Are we, on Earth, the lone intelligent inhabitants of this vast universe? The Catholic tradition teaches us that there are other rational creatures, namely angels, who are purely intellectual, non-physical beings. But do we humans share the cosmos with any other embodied intelligent forms of life? Today, speculation about the
Like Augustine’s Confessions, what is offered here is in a mode of theological memory. [1] It is a recollection, a re-collection, a gathering up and dusting off and laying out vignettes of personal memories side-by-side in a retrospective effort to discern a providential pattern of moments that cumulatively prompted my turn
The Catholic tradition has much to say about the relation of science to the faith. In what follows I will discuss the development of that tradition, starting with its roots in Sacred Scripture and ending with some of the writings of St. John Paul II. A good place to start
On October 7 Hamas attacked the state of Israel, killing approximately 1200 people, mostly civilians. Whole families were slaughtered in their homes. Among the victims were hundreds of young adults at a music festival. The killings were accompanied in numerous cases by torture, disfigurement, and rape. Around 240 hostages were taken
We Catholics are never more cruel to one another than when we are arguing over our tradition. We know, in some way, even if in a mostly inchoate way, that tradition is our temporal marrow. It is something like the meter for a melody. We know that tradition means Christ
In his “Philosophy of Composition,” an essay written about the process of writing “The Raven,” Edgar Allan Poe famously claims that “the death . . . of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic in the world.” He wrote these words in 1846, a year before his young wife,
Some Catholics are not sure what to think of biological evolution. They hear from their evangelical Protestant friends and neighbors that it is contrary to Christian belief, but they do not hear much on the subject one way or the other from authorities in the Catholic Church. For example, the
In 1953, while The Lord of the Rings was being prepared for publication, Tolkien wrote: The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically