This week I have been on retreat at Belmont Abbey and had the privilege of going to lunch with the editors at TAN Books which is located just a few minutes from the Abbey. The Abbey--by the way--is in the midst of what future church historians will name "the Southern Catholic Renaissance" or something like that [...]
On this day fifty eight years ago John F Kennedy was assassinated and in Oxford, England C.S.Lewis died. Lewis had a great impact on my life--in many ways saving my Christian faith. I had been brought up in fundamentalist Protestantism and, after high school, went to Bob Jones University. The education I received at BJU was [...]
The illustration for this post shows the range of light waves and the tiny proportion of which is visible. A similar chart for sound waves shows the tiny range of waves which are audible to the human ear. There is much more "out there" than we can perceive with our physical senses. The aptly named Angelico [...]
Today's blog post is an excerpt from my new book Beheading Hydra - A Radical Plan for Christians in an Atheistic Age. Rusty Reno’s recent book The Return of the Strong Gods catalogues the concerted effort after the second world war of philosophers, political thinkers, economists and theologians to exterminate dogma. They looked at the legacy [...]
A few weeks ago a report came out from the Archdiocese of Cincinnati about the new plan to "re-structure" the archdiocese. The short version is that "the restructuring process will combine the archdiocese’s 208 parishes into 60 “families of parishes...The goal, church officials say, is to eventually unite the 60 new parish families into single parishes." [...]
I've been reading a fair bit about angels and demons recently. An excellent new book The Other World We Live is subtitled, A Catholic Vision of Angelic Reality. It's a good primer written in a punchy, accessible style and outlines the reality and relevance of the angelic in the world today. I have also completed a ten module course [...]
I remember when and why I began to believe in the reality of purgatory. It was after taking a funeral and I wondered where the person who had died had gone. It struck me that the doctrine of purgatory (which I had up to then rejected as "unBiblical") was simply common sense. I had come to [...]
This bit of satire from the archives, but still relevant as the POTUS visits the Vatican and the members of the Catholic hierarchy continue to tiptoe through the minefield of abortion politics: When a local Catholic priest denied Reinhard Heydrich communion because of his support of the so called "final solution for the Jews," local Catholic [...]
I am going to find it difficult to leave Twitter, but when I examine my relationship with the micro-blogging site, I think I will have no regrets in the long run. I originally joined Facebook and Twitter in order to promote my blog posts and drive traffic to my main means of sharing the Catholic faith--this [...]
When I was a high school chaplain I used to explain to the kids that a sin was not just something that made you feel bad. Often I'd get folks in the confessional who would "confess" that they were angry with another person. Anger is not necessarily a sin. The Bible says "Be angry but sin [...]