Nathaniel Peters

It took me five years of graduate school to realize that my study is a vocation. My thinking about this was prompted by finally reading A.G. Sertillanges’s The Intellectual Life, which along with Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture and Elizabeth Corey’s “Learning in Love” make essential reading for anyone considering graduate work or a career in the intellectual world. Culling insights from those thinkers and from my own time in graduate school, I thought I would offer some thoughts for those beginning graduate school. Continue Reading »

I did not think I knew much about death. In high school, my headmaster reminded us constantly that young though we were, we were destined to die. Death was an abstract fact of reality for me, mainly a reason to pursue now what mattered most in life. And then I saw Richard John Neuhaus die. At the . . . . Continue Reading »

The small oratory at Littlemore”dark but warm, dominated by red damask hangings that exude Victorian piety”is the room in which John Henry Newman was received into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church. Newman is most famous for that act, and that is why the Catholic Church celebrates his feast day today, on the anniversary of his reception, and not on the day of his death, as is customary. Those of us who have followed in his footsteps from evangelical Protestantism through Anglicanism into Catholicism revere him. For us he is a guide and patron who spurred us on and captures what we thought and felt with prose, intellect, and holiness to which we can only aspire… . Continue Reading »

“The most serious of the evils that afflict the world these days are youth unemployment and the loneliness of the old.” So begins the most recent papal interview, this one with Eugenio Scalfari, founder of the Italian paper La Repubblica, with whom Francis had already had an exchange of letters. If you look at that sentence as it stands, it sounds a bit incongruous… . Continue Reading »

“I am a sinner.” That is the key for understanding Pope Francis. He tells us so at the very beginning of his interview with Antonio Spadaro, S.J., for Jesuit publications worldwide. “This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.” He is also, he says, “a sinner whom the Lord has looked upon,” and upon whom the Lord has had mercy. Sin and mercy are two of the key words emerging from the interview which, at over ten thousand words, offers us the best picture yet of the pope and provides a broader context for the words and gestures of his pontificate… . Continue Reading »

In his column yesterday , Stephen Webb argues that von Balthasar’s view of the descent into hell is incorrect, but not for the usual reasons. Webb agrees with von Balthasar that Christ enters the abode of the damned, but argues that he comes to preach, not to suffer. Based on his experience . . . . Continue Reading »

The word sin never once appears in the English text of Lumen Fidei, the new encyclical letter released last month by Pope Francis. (It does, however, appear in a quotation in the Latin text that is clipped in the translation.) Neither Francis nor Pope Benedict XVI (whom Francis acknowledges as the author of the encyclical’s first draft) are afraid… Continue Reading »

One of the greatest theological diseases we find in contemporary Catholicism is pelagianism, the notion that we’re all basically good people whose moral improvement and salvation is the result of our good actions. In this mindset, God’s grace becomes less consequential because . . . . Continue Reading »

Maundy Thursday, like Palm Sunday, begins in joy and ends in sorrow. The music of Maundy Thursday usually recounts the events of the Last Supper, the foot-washing, the discourses found in the Gospel of John, the betrayal, and Jesus’ arrest. Orlando di Lasso’s “In Monte . . . . Continue Reading »

Sandro Magister writes : It is a widespread opinion, confirmed by numerous testimonies, that the intention of electing pope Jorge Mario Bergoglio grew substantially among the cardinals on the morning of Saturday, March 9, when the then-archbishop of Buenos Aires spoke at the second to last of the . . . . Continue Reading »