Category: Religion
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Religion Under Assault
Religions are under assault from without, but they also undermine themselves from within. To put it sarcastically, the Roman Catholic Church has worked hard and successfully at destroying its own credibility by refusing (not just failing) to rein in priestly misconduct. Not all, but too many leaders of the RCC from the Pope on down…
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“You’ve Ruined my Life, Professor Craig!”
Here, with William Lane Craig's response.
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Faith Animated by Doubt
A living faith is animated by doubt. Faith dies when it hardens into a subjective certainty and a moribund complacency. I have had this thought for years. Each time I re-enact it, it strikes me as true. I was pleased to discover recently that T. S. Eliot holds the same or a very similar view:…
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Bishop John Shelby Spong (1931-2021)
Yes, I know, de mortuis nil nisi bonum, but I will make an exception in this case. This man filled his belly from Christianity while rejecting not only its specific tenets, but theism itself. Spong in his final years belonged to the now largely defunct Jesus Seminar, which voted with marbles on which scriptures were…
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Religion as Morality and as Metaphysics
I can't shake the thought that something is at stake in life. I cannot throw off the moral point of view. It addresses us from Elsewhere and calls us insistently to a Higher Life. It matters how we live. And this despite our being miserable bits of the Earth's fauna. This mattering cannot be a…
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Ten Impediments to Religious Belief
Why is it so hard to believe these days? Substack latest.
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Sacramental Efficacy Despite the Corruption of the Church?
Here: Therefore, the serious believer is thrown back upon his or her own inner resources. Thankfully, the Sacraments are still efficacious despite the corruption of the Church . . . . Suppose I go to what used to be called Confession, but is now foolishly called Reconciliation. The priest, I have reason to believe, is…
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Is Religion Escapist?
Escapism is a form of reality-denial. One seeks to escape from reality into a haven of illusion. One who flees a burning building we do not call an escapist. Why not? Because his escape from the fire is not an escape into unreality, but into a different reality, one decidedly superior to that of being incinerated. …
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Husserl, Thomas, and Sister Adelgundis
Some of us live within the tension between the autonomy of reason and obedient faith and trust. On the one side, we are admirers of Edmund Husserl with his ethos of critical examination, of cautious inquiry painstaking and protracted, of scholarly sobriety; we share his fear of error, of doxastic over-extension; we subscribe to an…
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Jack Kerouac: Religious Writer?
Beatific October, Kerouac month hereabouts, is at its sad redbrick end once again, but I can't let her slip away without at least one substantial Kerouac entry. So raise your glass with me on this eve of All Saint's Day as I say a prayer for Jack's soul which, I fear, is still in need…
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Simone Weil on False Gods
Despite her infuriating extremism, Simone Weil may well be the purest incarnation of religious sensibility in the twentieth century. "It's not up to us to believe in God, but only not to grant our love to false gods." As Weil understands, essential to genuine religion, though not exhaustive of it, is the realization that nothing…
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The Sensus Divinitatis Waxes and Wanes
Our sense of the reality of the Unseen Order and the Unseen Other waxes in the measure that we detach our love from the objects of the senses and the pleasures they promise but never quite deliver. It wanes as we lose ourselves in the diaspora of the sensory manifold and its multiple temptations and…
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Thought, Prayer, Meditation
"Prayer is when night descends on thought." (Alain, as quoted by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.) Knowing Alain, he must have intended his aphorism as a denigration of prayer. I see it the other way around. We cannot think our way out of our predicament; thinking merely allows us to map the terrain…
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Leftism is not a Religion
Leftism is not a religion, but it is importantly like a religion.* How so? Religions make a total claim on the lives of their adherents, and the committed latter live accordingly. The serious Buddhist, for example, does not merely meditate for an hour in the morning; he tries to bring the mindfulness of the meditation…