Stephanie Block
Is Common Core Unraveling? Or Is It Changing Face?
Now that everyone knows what “Common Core” is, nobody is talking about it except to mock it. But, has it really disappeared from Education administrations?
Catholics Funding “System Change” – CCHD money supporting Soviet Workforce Training
Catholic Campaign for Human Development supports government takeover of education It’s helpful to examine what the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) is funding in a given locality. Such an examination provides a small cross-section, with very concrete examples, of where its progressive political advocacy is headed. In the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, CCHD grants,…
Why Not Give to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development?
Hasn’t it undergone a major overhaul recently? When asked to explain, in a nutshell, why a Catholic might continue to oppose the annual Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) collection, despite recent protestations that the CCHD has put its house in order, there are four solid responses: CCHD continues to make grants to organizations that…
Agents of Death: The Alinskyian Effort to Manage Your Life’s End
Change agents hope to transform end-of-life care with “new” values Journalist Ellen Goodman was a 2015 National Summit on Advanced Illness Care keynote speaker for The Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C-TAC). She addressed the room of professionals in their personal capacity, “as mothers, as fathers, as sons, as daughters, as well as change agents…
Using Social Justice Alliances to Subvert Catholic Principles
Frontal assault is not the best way to bring down a religious establishment. That only creates martyrs and underground resistance. Minimizing religious values, however, while elevating political ones is much more effective and, when the religious establishment cooperates with the process, it withers like a vestigial organ. Two examples – one from a predominantly Catholic and one…
Catholic Action versus Alinskyian Organizing
For years, apologists for Alinskyian organizing have been trying to make the case that such organizing is a development of Catholic Action and therefore deserves support and respect. For instance, a 2011 National Catholic Reporter article reported that several speakers at a Catholic Campaign for Human Development seminar expressed the idea that community organizing – specifically citing the work…
Beware the “Experimental Faith”
At the “Progressive Christian Channel” of patheos.com, Diana Butler Bass’ bio describes herself as an author who regularly comments on religion, politics, and culture in the mainstream media. Among her opus is a 5-session “study” that was co-written with Tim Scorer, “Embracing Spiritual Awakening: Diana Butler Bass on the Dynamics of Experimental Faith.” As one…
New McCarthyism is the Invisible Hand against Catholic teaching
It’s unlikely that the actor Gary Sinise, Fox News anchor Bret Baier, and beer magnate Pete Coors didn’t realize that Legatus, an association of observant Catholic business leaders, adheres to Catholic moral teaching when they agreed to speak at an upcoming Legatus Summit. Legatus has been known for Catholic positions on a number of issues, even…
CCHD 2014-2015 …with a sobering look at a New Mexico PICO grantee, CAFÉ
The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), an annual collection that is touted to “help the poor” but has actually been a steady source of revenue for Alinskyian organizing and other progressive, political activity, recently released its 2014-2015 grant list. It’s a doozy. As has been the trend since scandal forced the collection to withhold…
Book review: My Battle Against Hitler
My Battle Against Hitler, a posthumously published memoir and collection of essays by “20th century Doctor of the Church” Dietrich von Hildebrand, is a timely cautionary for a world that is again on the cusp of momentous world events. It is sobering to read, for example, a Provincial of the German Dominicans remark, in the…
