I have long desired a wilder Catholicism—bygone, primitive, a bit off-kilter. What I have wanted, prayed for, and preached in hope of is that sort of Christianity we read about mostly now in books. Thirty years ago, for instance, William Dalrymple in From the Holy Mountain wrote about stylites, how
Pope Francis recently addressed a conference in Trieste, Italy, on the theme, “At the Heart of Democracy.” He began by invoking Blessed Giuseppe Toniolo’s definition of democracy: “that civil order in which all social, legal, and economic forces . . . cooperate proportionally for the common good, ultimately benefiting the
Hans Urs von Balthasar’s reputation and theological legacy have been attacked in recent years for allegedly contributing to the declining numbers of those who take seriously Catholic faith, morals, and spiritual/sacramental practice. In my judgment, enough has been said already in Atonement, prove unfounded the facile misrepresentations of Balthasar as a
The Challenge One afternoon about twenty-five years ago, I was sitting in an English Department meeting at the Jesuit university where I taught. I was a younger member of the department and was expressing my enthusiasm about a new course I had been invited to create and teach by the
The advocacy of Patristic theology on the part of the nouvelle théologie was motivated, to a large extent, by an admiration for Patristic ways of reading Scripture and of inscribing Scriptural language into theological exposition. The retrieval of these Patristic approaches to Scripture was championed as a remedy for both
All that John Chrysostom teaches about the Eucharist and holy communion circles back to the liturgy. It is the liturgy that calls the Christian away from the busyness and boredom of everyday life, and yet profitable participation in the liturgy can be marred by what the Christian brings to the
Unlike spontaneous healing miracles, which really do occur with some frequency and are acknowledged by skeptics and believers alike, including medical professionals who are atheists, levitations and bilocations are extremely rare events that are seldom taken seriously outside certain belief systems. Levitation and bilocation are but two of several physical