inhabiting the others without confusion or loss of distinction. In this context it is sometimes called the divine dance, an image drawn from the word's echo of the Greek for 'dancing around.' But coinherence is not confined to the Trinity; humans experience it in family, friendship, and marriage: wherever lives are so given over to one another that each person lives in and through the others, while remaining fully and irreducibly themselves.

Politics ⁊ Economy

Distributism is an economic system which holds that productive property, meaning land, tools, and capital, should be owned as widely as possible rather than concentrated in a few corporations or in the state. It favors family farms, small workshops, cooperatives, and guilds. Distributism is grounded in two principles of Catholic social teaching: subsidiarity, the principle that matters should be handled at the most local level capable of handling them, with higher powers intervening only to help and never to absorb; and the universal destination of goods, the principle that God gave the earth to the whole human family, so that private property, while legitimate, always carries a social obligation and can never be an absolute right.

Like Marxism, Distributism seeks to deproletarianize the working class, that is, to end the condition in which most people own nothing productive and must sell their labor to those who own everything, and to sublate the distinction between capital and labor: to overcome the division not by destroying either side but by uniting them in the same hands, so that the worker and the owner are the same person. But unlike Marxism, Distributism seeks the distribution of capital rather than its centralization, and it seeks not the abolition of markets but their subordination to the person and the common good.

Social democracy is a democratic and reformist descendant of the socialist movement: democratic in that it works through elections and persuasion rather than revolution, and reformist in that it seeks to transform society gradually, from within its existing institutions. It retains, secures, and expands the rights and gains of liberal democracy, meaning free elections, civil liberties, an independent press, and the rule of law, rather than treating them as obstacles to be swept away. It envisions a society which offers a comprehensive and completely free 'cradle to grave' system of welfare, healthcare, and education. It defends the right to self-organization, both through union democracy, workers governing their own unions from the bottom up, and through the right to start a family business; and it desires a global trade system of connection without neo-imperialism: economic relationships in which wealthy nations trade with poorer ones as partners rather than extracting from them as dependents.

The Social Gospel is the recognition that the Gospel has profound social implications, that salvation is not a private transaction but a summons to transform the world. When Jesus told the Disciples, 'Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another,' He did not add an asterisk. Jesus did not turn away the sex worker, nor did He turn away the tax collector, the collaborator with an occupying empire, then as much a byword for betrayal as 'fascist collaborator' is now. He called us to strive for justice for the persecuted and to stand in solidarity with the poor and the marginalized, but He also called us to love everyone, including our perceived enemies. Including the humans we find uncomfortable. The Social Gospel is both the defense of the vulnerable and the humanization, and dare I say it, the love, of Judas and Longinus, then as now: the friend who betrays you and the instrument of your persecution.

Art ⁊ Sensibility

Remodernism is an artistic and literary movement which seeks to revive the optimism of modernism, art that pursued truth, beauty, and spiritual depth, and to do so through sincerity, authenticity, and inclusivity instead of irony and deconstruction for deconstruction's sake.

Shadowcasting is a generational institution of queer culture which has been a safe space for queer people, outcasts, and misfits since 1977. A shadowcast performs the Rocky Horror Picture Show live in front of the screen as the film plays: the actors, dressed as the characters, mirror every scene in real time, while the crew runs the lights, props, and chaos that keep the show alive. The audience is part of the ritual too, with callbacks, props, and the initiation of first-timers, or 'virgins,' into the fold.