Church history is persistently a contentious affair, especially when it comes to debates about doctrine. From the Gnostics to the Modernists, these disputes get a lot of coverage in various histories of the Church. While our times have their own doctrinal disputes, we are faced with a pastoral crisis more
St. Thomas deals with free will and impeccability on several occasions: first, around 1254–1256, in his commentary on the second book of the Sentences; then, in 1258 or 1259, in the De Veritate; around 1259–1261, in the third book of the Contra Gentiles; around 1265–1268, in the first part of the
All of the official documentation of the Church agrees that virginity or celibacy, whether embraced as one of the evangelical counsels vowed by consecrated religious, or as part and parcel of the vocation to the priesthood in the Roman Catholic communion, carries a special “sign” value. Virginity or celibacy is
1. A Long and Difficult History A theology of the Holy Spirit and, in more general terms, a theology of Christ and of the tri-unity of God, took a long time to develop. There was no model to follow. The chapter was blank and yet, in a sense, its contents
In the last ten years, scientists have placed various components of the human brain into animals of other species, producing mice with human brain cell grafts, rhesus macaques with a key human neurodevelopmental gene MCPH1, and most recently cynomolgus monkey embryos with human stem cells inserted into them. The mice with
Animals feed, but only humans feast. The heart of a feast, as philosopher Josef Pieper noted, is sacrifice: to retreat from the workaday world into the landscape of leisure, to transform our food into the uselessness of art and offering. Divine in origin, the feast is a place of propitiation,
From being a limited concern of Neo-Scholastics in the mid-twentieth century, the alleged heterodoxy of Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) and other ressourcement theologians has become a rallying cry of self-proclaimed traditionalists in the twenty-first. Despite his acceptance by the hierarchical Church, aspects of the French cardinal’s life and thought remain misunderstood
My family has a tradition that after we read a novel together—which we do often, as my children have the fortunate or unfortunate circumstance, depending on how you see it, to have a children’s literature professor as their mother—we watch the movie if there is one. Naturally, what is different