Simeon Zahl offers thoughts and comments on David Bentley Hart’s “blistering reflection on the economic ethics of the first Christians,” and Hart responds.
Henri Nouwen, a Pierrot-like figure with many masks, turned personal vulnerability into spiritual exploration, addressing other people’s pain by sharing his own.
It is worth stopping to reflect on what Francis has described as “the very foundation of the church’s life,” now, while the Year of Mercy remains fresh in our minds.
Fond memories and beautiful places are fine, but they are not all that matters. Indeed, there is a “Catholic way of doing things” when it comes to death.
Problems with faith cross religious boundaries. Here are the fruits of a conversation that I’ve been conducting, with my friend and in my mind, for a long time.
One of the biggest problems confronting Catholics engaged in the public square is our failure to develop a body of political thought relevant to this modern moment.
The USCCB meeting offers another opportunity to ditch a style of culture-war Catholicism that has failed to persuade even many of the faithful in the pews.
Even when produced with the most meticulous scholarship, our dictionaries ought to remind us that words exceed our best efforts at definition and classification.
Diarmid MacCulloch wants us to understand the religious beliefs of centuries ago in their own terms, however strange they may seem to modern secular sensibilities.
The place of the term “revelation” in the church needs to be debated. The church cannot eliminate either “revelation” or “word” as metaphors for divine activity.
Mass facing the people has a profound beauty. A view of the priest’s back and elbows isn’t naturally or inevitably going to make anyone think of the Second Coming.
In ‘The Practice of Catholic Theology,’ Paul J. Griffiths writes about what it takes to be a Catholic theologian. More notable is what it doesn’t take.
Trump may be what sixteenth-century Catholic theologians were worried about, but Luther wouldn’t have recognized him as a Christian any more than the pope would.
By signing one sentence asking for an exemption, the Little Sisters are not formally cooperating. They are materially cooperating only in a minor and remote sense.
Pope Benedict XVI resigned over three years ago; Francis is undeniably the only pope.Yet in some ways the transition is ongoing and continues to affect the Church.
Online media in the wake of tragedy could be doing something good. It may be a modern means of activating an ancient genre: a particular subset of human sorrow.
Church teaching about the use of force is paradoxical. “Just peace”—not just war—should be the distinguishing mark and calling of the global Catholic Church.
The tensions within Orthodoxy are partly theological. But there is also a more worldly clash of interests, including the rivalry between Constantinople and Moscow.
The most debilitating conceptual limitation in Whitmarsh’s story is an unawareness of what “theism” is—or, how “classical theism” differs from polytheistic myth.
Early stories of Jews, Christians, and Muslims; the politics of celibacy and marriage; reflections from Cardinal Kasper; afterlife and wealth in early Christianity.
In his examination of imaginative pictures of the afterlife and the ways in which Christians disposed of their wealth, Brown traces two distinct lines of development
From the Cardinal called a “clever theologian” by Pope Francis, this volume of Walter Kasper’s writings characterize the nature of religious belief in late modernity
Gregg looks at five of the two dozen stories with characters shared by the Jewish Bible, New Testament, and Qur’an, interpreting how they are told in each tradition.
As a student of Reinhold Niebuhr, President Obama has sought out occasions on which he could preach about the ironies and uncertainties of human action.
“Deeply Christian, she has no desire to impose her religion on others, but only to work together to make her country better. Her open, humble practice stays with me”
