“I painted to be loved.” That is how the artist Francis Bacon (1909–1992) described his impulse to create. Bacon’s work came to be part of the canon of late twentieth-century British painting, hanging in major museums around the world. His brutal images of contorted bodies, slabs of meat, . . . . Continue Reading »
Death has a way of focusing the mind on the transcendent. It helped set off America’s First Great Awakening. In April 1734, the little community of Pascommuck, three miles outside Northampton, Massachusetts, suffered what Jonathan Edwards recalled as the “very sudden and awful death of a young . . . . Continue Reading »
Is Philip Pullman actually any good, or he just popular with the cultural elite because he is anti-Christian? Continue Reading »
On this episode, Robert Delfino discusses his book Does God Exist?: A Socratic Dialogue on the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas.
Good Dr. Mumford was an atheist;He didn’t really understand the Creed.But as a cautious-minded scientist,He thought it would be very wise indeedTo make completely sure (per Pascal’s Wager)That there was nothing in this Catholic bosh;And so he locked his doors, turned off his pager,And settled . . . . Continue Reading »
There is a real cure for the anxiety afflicting today’s youth. Continue Reading »
On December 15, 2011, Christopher Hitchens died of esophageal cancer. Some remember him as a man of the left who, after 9/11, converted to a kind of neoconservatism; others remember him as an atheist provocateur and serial blasphemer. For me, Christopher Hitchens was much more than either of these . . . . Continue Reading »
Atheists have long been a vocal minority in America, their relations with the dominant Protestant culture defined by consistent, unresolved antagonism, unexpected ideological affinities and interdependencies, and the back-and-forth movement of individuals between atheism and belief. Continue Reading »
Faith, Fiction and Force in Medieval Baptismal Debates by marcia colish cua, 384 pages, $69.95 B aptism seems so simple: water and the formula “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” But like so many religious practices, it can be celebrated in different ways, with . . . . Continue Reading »
To say, as people do from time to time, that science is the only source of meaning available to human beings is to consign large swaths of everyday experience to insignificance. (And to offer an open goal to any quick-footed apologist for religion who may be passing.) The implication of the maximal . . . . Continue Reading »
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