There are places where the Spirit breathes; but there is one Spirit who breathes in all places. There are some people whom God takes and sets apart. There are others whom he leaves in the masses and whom he does not “withdraw from the world.” These are people who do ordinary jobs, who have an ordinary household, or are ordinary celibates. People who have ordinary illnesses, ordinary deaths. People who have an ordinary house, ordinary clothes, these are the people of ordinary life. The people we meet on any street. They love their door that opens onto the street, just as their brothers, wh ..read more

The Healthy Mind and the Sick Soul Despite having been excommunicated from the Jewish community as a young man and vilified as an atheist and corruptor of morality in his later years, Baruch Spinoza was, it seems, a happy man. Stephen Nadler writes that, though he was often more occupied with his work than with other people, “Spinoza was, when he did put down his work, gregarious, self-controlled, and possessed of a pleasing and even-tempered disposition.”[1] In his Ethics Spinoza writes, It is of the first importance in life to perfect the intellect, or reason, as far as we can, and the high ..read more

Once upon a time there was a puppet who could play chess with great skill. He won fists down and shamed all challengers who, sweating under all too human awe, sat on the table’s other side wondering: by what mysterious means did the machine achieve such a feat? In Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin uses the puppet allegory in order to reveal the metaphysical forces that move history: the puppet of “historical materialism,” who seems a prodigious algorithmic automaton, is actually guided by a dwarf “who was an expert chess player.” The dwarf Benjamin dubs “theology, which toda ..read more

When it comes to Benedict XVI we find ourselves in the strange and awkward position that we neither know how to end nor how to start dealing with his legacy. We don’t know how to end insofar as we continue to receive his person and work. Like Vatican II, of whose reception he spoke so often, we live in the midst of discernment and argument concerning who and what he has bequeathed to us. Yet, we are also not quite sure how or where to begin dealing with a life that was constituted at once by unshakeable Christian conviction and deep investigation into truth, characterized by prayer, focused on ..read more

This past fall I taught my course on atheism for a second time. It was well received last spring, the first time a course on atheism had been offered at Georgetown University. So, I decided to teach it again. Why offer a course on atheism at a Catholic institution? Many who take the course identify as atheist, but some are Christians who want to know more, while others are struggling with their beliefs. The course, it turns out, is a series of surprises for all. The first surprise is that atheism has never simply been atheism. That is, it has never been simply a denial of the existence of ..read more

The early Aughts were great for new alternative music, or so I’m told. I wasn’t paying attention, being overwhelmed with caring sleeplessly for three young children, plus finishing a dissertation and a sideline book. But, apparently, the scene in New York City was buzzing with groups like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Strokes. At the tail end of this era came a band of Columbia students who played in Brooklyn art galleries and got their MySpace page promoted by the New York Times before they even had an album out. Their song “Cousins,” about family connections, summarizes the trajectory aptly ..read more

The philosopher Pascal once quipped, “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Pascal’s deliberate hyperbole contains a truth that is perhaps more evident in our time than in his. While we seem to find ourselves more alone and more lonely than in previous generations, we are hardly quiet or at rest. We seem addicted to lives of endless distraction, especially on screens, an addiction that makes us less capable of being silent, still, and attentive. Pascal also thought that young people, whose lives he described as “all noise, diversions, and thought ..read more

The last several years of teaching collegiate introductory Catholic theology courses at multiple universities have convinced me that the very rationale of a mandatory theology course at a Catholic university, as well as the material typically studied in such courses, are largely unintelligible to many students. If my experience is representative to any degree, it indicates a significant crisis for collegiate theological education. And this crisis extends beyond the theology classroom. It touches the entire liberal arts enterprise and concerns the crisis facing the humanities as whole. More on ..read more

Since the end of the nineteenth century[1], the brain has held a regnant place in Western notions of the human person. With the dawn of modern experimental methods of stimulating and imaging the nervous system, scientists obtained incontrovertible evidence that the brain is a necessary physical substrate of human thought and behavior. This conclusion has undoubtedly yielded good fruit both in our medical practice and our self-awareness as a species. But it has also fueled a peculiar form of reductionism: the view that the neural is the primary explanatory level of reality. This neurocentric id ..read more

Careful readers of Scripture committed to its truth as an article of faith often face challenges when its details stand in tension and even contradiction. Examples are easy to produce: Was the Passover celebrated on Thursday evening prior to our Lord’s crucifixion (as asserted by the Synoptic Gospels) or on Good Friday (as asserted in John; cf. John 18:28)? Were land animals and birds created prior to humans (Gen 1:20–27) or after (Gen 2:19)? Did Judas return the price of his betrayal (Matt 27:3–10), or did he use it to buy the field in which he died (Acts 1:18–19)? For readers who understand ..read more