Freedom and Predestination
If God is not love but only knowledge, then it is difficult or impossible to see how human free will and divine predestination can both be true. But if God is love, there is a way. Freedom and...
View ArticleThe Central Argument in Christian Apologetics
The doctrine of Christ’s divinity is the central Christian doctrine, for it is like a skeleton key that opens all the others. Christians have not independently reasoned out and tested each of the...
View ArticleModernity and Morality – Father Barron Comments
One of the most significant fault lines in cultural history opened up in the 16th and 17th centuries, with the emergence of a characteristically modern way of approaching life… Watch and listen to Fr....
View ArticleWhose Rights? The Paradox of Moral Relativism
Whose rights are protected in a relativistic culture? It is precisely on this point that relativistic societies face a serious dilemma: How does a community arbitrate various individuals’ competing...
View ArticleHow can a loving God allow his beloved creature, made in his own image, to die?
God is Love! This is the most glorious and welcomed notion in all of Christian theology. Man must die! This is the most vexing and most unwelcomed realization in the domain of human existence. How can...
View ArticleBut Don’t You Impose Your Morality on Me!
When teaching about virtues and the moral life, I often think of a discussion I had with a college friend. He was taking an ethics class with a professor who promoted moral relativism – the notion that...
View ArticleWhy Faith is Indeed a Light
In “new” atheist and secularist circles today, faith is regularly ridiculed. It is presented as pre-scientific mumbo jumbo, Bronze Age credulity, the surrender of the intellect, unwarranted submission...
View ArticleIdentity – What We Do Changes Who We Are
This thing about identity – there’s more here than meets the eye, more here than most psychologists talk about, more here than we can understand, and what I’m going to present is more questions than...
View ArticleCan Human Free Will and Divine Predestination Both be True?
If God is not love but only knowledge, then it is difficult or impossible to see how human free will and divine predestination can both be true. But if God is love, there is a way. Freedom and...
View ArticleLesson One in Prayer
Let’s get very, very basic and very, very practical about prayer. The single most important piece of advice I know about prayer is also the simplest: Just do it! How to do it is less important than...
View ArticleThe Mindless Flapping Leaf
Every springtime when the leaves reappear, I remember something profound I once said. I was a doctoral candidate at Penn State University, and our research group was dining outside on pizza and Corona®...
View ArticleToo Enlightened To Believe?
In the days when states of the United States were still “the colonies” and men wore powdered wigs, a new way of thinking captured the intelligentsia of the western world. “The miracle stories in the...
View ArticleReading St. John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio—Like a Mother
Pope St. John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio was given in 1998 to address the relationship between faith and reason. The purpose of reading an encyclical is, in my opinion, to work it into your...
View ArticleThe Four Causes of Holy Mother Church
“In the Nicene Creed we profess the four Marks of the Church which are one, holy, catholic and apostolic. These four marks are intrinsically intertwined. These are those things by which we can...
View ArticleImago Dei
The renowned psychologist, Paul C. Vitz, has made the tragic observation that “America is the most polytheistic nation in history; we worship over 350 million gods.” So disconnected have we become from...
View ArticleI Believe in God
When we say “I believe” as we recite the Apostle’s Creed we are making a statement about our Faith. The theological virtue of Faith is supernatural and infused by gift of the Holy Spirit. St. Thomas...
View ArticleFive Questions From Catholics About Evolution
In elementary school, children learn about dinosaurs and fossils, how fossils form, how paleontologists reconstruct skeletons of animals from the past using those fossils. There seems no difficulty...
View ArticleDon’t You Impose Your Morality on Me!
When teaching about virtues and the moral life, I often think of a discussion I had with a college friend. He was taking an ethics class with a professor who promoted moral relativism – the notion that...
View ArticlePope Benedict XVI on Creation and Evolution: “Complementary Realities”
In 1981, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger, developed a catechesis for adults on the creation narratives because, he noted, creation catechesis was nearly absent from teaching,...
View ArticleCan Human Free Will and Divine Predestination Both be True?
If God is not love but only knowledge, then it is difficult or impossible to see how human free will and divine predestination can both be true. But if God is love, there is a way. Freedom and...
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