During the twenty years it took me to convert from a Bob Jones University student to a Catholic I considered many of the Marian dogmas to be pious opinions. It was okay for Catholics to believe them, but why did they have to go and make them dogmas and therefore make it more difficult for me [...]
Is there a demonic element to seemingly ordinary human problems? Sometimes. While full blown demonic possession is rare, it is much more common for souls to be troubled by what might be called "demonic infection". In counseling people spiritually I have come to believe that there is a state of demonic influence in our lives which is [...]
I remember how they wired up the visionaries at Medjugorje while they were experiencing their apparitions. The scientists wanted to study what was going on in their brains as they "saw" the Blessed Virgin. Religious experiences of the mystical kind occur throughout human experience and in most every kind of religion. But what is happening when [...]
This summer in America has erupted in racially charged protests about the verdict on the killing of Trayvon Martin. Yesterday I posted this video of an atheist who went berserk with rage. I've commented earlier about the irrational rage which seems to be simmering just below the surface in our country, and wrote here about my [...]
An earlier post this week with a similar title evoked the most passionate comments I've had on a post for a long time. I suggested that one of the reasons why Catholic kids leave the church is that our catechism and worship styles and preaching for the past fifty years did not prepare them for the [...]
In the current debate on hell (which is really a debate on universalism) there is some fuzzy thinking going on. Here is an excerpt from my book The Quest for the Creed which comes out next week. This book is a new edition of Adventures in Orthodoxy. Published by Crossroads, it has new material and a new format. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Someone [...]
Sin is monotonous. Sanctity is totally original. Underneath this observation lurks a deeper truth--that sin is boring. We believe in original sin, but there is nothing original about sin. This is because evil is derivative. Satan cannot create anything, all he can do is twist or destroy or distort what is good. Take any sin at [...]
A debate has been cooking amongst various bloggers who are atheists about whether there is such a thing as objective morality. I was interested in the observations that animals behave in a 'moral' way--elephants grieve their dead herd members, dogs stand loyally beside the grave of their dead master, monkeys share and gorillas are tender toward [...]
The wound at the foundation of all our other wounds is the deep wound at the heart of love. Put simply, we all long for total, overwhelming, unconditional love. It is as if the whole human race is starving and in our starved and desperate state our appetites will turn to most anything to fill the [...]
In Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice Caroline says to Mr Bingley, I should like balls infinitely better, if they were carried on in a different manner; but there is something insufferably tedious in the usual process of such a meeting. It would surely be much more rational if conversation instead of dancing were made the order [...]