In the course of a discussion about the existence of God and of the miraculous, an unbelieving reader (who strikes me as open to reasonable discussion) writes:

All I’m saying is that people everywhere demonstrate a powerful desire to believe that there is intervention in the material universe from outside the material universe.

Except that’s not true.  Lots of people also demonstrate a powerful desire to believe there is no intervention in the material universe.  Even many people who believe in some sort of God do this, because they are deists.

The notion that the existence of God provides nothing but unalloyed consolation and does not also give reason to have deep fear...READ MORE

Almost 20% of teen births are not a first child

Plan B for Everyone of All Ages!

We must continue our Civilizational Mission to the rest of the world! They hate us for our freedom! America: The Light and the Glory! Our enemies are motivated solely by Envy. We are the gold standard by which all other cultures are to be measured.

C.S. Lewis once remarked that he was a converted pagan living among apostate Puritans. This is true in spades here in the US, where the Puritan certitude about our mission to save world continues on, like a careening headless robot, long after the robot has been reprogrammed to bring the gospel of democratic capitalist hedonism, militarism, and...READ MORE

One of the things that periodically comes up in discussions of the Resurrection is summarized by Christopher Hitchens when he notes that Matthew tells us:

"the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.” These rather conspicuous events, which among other things would seem to make resurrection something of a commonplace, were entirely missed by Saint John, or at any rate unreported by him, and appear not at all in the only written historical record, which was by Flavius Josephus. 

Not only does St. John not report it, but there is in fact a lot...READ MORE

Gay "marriage" must inevitably lead to the demand for approval of all other forms of consensual activity and the demand that the state punish those who fail to bow to that demand. When you point this out, you get sneered at and told that believing in a slippery slope is utterly ridiculous. Then, when the guys who led the charge for gay "marriage" begin leading the charge for polygamy and group marriage, we are told that it is the obvious corollary to gay "marriage" and always has been. It reminds me of this. More here, here and here. Eventually, a culture that sees consent as the sole criterion of the good loses its capacity to conceive of a Common Good at all. And when the powerful in...READ MORE

I wanted to get your opinion on something I encountered recently.  I teach High School Faith Formation at my parish in NC.  Great group of kids & great conversations.  All of these kids have received Confirmation, so attendance is purely voluntary which makes for some great conversations on Sunday morning.  We have an alternating book cycle (we use the Didache series) and are currently on Christian Morality.  Presently, the topic has been capital punishment.

As I understand the Church’s position on capital punishment, bearing in mind that no person can ever be stripped of their dignity as a human person, capital punishment can only be permitted in cases where there is absolutely no...READ MORE

A reader writes:

I can personally vouch for your observation that prudential judgment is to right-wing cafeteria Catholicism as primacy of conscience is to left-wing Catholicism.  I discovered Church teaching from a right-wing, indeed a libertarian, position, and so was guilty of dismissing select Church teaching as mere prudential judgment myself for years.  Most of my friends and relations are right-of-center, as are most of the people I encounter in comboxes online.  Unfortunately, I still find this objection raised, chiefly when the discussion turns to economic issues.

Now I intuit that the social teaching is more than merely a prudential judgement, and that it is false to...READ MORE

Turns out the Shroud of Turin does date from the first century after all.  That's because it is, as I have always thought, the burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth. Unless, of course, you seriously believe that a medieval European forger just happened to have a 1300-year-old burial shroud (that originated in the Holy Land) laying around and decided to use it to conduct an absolutely unique and unrepeatable experiment in photo-realistic imaging on cloth.

Simple request for skeptics who say it's a fake made by and for scientifically ignorant medievals who stupidly believed in miracles: Make another one.

Some will object that we can't make another Pyramid under the conditions that existed...READ MORE

When somebody babbles about the Church's "War on Science and Reason" and prates about the persecution of Galileo, ask, "And what other scientists were persecuted?" It's fun to watch their mouths open and close while nothing comes out. Sometimes, if they are half-educated they might manage to scrape up something about Hypatia and the Library of Alexandria. If they do, here is how to make them fully educated about how ignorant they are. If they are really super half-educated, they might be familiar with the name of Giordano Bruno. The main problem is that Bruno, though burned for heresy, was not burned because of his scientific views, because he wasn't a scientist but...

a mystic of...READ MORE