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.
August 17, 2022
Any satisfactory account of how God creates new life forms through evolution must seek to address the role that contingency or chance plays in the natural world. Many people assume that divine providence is incompatible with an evolutionary process that operates through natural selection and random genetic variation.
July 13, 2022
Griswold is easily characterized as the case kicking off the Supreme Court’s high level of interest in sexual freedom as individual liberty. There the Court proved willing to create a constitutional right without explicitly supporting constitutional text. This exercise is not only fraught with uncertainty, but easily invites judges to substitute their personal predilections for the actual meaning of the Constitution and at the same time to trespass into the rightful sphere of legislatures.
June 16, 2022
It is the Spirit who aids our stumbling lips when we groan and pray for full salvation in the midst of a creation that is itself groaning for liberation from decay (Rom 8:22–27).
June 1, 2022
One of the defining features of great poetry is an extraordinary sensitivity to the spiritual currents of the age—to disturbances in the fabric of a culture’s moral consciousness. It is, therefore, not surprising that the greatest poet of the English language should manifest an awareness of the nominalist assumptions that had begun to permeate the web of daily life by the end of the sixteenth century.
May 5, 2022
Because of their own political and religious environment, England and his colleagues saw the shifting conditions in the world as advantageous to the Catholic Church; the Irish church, at least, had gained greater freedom because of the eighteenth-century revolutions. He and his colleagues were accustomed to speaking of change, reform, adaptation, republicanism, and democracy as beneficial to the Catholic Church.