Some time ago, literary critic Stanley Fish observed that religion was “transgressing the boundary between private and public and demanding to be heard.” And that’s a dangerous thing because, as Mr. Fish sees it, religion is based on claims that are excluded from tests of “deliberative reason.” Take the resurrection of Jesus Christ. “The assertion [...]

Amidst the divisions and frustrations that mark the Church of our time, there are, quietly dispersed throughout the Mystical Body, clergy and laymen striving for the recovery and promotion of the Apostolic Faith. Their good work—and the renaissance it will bring about—is easily obscured, as it is rarely offered a proper place in the tired [...]

There was a time when it was nigh impossible not to believe in God—not because of man’s irrational superstitions, as atheist popularizers tell it, but because of nature’s rational design. To early thinkers, the intelligibility of nature pointed to an ineluctable fact: a prime, non-contingent source of reality (i.e., the uncaused Cause, the One, Apeiron, [...]

I recently wrote an article offering a different approach to communicating with Mormons. Instead of the often confrontational stance of trying to prove their theology wrong on biblical grounds, or, even less effective, mocking their unusual beliefs, I suggested Catholics work within a paradigm of hospitality and empathy, inviting LDS members into their home, feeding [...]

In a recent article in The Federalist regarding the current sex abuse scandal rocking the Catholic Church, Dr. Korey Maas, a Lutheran and professor of history at Hillsdale College, asks, “Is there any church abuse too far for the Catholic faithful?” The answer, quite simply, is no. Elsewhere, Maas presses, “What abuses, both physical and spiritual, might the [Catholic] hierarchy not [...]

On cue, my recent article, "The Mercy of Intolerance," prompted some, um, spirited responses outside the general Crisis readership. One gentleman, “Paul,” who was particularly exercised by the piece shot me an email (excerpt below) in hopes of educating me. My response follows. Regis, you and I live in two different worlds. In my world tolerance [...]

The spiritual-but-not-religious phenomenon has its roots in the Reformation, but it has taken flight in the United States, fanned by the ego-affirming consumerism, democratic individualism, and the atomizing effects of mass media and modern technology. Now, more than a quarter of Americans identify as “spiritual but not religious,” according to the latest survey from the [...]

Some people call me a street preacher. I’m not a street preacher. The label does roll off the tongue, but it also carries a fairly negative connotation. I could be more accurately described as a street questioner. I spend about a dozen Saturday mornings each year, standing on a street corner adjacent to the Farmer’s [...]

Over the years, I have become acquainted with various logical arguments for the existence of God—some I find more convincing than others. Of course, the strongest evidence comes from direct experience, for God is a person to be mystically encountered, not an abstraction to be logically deduced. This should not be taken to imply that [...]

The other day on an obscure channel on TV I saw a fundamentalist preacher interviewing two young Catholics at the Minnesota State Fair. The two Catholics were utterly unable to match wits with the Protestant old-time-religion preacher. It was painful to watch, almost as painful as reading Vatican press releases over the last several years [...]

“Something had given him leave to live in the present.”  ~ Walker Percy A friend of mine sent me an email with this subject line: “A challenge for your blogging….” She included Elizabeth Scalia’s invitation to Catholics everywhere in the internet cosmos to write about “Why Do YOU Remain a Catholic”—an invitation itself prompted by [...]

A number of Catholics, including theologians, think that the Church should not engage in apologetics. These critics claim that Vatican II made apologetics obsolete by calling for the Church to embrace, and no longer turn its back on, the modern world. They say theology is supposed to engage pressing contemporary issues that affect everyone, but [...]

In recent decades the Church has tried more than ever to accentuate the positive. As a result, she talks less about rules and prohibitions than in the past. Those things are important, the thought seems to be, but they exist for a purpose, and the positive teachings tell us what the purpose is. After all, [...]

The issues that now put Catholics in opposition to secular public thought are too basic to ignore. The Church accepts God as our reference point, and views freedom to develop our relation to Him and act by reference to it as basic to our good and our dignity. In contrast, secular society has made our [...]

One nice thing about being Catholic is that when a dimestore Origenist (who is pretty certain nobody's going to Hell) goes up against dimestore Calvinists (who are certain they know just exactly who is in Hell), you don't have to feel as though TIME magazine is arbitrating a dispute that never ever ever occurred to Christians before. Just [...]

Subjectivism, deconstructionism, postmodernism, multiculturalism—there is a blight on scholarly research today, cast by the epistemic “isms.” No field is safe. Even in physics, the “isms” are attempting to spin every idea as nothing more than one person's opinion or the accidental product of historical evolution. Physicist Alan Sobel exposed this effort when he sent a [...]