Thomas Aquinas would have agreed with a comment on this website that he was as vulnerable to error as anyone else and should never be taken as “the truth”. He has read widely and deeply: Aristotle’s influence is evident throughout the Summa Theologica, as is that of St Augustine. Other philosophical influences include the pagan (Plato and Read more
For a brief moment, Catholics on all sides were united in defense of the freedom of the Catholic Church to define for itself what it means to be Catholic in America. They came together to defend the church’s institutions from morally objectionable potentially crippling burdens imposed by the Obama administration under the Affordable Care Act. Read more
A. J. Muste, peacemaker, was born on January 8, 1885, and died on this day in 1967. He was a vibrant example of Christian nonviolence in the twentieth century. In 1909, he was ordained as a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, and during the 1920s, he was a trade union activist. A. J. Muste Read more
If abortion rights advocates are feeling their oats this week, they have good reason. In just two-and-half a weeks, they’ve claimed two major victories, forcing the Susan G. Komen Foundation to back off its policy change denying grants to Planned Parenthood clinics and convincing the Obama administration to maintain only a very limited exemption for Read more
Jefferson Bethke, 22, and has created a vigorous online debate about God and Religion When he posted his “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus” video on YouTube,he made a bet with his roommates about how many views the video would get by morning. The lowest bet was 1,000 and the highest bet was 6,000, By the time Read more
Burma is one of the most tightly-controlled countries in the world. Although elections last year replaced the military regime with a civilian one, the country still regularly ranks among the worst for human rights and corruption. Despite this, a group of New Zealanders has set up a successful microfinance charity providing small loans to the Read more
According to The Washington Post and The New York Times the Iraq War has ended—again. But we still have not come to terms with what it has really meant. Those with long memories remember that the first George Bush Gulf War ended as we slaughtered the helpless remnants of the Iraqi army fleeing from Kuwait, Read more
Of the many remarkable things about Christopher Hitchens, who died on Thursday after one of the most prolific and provocative careers in modern Anglo-American letters, perhaps the most remarkable was how much religious believers liked him. Not all believers, of course: When Hitchens’s esophageal cancer diagnosis became public last year, the famous atheist took obvious pleasure in Read more
A Church leader once said he didn’t have a vision beyond the next 12 months. His point was that everything changes rapidly, and no one knows the future. So why plan beyond what you do not know for certain? In looking far into the future, he believed leaders wasted too much time on fruitless thinking Read more
Considering that Britain is a deeply secular country, there is a lot of God about this Christmas. Austerity is a part of the explanation. With the core cultural activity of modern Britain–shopping for stuff–losing its lustre, there are hints of a nation groping for something more profound. For millions, austerity Christmas will include a dose Read more