At its core, superstition is treating as God things or persons that are not God. Superstition is a failure in faith and reason. It is a key human pitfall, one that will be around as long as human beings are human, and one we must guard against whatever its source. “Superstition” is a word encountered [...]
Perceiving metaphysical reality requires being spiritually alive to its presence. It is the virtue of humility which opens the heart in gratitude and the eyes in wonder. A very thoughtful and thought-provoking comment on my recent essay “Tolkien on Reality” merits a response. Here’s the comment in question: The conflation of “real” and “alive” isn’t [...]
Time taken does not perish because it is made of imperishable things, such as truth itself. It exists in eternity liberated from the shadow of transient things. Time is a great mystery. It is... but we don’t really know what it is. We know that we are subject to it and that it is not [...]
The case of Naomi Wolf is a sign of our sinister times. We do not know whether she will develop her faith and embrace Church teachings. Such conversions are best left in the hands of God, Whose ways are mysterious and inscrutable. However, her desperate plea for help against the principalities and powers of darkness [...]
What is happening right now in regard to the UFO activity recently acknowledged by the U.S. government is fascinating. The questions raised by the possibilities take us back to first principles, causing us to ask: What is man? Who is God? And what is man’s relationship to his fellow man and to God? More than [...]
In “The Language of God,” Francis Collins breaks into the debate between faith and reason with intelligible writing and with the strength of his experience as a scientist and the nine-years director of the Human Genome Project. He is a man who found God while deciphering the hidden codes of life. The Language of God: [...]
In a somewhat bizarre recent interview with the National Catholic Register, the aging rock star, Sting, who eons ago had been lead singer of the rock band The Police, waxed in a bemused and confused way about his relationship with the Catholic faith, in which he was raised but which he has abandoned. He gave [...]
Michio Kaku has made a name for himself as a world-leading theoretical physicist unafraid to speak his mind. Dr. Kaku, the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York, has published more than 70 articles in physics journals on topics such as supersymmetry, superstring theory, supergravity, and hadronic [...]
The narratives of science and Christianity are obviously not novels, nor works of fiction, for both claim to tell the true story of humankind—where we came from, what we are, and where we are going. To determine if either of these narratives is true, we must assess the plot… In 1882, Nietzsche’s madman ran to [...]
The Seventh Seal is focused on man’s spiritual doubt, and even complete lack of faith in God. The film asks: How can God remain separate from us as we experience darkness and suffering? The Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman, has secured his place in the cinematic canon not only as a superb and unique director but [...]
Agnosticism is the ultimate stupidity and wickedness because it doesn’t so much reject God as ignore him. If I were God, I’d be more angry at such cold indifference than anything else. “Either God is, or he is not. But to which view shall we be inclined? Reason cannot decide this question. [Remember that Pascal’s [...]
A straightforward reading of Michel Houellebecq’s book shows that the author wants to consider the possibility that religion—not spiritualism, not some kind of therapeutic deism, but true, practiced, day-to-day religion—soothes our longings and grants us some measure of peace and satisfaction, a measure withheld by secular liberalism… Submission: A Novel by Michel Houellebecq (Groupe Flammarion, 2015) [...]
In Modernity, the capacity for effortless knowing is denied, ignored, or misunderstood. As a result, the origin of all knowledge is taken as unaided human effort and activity. The Two Modes of the Mind If we lack a word for an experience, we obviously cannot talk to others about it, and the experience, no matter [...]
To understand the concept of God in Modernity, I first turned to the high point of Christianity in both the East and West. According to patristic tradition, God can be known in two ways. Cataphatic, or rational, knowledge defines God by positive statements; apophatic knowledge is direct experience of God, although such knowledge cannot be [...]