JDA has a new book out that addresses a very serious flaw in the modern Church:
Jon Del Arroz’s new book, The Wages of Sin, is out today. It follows Churchianity, for which I wrote the introduction and which hit #1 in Amazon’s religious philosophy category last year. Where Churchianity diagnosed the consumer-driven model reshaping American parishes, the new book turns to a word Del Arroz says most pulpits quietly retired: sin.
The Wages of Sin builds its structure on the Confiteor, the confession prayer Catholics have recited at every Mass since at least the tenth century. Del Arroz splits the book into four sections, one for each phrase of the prayer: thoughts, words, deeds, and omissions. Nine chapters work through the sins Augustine confessed in his Confessions, including pride dressed as worship, envy refined into schadenfreude, the spiritual torpor the Church Fathers called acedia, and the four sins Scripture names as crying out to heaven for vengeance. Each chapter closes with an examination of conscience, and the appendix adds a full one plus a vice-virtue table for daily use.
The book leans on Augustine’s framework of sin as disordered love: not a checklist of prohibitions, but the habit of loving the wrong things, or loving right things out of order. Del Arroz traces that idea into Romans 6:23 and the Catechism’s teaching on mortal sin, arguing that a Church which stopped naming sin also stopped being able to prescribe its cure.
The post-1960s idea of welcoming sinners into the church and refraining from judgment was correct in theory and flawed in application. The point is to welcome the sinner, not to accept and embrace the sin. And now we have “churches” featuring open satanists pretending to be priests and pastors, preaching blasphemy from the pulpits.
One hopes The Wages of Sin will help restore much-needed order to the Christian churches.