The year was 1897. A young Carmelite nun lay dying of tuberculosis. It was a custom in many religious communities of the time for consecrated religious to circulate a brief biography of deceased members as a remembrance and to encourage prayer for the repose of the dead. While she lay on her deathbed, Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus could hear two of her sisters...
Many atheists say that all arguments for the existence of God are just fallacious “God-of-the-gaps” reasoning. They claim that any evidence offered for the existence of God, such as the beginning, contingency, and fine-tuning of the universe, are nothing more than appeals to ignorance. These arguments are supposedly on par with primitive explanations of natural events (such as lightning) that erroneously included God as a direct cause. Modern arguments for theism are likewise lampooned as...
This week Stephen Hawking delivered a lecture at the California Institute of Technology titled "The Origin of the Universe," and you’re likely to have heard about it because, according to mainstream media outlets, Hawking has put God out of a job. In an article headlined “Stephen Hawking lays out case for Big Bang without God,” NBC News describes the...
Last week, Pope Francis received a collection of world religious leaders in his first ecumenical and interreligious event. His address to them contained diplomatic niceties and specific expressions of good will aimed at Orthodox, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims.
His remarks to the latter recognized that Muslims “worship the one living...
Unlike most converts from various strains of Protestantism, I never had much of a problem with the Blessed Virgin Mary. Perhaps it was because my Christian background was more or less nominal and lacking a good deal of Christian catechesis. Or perhaps it was because I had a natural attraction to the idea of saintly intercession and the communion of the saints.
Whatever the reason, I did not have difficulty accepting the Marian dogmas, and I enjoyed the folk piety of ordinary lay...
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