What follows is about Catholic evangelization, motherhood, the trauma of worldwide pandemics, and the lessons about each that Louisa May Alcott’s beloved nineteenth-century children’s novel Little Women (1868-69) can offer us today. But it starts inside my house, January 2022, in small-town Texas, when my six-year-old daughter stands before me
Americans struggle to understand the nature of Catholicism. In the U.S. context, religion is often understood as a strictly private affair. On Sundays, we go to church (or at least we once did, before many people stopped going to church at all). Such attendance, of course, is an optional dimension of
As a young adult of nineteen—just a few years older than the high school students I teach—Augustine had his first conversion on his pilgrimage towards Christianity. As Augustine recounts in his Confessions, the catalyst for his first conversion was, famously, his reading of Cicero’s Hortensius. A pagan’s apologia for philosophy
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