Before I even begin to blog, I have to thank Emily Stimpson for her post on Drawing The Battle Lines. I wish I had her talent of discernment and her grace of illumination.

"Catholicism is a cosmological religion, that is one that integrates all the phenomena of space and time into a sacred order in which divine and human existence are continuous. This cosmology locates and explains man's existence. For the Catholic, therefore, religion is not private and autonomous but communitarian and cosmic. Every aspect of existence is explained as part of an eternal benevolent continuity....

There are no empty spaces in the Catholic universe. God has not disappeared as He did in Protestantism into radical transcendence to dwell unknowable, arbitrary, unapproachable. Catholicism has a universe of symbolic discourse, of mediating and communicating signs and structures through which one can remain in touch with the sacred...

Both the religious symbols of Catholicism and the social behavior of Catholics are outward signs of inner beliefs, the high altar and the large family equally eloquent about one's world view. The cult informs the culture and is inseparable from it...

In Catholic life, there is not such thing as 'a mere external'..."
-- Anne Muddridge