For the first-time reader of In Search of Lost Time, Proust’s sinuous sentences can feel convoluted and even taxing, demanding—without due cause—such a sustained attention that editions of Proust’s masterpiece released “for the modern reader” should be equipped with a medicinal preface that contains a filled prescription for Ritalin. This is
One of the ways to gain clarity about a given thing is to explore not simply what that thing is, but rather to investigate precisely what it is not. When a scientist, for example, wonders what is behind a given effect, it can be an incredibly fruitful exercise to begin
For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45). As this saying of Jesus makes clear, service belongs to the most fundamental vocabulary of the Christian faith. It provides the basis for Jesus’ articulation
Recent scholarship on the so-called conflict between science and religion has revisited the reception of John William Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1875) and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896).[1] Indeed, contrary to common perception, Draper and
Allow me to clarify: in nearly twenty years of working for the Church—at the parish and diocesan levels and in an apostolate that has international reach—I have never seen a parish (or diocesan) pastoral plan produce the wide-spread transformative fruit its authors hoped for. I am not talking about capital
Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was born to John and Emily (Chalmers) MacIntyre in Glasgow, Scotland, on January 12, 1929. He earned a BA in classics from Queen Mary College (University of London) in 1949 and began graduate work in philosophy at Manchester University the same year. He received an MA in
Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it bears much fruit (John 12:24). This verse is announced by Jesus just after his entry into Jerusalem for the last time
The Swedish naturalist and botanist Carl Linnaeus caused a storm of controversy in the eighteenth century by classifying homo sapiens in the same genus (homo) as the recently discovered orangutan and by placing the genus homo within the order of primates. Linnaeus did not deny the unique dignity of human beings.