My blog post "Should I Attend the Wedding or Not?" prompted several questions and comments last week that I would like to address.
One reader asked about the validity of a Catholic marrying an Orthodox Christian in an Orthodox Church without a dispensation from his bishop. In the interest of ecumenism, the Code of Canon Law is less rigid in such a case. The Catholic party still has a...
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...
In a recent conversation with a convert to the Faith, the point was made that, as Catholics, our public discourse often suffers a noticable lack: we don’t talk much about Jesus.
We talk about abortion, canon law, the magisterium, Church history, principles of apologetics, natural law, "faith," virtue, sacraments, grace, divine Providence, the priesthood, liberalism, social justice, the...
Perhaps you've noticed that we live in a "me first!" culture. We want what we want when we want it exactly the way we want it. The fast-food chain Burger King has trained a generation of Americans to "Have it your way!" That's all well and good when ordering a Whopper, but it is a poor attitude to have in other areas of life.
In the Church the "have it your way" attitude shows up in many areas of parish life. Here are a sampling that I've pulled from common questions we receive at...
In the Divine Comedy, Dante is guided through the heavens by his courtly love, Beatrice.
These heavens are based on the astronomical ideas of the day, and she takes him through nine of them before they arrive at the ultimate dwelling place of God.
The idea that there are multiple heavens is not a concept that originated with Dante. Various ancient sources, including passages in the Bible...
"What rascal, what traitor, what madman would be so misled by the spirit of discord as to dare rend the Divine unity, the garment of the Lord, the Church of Jesus Christ?"
