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 [...]
If you’re doing the work that’s given you for the glory of God your work is just as important as the Prime Minister’s. And it ought to be a consolation to those of us whom ill-health has knocked out of life’s battle altogether, so that God seems to have no work for us to do [...]
True union with God comes not by escaping time but by coursing through it with Christ, its creator and consummator. If God is the author of time, and if by His divine decree we find ourselves immersed in time, fated to swim amid the ebb and flow of temporality, is it even thinkable that God [...]
C.S. Lewis believes in the laws of nature, but he argues that miracles do not violate them because miracles are done by the Creator of the natural world Himself. Miracles are, therefore, exceptions to the laws of nature. The Great Commission commands all Christians to share the Gospel with non-Christians. Different groups of non-Christians want [...]
Why do our lives happen this way or that? Are they meaningless? For four thousand winters Adam lay bound, bound by death, bound in death. So the medieval English hymn Adam lay ybounden has it. Not much is known about the hymn other than the parchment it is preserved on and speculations of its provenance. That is enough for our [...]
God’s love is deepest in us, as the very ground of our being. It is here in our deepest self that our desire to love and be loved that will only ultimately be satisfied in God, rises to enter into him. Inspired by and supported with as much of God’s love that our weakness can [...]
Saint John of the Cross restores, to a world which had nearly lost it, a sense of the transcendence of Almighty God. This is not to say that he loses sight for a moment of the Divine immanence, a subject which no mystical work treats with more delicacy and insight than the Spiritual Canticle. But [...]
Jesus Christ remains absolutely central to the life of the Church and, indeed, to the whole created order of the universe. In a Catholic economy of salvation, the two orders of nature and grace, of man and God, are not sundered one from the other. Jesus became the Savior of both realms, and God meant [...]
The fact that I needed glasses came as a surprise to everyone, most of all to myself. I was about eleven years old, having a late breakfast at Panera Bread after Saturday morning Mass with the family. My go-to order was a cinnamon roll, but that day I decided to try something new. But when [...]
It is a truth of the Church universally acknowledged that loving God is the end for which we are created. God’s love alone makes sense of and makes meaningful my life, your life. And yet loving God can seem difficult—not, to be sure, because God has loved us too little but rather because we have [...]
The genealogy of Jesus, so strange upon our ear, is no excursion into mere curiosity or arcane trivia. It is the unfolding and making known of the tale of God’s mercies down the centuries, told out in the lives of the many most of whose names are known to God alone and who lie in [...]
We can trace the desire to understand the universal quality and dignity of the human person as far back as our very origin as a Western people. As I get older, I’m terribly troubled by the move—going on since rise of the New Left and, especially, the Maoists who introduced us to Political Correctness in [...]
How, we wonder, can we know the lightness of His burden and the easiness of His yoke? Unless we are gifted by some special grace, this is not the work of one day or one night. We must surrender to the divine pedagogy, to the training that He offers us every day. Matthew 11: 28-30 [...]
The Second Coming is of course closely connected to the doctrine of God’s kingdom. To believe in Jesus’ New Advent is to believe that he is the true king, that he will return to take his rightful place as ruler of the world, setting everything right again and governing a heavenized earth in justice and [...]