Francesca Aran Murphy

Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism deserve to be studied, not as geographic entities, but as products of religious insight. Continue Reading »

A liberalized Islam is what many people say the world needs, but it’s not obvious how that will come about. Continue Reading »

Religions are not timeless—but neither are they unable to transcend the time from which they sprang.  Continue Reading »

All religions today share a single, common “Ultimate” beyond them all—the set of ideas about God implied by Christian religiosity.  Continue Reading »

Tomorrow, the Fairest Isle has to choose between forfeiting her soul to the European Empire and retaining the sovereign freedom of her Parliamentary democracy. Continue Reading »

The only viable vehicle of conservatism in modernity is a market-oriented liberalism that regards freedom within law as the means to the common good. Some religiously engaged conservative intellectuals cannot accept this. What drives their animus against the only workable form of conservatism in . . . . Continue Reading »

The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer by louis bouyer translated by john pepino angelico, 272 pages, $19.95 T his memoir is a joy to read. Louis Bouyer (1913–2004) writes so beautifully about his childhood in fin-de-­siècle Paris it almost makes up for not having lived in that time and place oneself. The . . . . Continue Reading »

Following on from my article about the Curriculum Review at the University of Notre Dame, I can report that the draft recommendations of the Curriculum Committee call for the retention of the current two theology course requirements. It recommends adding a core course called “Catholicism . . . . Continue Reading »

Blaise Pascal spoke of the contradiction in every human heart. Man is an animal at once godlike and depraved. It is not that our dreams are great and our behavior base, but that our dreams are simultaneously wonderful and vile. Perhaps nowhere is this more obvious than in our treatment of other . . . . Continue Reading »

Faculty often quarrel over curricula. That’s as it should be. A curriculum, especially its core courses required of all students, is an educational institution’s constitution. To tell a young person he must take this or that course announces a university’s highest priorities. This makes a . . . . Continue Reading »