All this week I’ve barely been able to keep up.
For my few readers who aren’t familiar with him, Jimmy Akin — yes, the cowboy hat guy — is a Catholic writer and apologist. His blog is the best place I know to go for extremely detailed, technical, practical, and correct answers to all kinds of questions about Catholic beliefs, practices, and morality.
In my view, he answers questions like an engineer, or perhaps a mathematician, often laying out the list of all possible answers or arguments and then systematically destroying them one after another until only a few remain, at which point he announces (one way or another) that the speculation is about to begin, and then proceeds to reason his way through them. He never lets an ambiguous term slip by without definition, and if he needs to appeal to Church documents he goes straight to the Latin. (For a sample, see his Moral Theology category)
Another thing I like is his willingness to write at length about hypothetical and fictional scenarios, as in this response to the recent reader question "Would it be just under Catholic teaching to commit genocide against the Cylons?"
This week he’s writing about torture (start here and read forward), the topic of which has been bandied about the Catholic blogosphere of late (notably by Mark Shea) and which has suffered a bit from a lack of definition of terms.
There’s also some writing about the Pope’s visit to Turkey. Also about Benedict’s upcoming book about Jesus. Good stuff. Check it out.
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