” The gospel was not good advice but good news.” — William R. Inge, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, 1911—1934. Dean Inge was right. The preacher’s primary task is not to tell people what to do. It is to proclaim good news. Inge’s younger colleague at St. Paul’s, Canon . . . . Continue Reading »
Fifty years. It seems like a long time. But if you pick up Jacques Barzun’s searching analysis of modern education, The House of Intellect , the half century melts away. Published in 1959, this piquant critique of post-War American attitudes toward the life of the mind remains . . . . Continue Reading »
It is the issue that simply will not go away¯at least not in the post-Christian, post-consensus West. It is the issue that breeds a nasty recurring tendency to divide, and divide, and then divide some more. It is the issue to which (seemingly) every General Assembly, every major synod, and . . . . Continue Reading »
The earliest Christians used the name of Jesus Christ to cast out demons, but today atheists use it to cast religion out of the public square. No other name has ever had such power for both believers and deniers alike. Simply saying that name in public is enough to traumatize secularists possessed . . . . Continue Reading »
When I was a freshman in college, a woman who looked like a whole-earth hippie asked me if I had a personal relationship with Jesus. The question struck me as a strange one. Yet I found myself compelled to hear her out, and began to hang out with the young people in the InterVarsity Christian . . . . Continue Reading »
Sr. Sandra M. Schneiders, plainly unhappy with a recently announced apostolic visitation of women’s communities in America, wrote an email to some of her colleagues and friends which she later approved for publication in the National Catholic Reporter .In her email, Sr. Schneiders, a member of . . . . Continue Reading »
President Obama’s first choice for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services was former South Dakota senator Tom Daschle¯a pro-abortion Catholic Democrat. President Obama’s second choice for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services is Kansas Gov. . . . . Continue Reading »
Biblical scholars can be wonderfully predictable. John W. Martens, a biblical scholar at the University of St. Thomas, is not happy with my observations last week about our need for an approach to the Bible more closely coordinated with Church teaching¯and a theology more engaged in biblical . . . . Continue Reading »
Last May and June, our daughter Therese and two friends, all a year out of college, walked for over six hundred miles on the millennium-old pilgrimage route from southern France across the Pyrenees and the breadth of northern Spain to St. James Compostela. Therese did not take a single picture. When . . . . Continue Reading »
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