When I woke up this morning to the news that Stephen Hawking had died, it felt oddly like I had only just seen him. I hadn’t, of course, but I was literally yesterday perusing one of his books while blogging about wormholes and quantum physics in...

In Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time there’s a discussion about space-time that uses a four-dimensional geometrical shape called a tesseract (the square of a cube, as a cube itself is the square of a square) to approach the idea of a...

Two of the most important books in my journey from Evangelicalism to Catholicism were a pair of older apologetical works — one anti-Catholic and one Catholic — which I found laughably unconvincing when I first encountered them in college some 30...

Each year, after cataloguing my own annual top films list but before the Oscars, I take stock of the year’s top films according to a small circle of friends and peers in the world of Christian cinephiles and film writers. In recent years, our...

Jesus predicted his passion and death repeatedly — at least three times. Yet Jesus’ arrest, trial, passion and crucifixion seems to have caught the Twelve completely off guard. Why weren’t they expecting it? Hadn’t Jesus told them? Why was Peter...

Although I never saw Billy Graham, he had a profound influence on my life. Both of my parents saw him a number of times in 1957, at Madison Square Garden and other venues, and went forward for his altar calls. My father calls that experience a...

Last week controversy erupted over my “Reel Faith” video review of the Best Picture–nominated movie Call Me By Your Name, a gay-themed coming-of-age drama about a same-sex relationship between characters played by Timothée Chalamet and Armie...

Marriage is good, St. Paul says in the second reading, but being unmarried is better. Today it seems like more and more people agree in practice with Paul’s conclusion, even if their reasons don’t exactly line up with his. People think of...

If you hang in traditional Catholic circles long enough, sooner or later you’ll hear the story of the Catholic origin of the “12 Days of Christmas.” Here is how Father Hal Stockert, who popularized this story, put it in a short 1982 composition...

Many years ago I read a story about a well-dressed couple with a young boy who were out to eat at a nice restaurant. The waitress took the parents’ orders and then asked the little boy, “What would you like?” He was startled and answered...