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 Blockbusters like Bing Crosby’s Bells of St. Mary’s or grand biblical epics in bold technicolor have been replaced by nunsploitation horror flicks like the 2024 Immaculate with Sydney Sweeney, anti-traditionalist conspiracy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
In John the Evangelist’s account of the woman caught in adultery, there is an odd detail. We know the scene. A group of scribes and pharisees bring a woman caught in adultery before Jesus. They wanted to stone her to death in fulfilment of the Law and catch Jesus in
In a recent article discussing John Keble’s defense of patristic exegesis, Ephraim Radner suggests that in our own post-modern age, with its professed love of diversity, its penchant for popularized exoticism, and its interest in religious or “spiritual” experience, early Christian ascetical practices and the Fathers’ non-historical mode of scriptural
The Contemporary Metaphysics of Power and Sex Are women rational and free persons? Catholicism’s answer should be easy to discern, surely, given that Christianity was uniquely supportive of the equal human dignity of women in the ancient world. Yet many loud voices are claiming that the Catholic faith teaches that
In his dialectical reconstruction of Christianity, G.W.F. Hegel not only distorts theological events into philosophical moments through which the Spirit (Geist) comes to self-consciousness, but in doing so, he contracts each “stage” in such a way that each appropriates the role of the one that follows. The series begins with