See also: Part 1 If the Odyssey-like journey east in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (see Part 1) is the finest achievement of mythic worldbuilding in the Narnia stories, the second finest is in the descent into the underworld in The Silver...

Read more: Part 2 Earlier this week Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen tweeted his own personal ranking of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia — and Catholic Twitter exploded. Just finished Lenten reading Chronicles of Narnia. Loved them as a...

This week there was much exasperation and merriment in Catholic social media over a very silly op-ed in the New York Times that actually raised the age-old question — I swear I am not making this up — “Can God create a rock so heavy that he can’t...

See also: It’s Complicated: Islam and violence | The problem of evil Not long ago I got two converging questions from two divergent points of view, one from a lapsed Catholic friend and one from a conservative Catholic believer. My la

See also: It’s Complicated: Islam and violence | No salvation outside the Church “God had to take her,” says a grieving father at a bereavement support group in the 2010 film

See also: It’s Complicated: The problem of evil | No salvation outside the Church When it comes to Islam and violence, there are main two bumper-sticker schools of thought. One is the irenic line popularized by the George W. Bush adm

A pro-choice friend of a friend offered the following challenge to pro-lifers: There is a legal concept called bodily autonomy. Legally, you can’t compel another person to provide you with life support at the expense of that other person’s...

Shall not we your sorrows share And from worldly joys abstain? Fasting with unceasing prayer Strong with you to suffer pain. — “Forty Days and Forty Nights,” verse 2 (George Hunt Smyttan) Recently I’ve seen a meme pop up repeatedly on Catholic...

When Paul Schrader finally reached for the tools of the transcendental toolkit in a theologically and existentially fraught film starring Ethan Hawke as a tortured pastor, it’s not surprising that the resulting film would rate high among...

One of the most familiar and important passages in all of scripture is the famous Sermon on the Mount in St. Matthew’s Gospel, which begins with the Beatitudes. But that’s not what we just heard today. Today is the first of four consecutive...