August 17, 2023
A change almost too subtle to be described passed over her companion’s face. It was only a slight contraction of delicate lines about the long narrow eyes, denoting an increase of interest and alertness at this announcement. She was sitting on a low chair, nearer to the fire than her visitor. She now turned towards her, as if expecting to hear more.
July 27, 2023
In the Catholic Church of the early nineteenth century, no formal and absolute condemnation of slavery as an institution existed. Although recognizing abuses in the system, the Church did not see slavery as a moral evil in itself but as a result of original sin.
June 8, 2023
They got married. I was born on a Good Friday afternoon, and Mama died on the joyous morning of the Resurrection amid the hallelujah fireworks. Covered with gillyflowers, she lies in the cemetery of Viana do Castelo, in a humid lane near the wall shadowed by weeping willows, where she liked taking summer afternoon walks with her shaggy little dog named Traviata.
May 26, 2023
Many of us who have been called to evangelize and build up the Church by life and speech want to address the frustrations that upset so many people. We want them to experience the Word through our speaking and living, and we also—sinful, broken creatures ourselves—want to hold fast to the Word.
March 29, 2023
Yet those who lament these enduring “religious conflicts,” previously theorized as a phenomenon which, together with religion itself, would diminish and then disappear with modernization and secularization, are confronted by the stubborn presence of religious believers in contemporary democracies.
February 28, 2023
Newman produced a bittersweet account of the meeting in a letter to Ambrose St John, his last great friend, written in the house of his first great friend, the late Bowden, in which he speaks about two other great friendships recovered after 20 years of silence. A truly marvelous concentration of coincidences!
February 1, 2023
I have not attempted to write, neither concerning the Synoptic Gospels nor John’s, a “normal” scriptural commentary. I have written a theological interpretation. As a systematic or doctrinal theologian, I intend to discern the theological and doctrinal content of the Gospels.
December 9, 2022
The two ends of man—the political and the transcendent—are, in principle, compatible with each other. They have a common origin. They can diverge from their respective ends, however, because of free will, itself natural to what it is to be a human being.
October 28, 2022
The figure of Galileo, whispering his conviction of heliocentrism in a theocratic Italian court, represents in the minds of many modern people their image of an intrinsic conflict between faith and science, dogma and free enquiry, medieval justice and modern values. As numerous scholars have shown, however, the Galileo trial was largely an anomaly in the history of Catholicism. In the early modern period, it was far more common for religious institutions, especially the Catholic Church, to embrace with zeal the latest scientific discoveries, which by and large confirmed their worldview.
September 28, 2022
The image of international Catholicism has itself undergone a change since the Second Vatican Council. The Church began to pay more attention to the individual conscience, to ecumenism, and to social justice, although there has also been fierce resistance to these trends in some quarters. Yet for a long period, Catholicism had seemed powerfully authoritarian and reactionary, and it was understandable that it should have been seen as set against all the social and political developments on which the genre of the novel was held to depend.
