In his beautiful treatment of the resurrection in the Summa theologiae, Thomas Aquinas writes that one of the reasons why Christ had to rise from the dead is to “confirm our faith in his divinity” (ST IIIa, q. 53, a. 1) Christ’s resurrection—and his prior raising of Lazarus—are miracles that
It seems that everyone from industry is finding Artificial Intelligence (AI) to be useful. Even skeptics of AI are softening to the idea that AI can make work easier. People are confessing that they are using AI to write their emails, to help them set the tone, or to pitch
Saint Mark tells us in his Gospel that as the disciples came down from the Mount of the Transfiguration, they were discussing among themselves what “rising from the dead” could mean (see Mark 9:10). A little earlier, the Lord had foretold his passion and his resurrection after three days. Peter
If the case against God’s goodness almost always references the Holocaust, this argument almost always references the Inquisition. Whatever the notional benefits of religious membership, how can one reasonably subject one’s life and choices to institutions that are responsible for so much intolerance and bloodshed, so many benighted centuries of
Films and series with spiritual themes—faith, transcendence, human meaning, the sacred, the holy—seem to have fallen on hard times. Blockbusters like Bing Crosby’s Bells of St. Mary’s or grand biblical epics in bold technicolor have been replaced by nunsploitation horror flicks like the 2024 Immaculate with Sydney Sweeney, anti-traditionalist conspiracy
The story of my recent book, Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America, presents an empirical challenge to traditional secularization theory, which holds that, as societies become more modern and developed, they will become more secular. While traditional religion has declined in the United States, it
In the 1987 film, Wall Street, Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas, who won the academy award for best actor), amid illegal insider trading schemes, states that “greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” Is that true? William T. Sherman, after the Civil War, became a divisional commander
With the upcoming centenary of Under the Sun of Satan (Sous Le Soleil de Satan) (1926) on the horizon, and with the explosions of rage, real or contrived, before us on the daily basis, the endless lies streaming through our information systems, constantly recycled as bilge, with the inversion of