The first beatitude teaches us, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). The Gospel calls us to a paradox in its teaching on poverty. First, it bids us recognize in the face of the poor the face of Christ. Our culture is
Over Lent, we took a good long look at one of the legs of Catholic moral teaching: the Ten Commandments. Some people have the notion that the Ten Commandments are pretty much all you need for Catholic moral teaching. Hew to them and you’ll be a moral person–and being a
“Getting back to basics” is one of those desires which has, in one form or another, been a hallmark of our world nearly from the start. Ever since the Fall of Adam and Eve, there have been thousands of books, poems, movies and what-not exhorting us to return to something
A subtle and slender thread often connects the Old and New Testaments. For instance, Jeremiah 31:7-9 prophesies a great throng of returning exiles from Babylon about 70 years after the great catastrophe of Babylonian conquest which struck Israel in 587 BC. Promising that the Lord has not abandoned Israel, he
The closest you ever get to a poll in Scripture occurs in this memorable exchange: Now at the feast he used to release for them one prisoner for whom they asked. And among the rebels in prison, who had committed murder in the insurrection, there was a man called Barabbas.
After a three week series on the flaws of atheism it’s not hard for an atheist reader to conclude that I have nothing good to say about atheists and for a certain sort of Christian to conclude that I assume the damnation of atheists. The truth, of course, is that
There are, according to St. Thomas, only two arguments against the existence of God. The first, translated into modern lingo, means: “Bad stuff happens, so God doesn’t exist.” The second says, “Everything seems to work fine without God, so He’s not there.” Most “scientific” attempts to argue for atheism (such
Last week, we discussed one facet of the incoherence of atheism, namely its dependence on materialism and naturalism to try to explain away the supernatural. It seems like a pretty promising road at first. The atheist loves to recite little tropes like “Once, people thought thunder was the voice of
One of the many things I don’t understand about atheists is their curious insistence on saying the religion is a purely natural phenomenon, coupled with their great outrage at religion. It gets odder the longer you contemplate it. On the one hand, God does not exist. On the other hand,
How lovely is thy dwelling place, O LORD of hosts!My soul longs, yea, faints for the courts of the LORD;my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God. – Psalm 84:1-2 The deepest desire of the heart is expressed in Psalm 84. The lover of God “faints for
I sometimes fancy the hardest thing about the gospel is not the wrath of God, but his mercy. I think, for instance, of some years ago, when serial child killer Wesley Allen Dodd stood on the gallows in Washington State and professed his faith in Jesus and his hope of
Many modern Americans have the notion that St. John’s Apocalypse is primarily about terror over the loss of the American Way of Life. Admittedly, the Apocalypse encourages us to, shall we say, consider rather more circumspectly our worldly fortunes than we might otherwise what with plagues, famines and all dotting
Everybody is familiar with the pop culture drama and comedy caricature of the fundamentalist preacher or rigid authoritarian priest who, possessing special knowledge his tribe trembles at, pops off about things he doesn’t understand. He turns up in popular entertainment all the time, denouncing people as witches for building some
Christians are accustomed to thinking of Jesus as the Anointed One. And, to be sure, he is. The name “Christ” is the Englished version of “Christos” and that is simply the Greek for “Messiah” or “Anointed One”. It refers, of course, to Jesus in its ultimate sense, but it also
St. Paul tells us that it was Jesus who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, pastors and teachers. So far as I can tell, however, there is no office in the Church of “Professional Bomb Thrower”. That’s just one of the reasons I
The Church’s tradition is chockablock with all sorts of devotions to angels, prayers to angels, and pleas for angelic intercession. One of the most common is the St. Michael prayer, which reminds us that, as Ephesians 6 tells us, we are living in a cosmic war zone. This means that
Last week, we discussed the predicament of those who try to avoid the rather strong inference of a universe made by You Know Who via recourse to the so-called “Multiverse” theory. This theory accounts for the extraordinary fine tuning of the universe by positing an infinite number of other universes
As the existence of everything from SETI to Star Trek attests, our civilization is fascinated with the question of the existence of non-human intelligences. The Faith says that we already know of at least one such class of creature. It is called an “angel”. However, our culture’s response to the
Some time ago I was on a camping trip with a bunch of kids and we were stargazing. My nine year old friend was sitting next to me as I pointed to Cygnus and remarked, “That constellation is called the Northern Cross.” She replied, “What’s a constellation?” I explained the
A few months back I guested on a talk radio show and got a call from a man who wanted to know what the “official Catholic teaching” was on (I kid you not) “how much body mass you can lose before you lose your soul.” The man was apparently under
One thing I have discovered (to my surprise) is how shocked some folk get when I express my opinion that we humans are never getting off the earth in any serious way. Oh sure, we might get a couple of people to Mars to walk around. Maybe a long-term space
Dale Ahlquist Interviews Mark Shea for Gilbert Magazine GM: Mark, you have been described as “A hero of Blogdom” and “The closest thing we have to a modern Chesterton.” Why would anyone say such things? MS: Beats me. I guess it’s because I’m a big blogger. Or at least I
The center of our Faith is Eucharist. Eucharist means “thanksgiving”. That means that the center of our Faith is thanksgiving. It is in the form of a thanksgiving meal that our Lord chose to make Himself present to us. And He did so, shockingly, “on the night He was betrayed”.
The other day, I sternly warned my two year old, Peter, that he must never, ever touch or kick the car door handle. For all he could tell, I was laying out an eternal edict, exalting car door handles above all things, and committing him to the reverence of car
I have sometimes ridiculed the Left’s commitment to abortion as its sole core principle by referring to the “sacrament of abortion”. It stands at the center of a belief system which holds that the Imperial Autonomous Self is the highest good and that, therefore, all (including the very life of
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