Many Catholics were hasty to assume that the opening ceremony of the Olympics went out of its way to “mock” the Last Supper. The instant outrage the tableau aroused — right or wrong — tells a larger story about something that has happened in Catholic life across the last four decades. But it has not Read more
“Faith seeking understanding” is a good definition of belief. Faith is our experience of God and belief is our attempt to express that experience in words and symbols. When we attempt to describe our experiences of God, we necessarily express ourselves in the symbols, words, and rituals that are products of our culture. All of Read more
As Zhou Enlai supposedly said about the French Revolution, we can’t assess the legacy of the Reformation because it is too soon to tell. In fact, it is still going on. The biggest religious stories of our times—the stories of retreat and resurgence—are both outworkings of the Reformation. Retreat The industrialised, liberal West is living Read more
Catholics talk about natural law, but what’s it all about? Basically, it’s a system of principles that guides human life in accordance with our nature and our good, insofar as those can be known by natural reason. It thereby promotes life the way it evidently ought to be, based on what we are and how Read more
I am fascinated by how Doctor Who slips under the radar of contemporary scepticism in a way that Christianity doesn’t. Perhaps its simply because it doesn’t assert itself as being true. The Bible is extremely weird in places: monsters with horns on their horns, men wrestling with angels, devils entering pigs, floods covering the whole Earth, people Read more
In the western experience modernisation and secularism come in a single package. “Real modernity must be democratic, runs the logic; and real democracy must be secular” says Lois Lee. However, outside of Europe, modernity is emerging without secularism. In modernised India for example the organisation of public space and the place of religion in it is quite different. The historian Dipesh Read more
A Jesuit priest has called for the establishment of a General Ecumenical Council to bring all Christian Churches together, and eventually all religions, in order to face together the challenge of the secularisation of society. Fr Michael MacGreil told the Irish Catholic that with the current state of religion in the world and the advance of Read more