Moses and John the Baptist: The Final Exodus As explored in a previous essay on Fra Angelico’s The Harrowing of Hell, both Adam and Abel, leading the procession from the cavern of hell, serve as a first reminder of the dust of the wilderness. Through its very distance from heavenly glory,
Sharing life in a human and Christian way does not require that the conditions of this act be conscious. Most of the time, they live implicitly in our good will—a will that is sustained, especially in difficult moments, by a reasoned explanation. Therefore, when the Gospel says, “Take heed, watch
Noah was different. His world was different. According to the figures provided by Genesis 5, at the time when Noah’s father Lamech was born, his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was still alive, at 874 years of age—Adam. Seth, too, was alive. And so were Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, and Methuselah, all of
There was a time when Fr. Patrick Peyton was a household name. It was a time when he regularly spoke to crowds of over a million, when souls lined up to be saved and hardened hearts were transformed by grace everywhere he went. And then Rome told him to back
Alvin Plantinga is famous for developing a “free will” defense of moral evil which argued that God could have a reason for allowing that evil in light of God’s decision to create free persons. Logically speaking, the problem of evil is not a difficult problem to solve. The existence of
I. HELL No quibbling helps here: the idea of eternal damnation, which had taken ever clearer shape in the Judaism of the century or two before Christ, has a firm place in the teaching of Jesus, as well as in the apostolic writings. Dogma takes its stand on solid ground
Let us face it: our history tells us that deep divisions have been annoyingly persistent in the Church. From the very beginning, Peter and Paul—whose feast day we celebrate together on June 29 as pillars of the Church—went at it pretty hard over their fundamental differences. Paul even speaks of
While some effort has been expended in bringing the fields of moral theology into productive conversation with those of liturgical and sacramental theology, sustained reflection on the role of the sacraments in the Christian moral life continues to elude moral theologians, generally speaking. With this being the case, it is