This is the mystery which, in the end, Saint Matthew relates in the pages of his Gospel: Jesus is not a teacher of ethics, or a strange oriental prophet, but the promised Messiah, unrecognisable except to those who had broken together that fragment of the Book of Isaiah and lived with it—lived with its mystery—in [...]
God’s ineffable simplicity is a spring of contemplation. Our wonder only grows when we consider the dignity of the Christian call to be like God. God is simple. We know this from the fact that God cannot be made up of any parts. Why? Because when a whole is composed of parts, that whole needs [...]
Despite our scientific prowess, to have a right view of creation, we still need to know that we are only a part of that creation. If we are tempted to think of ourselves as the true gods, we must recognize that we are just as dependent on God for being as even the lowliest sub-atomic [...]
Making the spiritual ascent into God is rather like trying to run up a downward escalator. The moment you stop moving steadily forwards is the moment when you start moving steadily downward. Going forwards means finding daily time to do what St Peter told his listeners to do when he was the first to announce [...]
There will never be a time when even the best and the brightest bulbs among us shall know all that there is to know concerning God. I am not yet so lost in lexicography,” writes Dr. Johnson on introducing his acclaimed Dictionary of the English Language, “as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, [...]
If God really is our happiness, then the greatest kind of hope is not an expectation of earthly felicity, but rather a bold trust in God’s love for us in spite of every challenge and suffering. “Nothing will be impossible for God” (Luke 1:37). By this one little phrase the weight of despair is lifted [...]
Between the omnipotence of God, who holds all creation in being, and the impotence of men, who possess no claim whatsoever on being, there remains an impassible barrier which no creature may presume to breach. Even the best and the brightest among us are forced to submit to that exigent fact. So utterly ill-equipped are [...]
We need to respect time and its Author. Indeed, one of God’s first acts in Creation was establishing the parameters of time. When Congress votes to make Daylight Saving Time permanent, we put ourselves at the center of things. The issue is time. Daylight Saving Time. Congress is again attempting to make it permanent. If [...]
The books we read this past year in the high-school class I dubbed “Evil 12” so accurately portray evil—whether horrific and nightmarish or subtle and uncanny—that they lead the reader to recognize and love goodness all the more. Indeed, each conveys the depths of both evil and goodness in imitation of the Gospel. This past [...]
There is no folly quite like a man who asserts his independence while standing in a world he neither created nor comprehends, and whose inevitable departure is more mysterious than his humble arrival. The great metaphysical truth on which the whole of Sacred Scripture opens, and to which everything from beginning to end testifies, is that the [...]
The Major Oak, like Robin Hood and Maid Marian, has died. Its death is felt even more deeply because of what it signifies. Its death seems to signify the death of England itself. Imagine for a moment that you are in Middle-earth. Imagine what you would think or feel were you to be told that [...]
There are some ideas so plainly preposterous, so spectacularly stupid, that only an astrophysicist of atheist persuasion could possibly believe them. And when will we stop listening to such people, I’d like to know—all these self-styled experts eager to tell us how little we know? Especially about the origins of the universe, concerning which they [...]
Most Christians, including Paul, would say the Resurrection is the basis of our entire faith, but without creation, there can be no Incarnation or Resurrection. If you were to randomly ask an average Christian, even one who does not routinely pray, pay, or obey, what is the greatest miracle of all, chances are that the answer [...]
While scientific inquiry and advances have changed the world we live in, it does not have the power to penetrate even a centimeter into the primary question of God. There once lived a rather tiresome New England transcendentalist by the name of Margaret Fuller, reputed to have been America’s first feminist, who had fallen early [...]