The Catholic Thing
The Church of What’s Happening Now
In his address to the U.S. bishops at their annual meeting in Baltimore last week, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the papal nuncio to the United States, argued – nearly to the point of obsession – that Vatican II has to be regarded as the guide to…
Karl Stern, AI, the Vocabulary of the Soul
Every day, we encounter articles warning of AI’s future dangers. But is machine learning really the threat? No. As psychiatrist Karl Stern warned 71 years ago in “The Third Revolution,” the core problem is that intellectual elites have spent…
Taking the Great Leap of Faith – in Smaller Hops
One of the great paradoxes of the modern world is that as living has become easier, believing in God has become more difficult. This lack of belief stems from, among other things, the many choices of religion on offer. The world today is largely…
Who Is My Neighbor?
Fellow TCT contributor Francis Maier warmed my heart last September with a favorable mention of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational Animals. This work is one of our most important recent philosophers’ most important contributions to moral…
A Life at Sea – The Catholic Thing
One of the wonders of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is its ability to completely engross the reader. The world Tolkien conjured up, though obviously fictional and fancifully so, is also unmistakably our world. And this was…
Abortion and the Greatness of the Church
I was recently asked, again: “Why is the Catholic Church so focused on abortion?” At least this time, it was asked out of curiosity rather than with anger. I can’t imagine how such questioners perceive the Church. Do they think she is the…
Shakespeare’s Hand in ‘Sir Thomas More’
Scholars have long known that Elizabethan drama was a collaborative business. Yes, a play by Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe, or William Shakespeare rightly belongs to each named author as the principal hand behind it. But there were often…
The Perils of Sophistry, Sacred and Profane
Persuasive and powerful words ignite us. Their commanding rhetoric moves our emotions, giving us energy to follow. As powerful as persuasive speech is, however, a question arises. Is it true? Or are we just listening to eloquent arguments…
The Last Lifeline – The Catholic Thing
I take it as given that God commands only what is good for us and forbids only what is bad, which means sometimes also not permitting others to do what’s bad. For we are social beings, and permission slides into participation, and participation…
To the place of the Dead
Some parts of the life of Christ cannot easily be imitated, and yet good Christians find a way. We cannot literally die with Christ each day – grandma could not literally be shot once a day – and yet we can “mortify” ourselves, that is, put to…