Collapsing the “Two Books” Newton’s theological investigations, marked by his pursuit of textual “simplicity” and his anti-Trinitarian convictions, revealed a man deeply invested in reconciling faith with reason. His approach to Scripture, which sought to uncover the “good sense” behind divine revelation, was emblematic of a broader intellectual shift in
You don’t need to rearrange your life around it,” a friend recently texted me about the Christmas pageant at our small-town parish. I had mentioned that my son was missing his December campout for Cub Scouts for it, as my children were deliberating about which role preferences to mark on
The details of their analyses vary, but a number of commentators have recently come to the same conclusion: Catholic theology finds itself in a profoundly challenging moment. In his 2021 essay, “The Crisis in Catholic Theology,” Grant Kaplan reflects from his position at a large Catholic university on the “gravitational pull
Augustine’s Confessions lends itself to a rich variety of readings and understandings. There is a lot that can be said about it, a sensus plenum of meanings. I want to propose one way to read the text that sheds light on what Augustine is learning over the course of his conversions
A Story About Ambiguity It was a mistake, says Hans Urs von Balthasar, to think of saints as heroes. Those kinds of stories (Balthasar means Western heroic epics) were, in some sense, the kind available to the early church and to the medieval church, at least in terms of Hellenistic
Just about everything Newman wrote on any topic over a long career of writing is controversial in some way, or another, and engenders strong responses, whether of outrage or acclaim, frustration or elation, the emotion of being hard-done by or quiet vindication. The experience of reading Newman—either The Idea of
A few years ago, I heard a woman who had founded a Catholic religious institute give a witness about the history of her vocation and her community. At the end, an attendee asked her: how do you see that you are living the hundredfold that Christ promises those who leave