Explain, John Hick once asked me in an undergraduate class, the traditional axiom that my church holds, “There is no salvation outside the Church.” He argued that Catholics officially maintain this teaching while actually saying the opposite because they cannot come to terms with the reality . . . . Continue Reading »
The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death by john gray farrar, straus and giroux, 288 pages, $24 Few historians of culture would think to suggest a similarity between the death throes of Victorian England and the first decades of Soviet totalitarianism—but . . . . Continue Reading »
Theological Tractates by erik peterson, edited and translated by michael j. hollerich stanford, 296 pages, $24.95 Germany’s most famous convert from Protestantism to the Catholic Church between the two world wars, Erik Peterson was also one of the most gifted theologians of his generation and, . . . . Continue Reading »
The World as It Could Be: Catholic Social Thought for a New Generation by thomas d. williams crossroad, 240 pages, $24.95 What would the world be like, asks Thomas Williams in The World as It Could Be, if essential truths of the human person were universally acknowledged and respected and “all . . . . Continue Reading »
Jesus Christ, Eternal God:Heavenly Flesh and the Metaphysics of Matter by stephen h. webb oxford, 368 pages, $65 Could God be a material being? It may sound like a strange idea, yet it resonates with a great many theologians who reject “classical theism,” the broadly Platonist metaphysics of . . . . Continue Reading »
In his influential book The Courage to Be Catholic, George Weigel wrote about the “The Truce of 1968.” By that is meant the decision not to discipline the many theologians and priests who, in a public and concerted campaign, rejected the teaching of the 1968 encyclical on human sexuality, . . . . Continue Reading »
Global warming has achieved the status of a major threat. It inspires nightmares of a troubled future and propels apocalyptic dramas such as the summer 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow. Even were the Kyoto treaty to be fully implemented, it wouldn’t make a dent in the warming trend, which . . . . Continue Reading »
The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America by Richard John Neuhaus was published in 1984. Herewith, twenty years later, reflections on the influence of the book and contemporary problems raised by its argument, with a response by Father Neuhaus. Stanley HauerwasI should not like The . . . . Continue Reading »
When the practice of sex-change surgery first emerged back in the early 1970s, I would often remind its advocating psychiatrists that with other patients, alcoholics in particular, they would quote the Serenity Prayer, “God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage . . . . Continue Reading »
The question of universalism—whether all will, in the end, be saved—is perennially agitated in the Christian tradition. A notable proponent of that view was the great Origen, who, in the third century, set forth a theologically and philosophically complex doctrine of “Apocatastasis” . . . . Continue Reading »
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