You're Wrong, Bart Ehrman
Well, it's Easter time, and that means that the mainstream media and publishing houses can be counted upon to issue de-bunking attacks on orthodox Christianity. The best-publicized of these is Bart...
View ArticleWhat Easter Really Means
In first century Judaism, there were many views concerning what happened to people after they died. Following a very venerable tradition, some said that death was the end, that the dead simply returned...
View ArticleHow Two Popes Became Heroes
This Sunday, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (Pope John XXIII) and Karol Jozef WojtyÅa (Pope John Paul II) will be recognized as saints of the Catholic Church, and may God be praised for it! No one with the...
View ArticleThe Danger of Soft Atheism
A very instructive exchange between Gary Gutting, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame, and Philip Kitcher, a philosophy professor at Columbia, just appeared in the pages of the New York Times. Kitcher...
View ArticleBill Maher vs. Ralph Reed
I don't know what possesses me to watch "Real Time With Bill Maher." Mr. Maher is, without a doubt, the most annoying anti-religionist on the scene today. Though his show is purportedly about politics,...
View ArticleThe Sacred Heart in Our Stars
John Green's novel The Fault in Our Stars has proven to be wildly popular among young adults in the English speaking world, and the recently released film adaptation of the book has garnered both...
View ArticleReading N.T. Wright With The Rock
On the first day of my vacation last week, I perused N.T. Wright's latest book, a collection of essays on contemporary issues in light of the Bible. A point that Wright makes in a number of the...
View ArticleWoody Allen's Bleak Vision
I was chagrined, but not entirely surprised, when I read Woody Allen's recent ruminations on ultimate things. To state it bluntly, Woody could not be any bleaker in regard to the issue of meaning in...
View ArticleWhy I Love My Invisible Friend
One of the favorite taunts of the New Atheists is that religious people believe in an "invisible friend." They are implying, of course, that religion is little more than a pathetic exercise in wishful...
View ArticleThe Fading Memory of Christianity
Lois Lowry's 1993 novel The Giver has garnered a very wide audience over the past two decades, since it has become a standard text in middle schools and high schools across the English-speaking world....
View ArticlePortrait of a Real Priest
St. John Paul II said that a priest should have the heart of Christ the Good Shepherd. Far too many saccharine paintings of effeminate Jesuses in the midst of delicate lambs have conduced toward a...
View ArticleParable of the Talents, Revisited
The attendance at our daily Mass at Mundelein Seminary on Labor Day weekend was sparse. Many of the students had gone home while others were on a special tour of Chicago churches. The celebrant and...
View ArticleThomas Aquinas's Proof of God
One of the unintended but happy consequences of the emergence of the new atheism is a renewed interest in the classical arguments for God's existence. Eager to defend the faith that is so vigorously...
View ArticleSausage-Making at the Synod
The midterm report on the deliberations of the Synod on the Family has appeared and there is a fair amount of hysteria all around. John Thavis, a veteran Vatican reporter who should know better, has...
View ArticleDeclaring Christ From the Laptops
Just last month, my media ministry Word on Fire marked a milestone: 10,000,000 views on our YouTube channel. This achievement fills me with gratitude both to God and to the many people who have taken...
View ArticleJohn Henry Newman at the Synod
The controversies surrounding the recent Extraordinary Synod on the Family have often put me in mind of John Henry Cardinal Newman, the greatest Catholic churchman of the 19th century. Newman wrote...
View ArticleC.S. Lewis's Achy Breaky Soul
One of the classical demonstrations of God's existence is the so-called argument from desire: Every innate or natural desire corresponds to some objective state of affairs that fulfills it. Now we all...
View ArticleWhy We Need Dietrich von Hildebrand
Postmodern relativism and deconstruction have produced what I have termed the "Meh culture," that is to say, a culture dominated by the "whatever" attitude, a bland, detached indifferentism to the good...
View ArticleStephen Hawking's God-Haunted Movie
The great British physicist Stephen Hawking has emerged in recent years as a poster boy for atheism, and his heroic struggles against the ravages of Lou Gehrig's disease have made him something of a...
View ArticleMissing the Point of the Book of Exodus
Ridley Scott's new film Exodus: Gods and Kings features Moses, the Pharaoh, hundreds of thousands of slaves making their way across the floor of the Red Sea, all ten plagues, the burning bush, and even...
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