Start here.
I have written here since 2010 on evangelization, parish life, Scripture, apologetics, and the moral life. These six are the best place to begin.
Go Home and Live as Missionary Disciples
If your faith feels humdrum, you may not have entered the mission yet. A talk to men on what that asks of you.
Formed By Distraction
Eliot described minds pulled from one distraction to the next. We now carry that in our pockets. What is it forming in us?
What Is a Catholic?
A plain answer: who belongs to the Church Christ founded on the Apostles, and what holds that Church together.
Why You Need Your Men’s Group
Before asking whether men’s groups work, ask what problem they are meant to solve.
Why Protestants Are Becoming Catholic at My Parish
What draws evangelicals and mainline Protestants into the Catholic Church, as they told me in class.
How God Speaks in Human Words
The first of four articles on how the Bible is at once a human book and the Word of God.
Book Review: Iraq, The Moral Reckoning, by Craig M. White
He believes that such important matters needed slow, careful and rigorous examination, but what was often being churned out was too simplistic, lacking due seriousness to the claims of the Bush Administration for meeting the criteria of just war, despite rhetoric to the contrary. White's hope was to debate the authors of First Things, notably Neuhaus himself and George Weigel, who took a pro-war stance.
Iraq, The Moral Reckoning, is required for every U.S. CatholicIraq, the Moral Reckoning is a rigorous analysis and application of the six criteria of Just War Theory to the 2003 decision by the Bush White House to go to war against Iraq. The subtitle of this book is important, for the author does not want to do what many critics of the Bush Administration have done, which is to look at all of the mistakes from 2003 - onward and say that, with 20/20 hindsight, this was an unjust war. His book is meant to analyze the decision, not the aftermath, of going to war. He treats the Jus Ad Bellum ("Right to wage War"), rather than the Jus in Bellum ("Rightness in War"), which means that the information that was available at the time of the decision and the justifications given for the decision, and not later information or re-justifications, are the data for his analysis.
Biblical Interpretation: Catholic Response
Biblical fundamentalism fails the Catholic Church’s vision of Scripture and exegesis because it is anti-science, anti-authorship and ahistorical. As an ideology, fundamentalism rejects any science as a force undermining the Christian faith. The natural sciences refute the ancient cosmology and Creation stories, while historical criticism demonstrates the development of the inspired text, denying their doctrine of strict verbal inspiration, and consequently, of total inerrancy. And so, despite its ability to bear good exegetical fruit, it is rejected from root to tip as valid tools for the biblical fundamentalist.
The Catholic Church, on the other hand, has never rejected the ability of human reason to know truth, affirming reason and faith, being neither rationalist nor fideist. Within this appreciation of human reason, comes the legitimization of the sciences: natural, social, and literary. Historical criticism was rejected initially by the Church in Pope Leo’s encyclical Providentissimus Deus, because it was attached to a “much too intrusively dogmatic liberalism” that was buttressed by rationalism and modernism (IBC: 28). Through Catholic exegetes making careful use of these critical methods, the Church, in freeing the methods from unacceptable presuppositions, fifty years later allowed her exegetes to make use of this criticism wisely in the papal encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu. In her cautious approach to ‘higher criticism’, she was able to avoid many of the abuses of liberal Protestant exegetes that the fundamentalists reacted against so strongly.