This lecture was delivered in Oxford at “Blackfriars” on February 12. Blackfriars is the historic Dominican presence at Oxford University, dating its original founding to 1221. It is a Dominican Priory, a House of Studies associated with the University of St. Thomas-Angelicum in Rome, and…
Category: Advancing the Kingdom
“The glory of God is man fully alive”
Many will recognize this quotation as that of St. Irenaeus, the second century bishop of Lyons. It is also the motto of a new school in the Philadelphia suburbs, Martin Saints Catholic High School. With pleasure I bring to your attention the exceptional approach with…
Posterity’s prosperity
Recently I came across an editorial celebrating the extent to which progress has flourished in the world over the past two centuries. Supported by impressive statistical research its author cites the extraordinary advances the world has experienced in numerous ways. These include the lengthening of…
The Gadarene Swine Fallacy
When I was very young I was taught that to be a ‘good’ child I had to be ‘nice’ to my brothers and sisters. The two adjectives were interchangeable. Then when I was in middle school the shared synonymy of the two words was sundered.…
Wordless Trees
At breakfast one morning this past week, I overheard my nine-year-old granddaughter mention she would be auditioning for a Christmas pageant in her school that afternoon. Officious grandparent that I am, I promptly volunteered advice on elocution and the importance of diction, projection, volume, et…
In the mist of mystery
It has been written that Truth, Beauty and Love are the celestial triumvirate that surrounds the throne of God. This poetic imagery prompts this novel (for me at least) reflection. According to a catechetical definition, God is infinite knowledge, infinite power and infinite love. One…
Mocking the sacred
A few days ago I read about a Hollywood celebration in which a well known television personality who – while accepting a coveted award for her talent – made fun of Jesus Christ by stating he had nothing to do with her success. Presumably, she…
The pastoral uselessness of Christology
Taken out of context this phrase is understandably provocative. However, its author, an eminent church historian, employs it with reference to the church’s disproportionate attention to academic theology at the expense of pastoral ministry before Vatican II – an imbalance that Pope John XXIII (now…
Torn jeans
Viewed through the prism of the Petrine ministry, Christianity reveals that the history of the world and the history of salvation are one and the same. Many of us never knew or have forgotten this identity. Our lapse in this regard contributes to the enervating…
An antidote to acedia
Are you suffering from what R.J. Snell calls the unbearable lightness of being? Where the insistence on personal freedom repulses commitment and its humanizing effects? Are you jaded by the unrelenting noise of marketing, and in-your-face advertising that is so blatant it is not even…