Jason Paone

Director of Word on Fire Academic. Creator of The New Ressourcement (journal). Husband. Father of three. Friend to animals.

[Jason Paone @JClementPaone]

@JHaddad01 He gets this from Guarding. This could almost be a Guardini quote.

[Jason Paone @JClementPaone]

Seeing Catholic reactions to the dustup between Pope Leo and President Trump, I’m struck again by how easy it is for our fundamental loyalty to drift from the Church and her shepherds toward the political and cultural tribes with which we identify.

As research has long suggested, in the US, partisan identity tends to run deeper than religious identity. As a result, our reactions often come prepackaged—simply favorable or hostile, depending less on Catholic principle than on whether something feels aligned with the right or the left.

You can see the same dynamic in the response to Bishop Barron’s forceful but nuanced repudiation of President Trump’s attacks on the Holy Father. Because his judgment is Catholic rather than partisan, it does not align simply with one side or the other—and so many immediately sort it into “right” or “left” and judge it on that basis.

The result is telling: he faces two contradictory criticisms at once—too aligned with MAGA for some, too accommodating to the left for others.

It is perfectly reasonable to disagree with him on particular points while respecting his office. But when disagreement begins to take the form of a broader repudiation of his character or integrity—treating him more as an opponent than as a bishop of the Church—we risk slipping into a posture formed more by partisanship than by the good faith of a disciple.

[Jason Paone @JClementPaone]

@JHaddad01 Love that book! My students have especially loved part 3.

[Jason Paone @JClementPaone]

An extraordinary book releases today.

Brad East’s review in Christianity Today gestures at why The Body of This Death has stayed with me. I wrestled with it—first as an editor, then more deeply as a reader—confronted by its bracing reflections on faith, death, virtuality, and martyrdom.

Written as letters from the last Catholic archbishop of Lancaster in a post-Christian future, this is theological fiction that refuses ease. It sets the terms of encounter—and rewards those who accept them.

If there is one book in our catalogue worth lingering with, it is this one.

https://t.co/huQSvoJgBL

[Jason Paone @JClementPaone]

"May all those who are weighed down with poverty, infirmity, and sickness, as well as those who must bear various hardships or who suffer persecution for justice's sake—may they all know that they are united with the suffering Christ in a special way for the salvation of the world" (Lumen Gentium §6). —I love this part!

[Jason Paone @JClementPaone]

It’s striking how many Catholic commentators misunderstand the crises of 1970s Catholicism. In particular, two tacit assumptions seem to recur:
1.that the crisis was caused by the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) and its reforms, ignoring the massive cultural upheaval reshaping nearly every Christian community and major Western institution at the same time; and
2.that Vatican II was a kind of historical singularity, unrelated to the historical and cultural forces that had been radically transforming the Western world after World War II and that would culminate in the upheavals of the 1970s.

Vatican II was not the cause of the subsequent decline and crises in Catholicism. Those crises emerged from cultural tides that were unsettling virtually every institution in the Western world. Vatican II itself, while not reducible to those cultural forces, nevertheless reflected them—and expressed the Church’s effort to discern and respond to them.

[Jason Paone @JClementPaone]

Greetings from SBL/AAR 2025 in Boston!

Hayden Hagerman and I are here representing Word on Fire Academic and The New Ressourcement journal at booth 606 in the SBL exhibitor Hall.

If you’re at the conference, come say hi--we’d love to meet you, talk theology and publishing, and give you a free copy of the latest issue of The New Ressourcement.

[Jason Paone @JClementPaone]

@HaleyCarrots I bet he was an American of the kind who dresses "like a European" while "on holiday" in Europe.

[Jason Paone @JClementPaone]

Here's a data point confirming the anecdotes about a Christian resurgence following Charlie Kirk's death. Bible sales jumped 36% in September (as compared with last year). https://t.co/0PGhmMEpOt

[Jason Paone @JClementPaone]

@ulrichlehner Indeed!

[Jason Paone @JClementPaone]

Thomas Joseph White, OP--a Jewish Catholic--shows that, for Christians, Zionism is neither biblical nor Catholic, nor coherent. https://t.co/DLJqYIuCTf

[Catholic World Report @cworldreport]

Fr. Joseph White’s cogently argued position on modern Israel in Principles of Catholic Theology: Book 4, On the Church, Mary, Nature and Grace, is ultimately grounded in Church teaching and tradition, holding in careful tension several key truths https://t.co/xEGToELqTq

[john milbank @johnmilbank3]

On this day Charles Martel held back the marauding Ummayad Moorish forces at the Battle of Tours or Poitiers. Let us honour his memory and not betray his glorious and providential achievement.

[Jason Paone @JClementPaone]

"Directly proportionate to the disappearance of responsibility is the appearance of false responsibility with its leaning to direct action by autocratic, or rather arbitrary, decisions. Look closely and you will discover that in the dictatorship, those held 'responsible' are not really so at all but are merely commandeered by higher 'authorities' who supervise their every move. Even the 'supreme authority' knows himself to be the mere executor of a mass will. As soon as he proves unsatisfactory in this role, he is eliminated, even as he eliminated lesser 'authorities' the moment they showed signs of personal initiation. In other words, a dictator is only a 'constructive' counterweight to collectivism . Both together extinguish the person, setting up in his place the anonymous functionary" (Guardini, The End of the Modern World 130–31n3).

[Jason Paone @JClementPaone]

"The rapid advance of a non-Christian ethos will be crucial for the Christian sensibility. As unbelievers deny Revelation more and more decisively, as they put their denial into more consistent practice, it will become the more evident what it really means to be a Christian. At the same time, the unbeliever will emerge from the fogs of secularism. He will cease to reap benefits from the values and forces developed by the very Revelation he denies. He must learn to exist honestly without Christ and without the God revealed through Him; he will have to learn to experience what this honesty means. Nietzsche has already warned us that the non-Christian of the modern world had no realization of what it truly meant to be without Christ. The last decades [an illusion to the World Wars] have suggested what life without Christ really is. The last decades were only the beginning" (Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World).

[Jason Paone @JClementPaone]

@JHaddad01 Haha that’s awesome, Jordan. Love how it shows the kids receiving Communion—and then modernism getting stomped on in the corner. That painting says it all—all except the part where he put Catholic theology in a kind of deep freeze for a couple of decades. 😂

[Jason Paone @JClementPaone]

Pope Pius X (1903–1914) was the “peasant pope” who lowered the age of first communion and promoted deep Eucharistic devotion. But he also opposed modernity on all fronts—political, theological, and cultural—in ways that some saw as necessary, and others as reactionary overreach.

What do you think—prophetic clarity or overreaction?

[Jason Paone @JClementPaone]

In this clip from my Ressourcement Theology for Evangelists class (CUA Evangelization & Culture MA), I talk about John Paul II’s response to the sexual revolution.

For him, the crisis wasn’t just about morality—it was about anthropology. If human beings are “just congealed stardust,” then sex, marriage, and the body lose their deeper meaning, reduced to pleasure and utility. His theology of the body was meant as a direct answer to this false, materialistic view of the human person.

I’ll be sharing more short clips like this from class discussions—let me know if you find them helpful.

[Jason Paone @JClementPaone]

"We have not yet come to the end of their philosophy, or, to speak more accurately, their folly" (Pascendi Dominici Gregis 8)—Pius X was savage in this encyclical! 😂

[Jason Paone @JClementPaone]

@MichaelPBarber Oh, wait. I know that conference. Say hi to Josh Miller for me!

[Jason Paone @JClementPaone]

@MichaelPBarber Sounds like a fantastic conference, Michael! I hope you’re planning to give that same talk (the very same one!) at The New Ressourcement 😁. Keep an eye on your inbox—I’m about to reach out.