It is a fact that theologians and theology departments in Catholic institutions of higher education struggle to justify their existences before their colleagues and before the world. Many a genealogy has been written to trace the blame for our dire circumstances. What follows below is not another one. Instead, I
Whatever we think of Origen today, his commitment to the Scripture is undeniable. He is known for his allegorical approach to biblical interpretation. Unlike other Christian theologians of his time, he studied the Hebrew language and consulted rabbinic interpretations of the Jewish Scriptures. Yet, beyond these commonly known facts, there
Background: Iris Murdoch Iris Murdoch was an atheist and a Platonist moral philosopher who taught at Oxford from 1948-1963 before retiring to spend the rest of her life writing racy novels. At first glance, she seems an unlikely candidate to offer a fresh vision of moral theology to Catholic thinkers.
Double Vocation: Priest and Scientist Erich Wasmann, a Jesuit priest and accomplished scientist, was one of the leading voices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century championing the compatibility of the theory of evolution with the Christian faith. There can be little doubt that his influence helped obtain for
1. Introductions to the classical doctrine of the Incarnation fall at the first hurdle when they begin by attempting to explain how two can be one, or how Jesus may be said to possess two things of various kinds—natures, wills, minds, personalities. Some of these options are wrong a priori
Blessed are those who fear the Lord! —Psalm 128 The fool hath said in his heart, “There is no God” (Psalm 14:1, 53:1). This Psalm passage is familiar to any reader of Anselm’s Proslogion. It is therefore associated very directly with the ontological argument for the existence of God and for
The French Revolution, which began in the summer of 1789, famously proclaimed the new creed of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Over the next several decades, this creed spread as a revolutionary force from France to the rest of Western Europe, and soon enough to the Spanish and French colonies in
Eugene McCarraher writes in his The Enchantments of Mammon as if he has our harried last-minute Christmas shopping in mind: The grotesque ontology of scarcity and money, the tawdry humanism of acquisitiveness and conflict, the reduction of rationality to the mercenary principles of pecuniary reason—this ensemble of falsehoods that compromise the foundation