The unregenerate Scrooge got and gets a bum rap. Of course he was cruel, selfish, cynical, and unbelieving. But so are all of us, to the e...

As I understand the concept, grace is "efficacious" when it ensures that there will be no "mortal" sin, i.e. when it ens...

Apologies to my vast readership for the weeks of silence. At the beginning of September, I moved from NYC for a new full-time teaching job i...

Gnosticism is a perennial impulse. I don't mean all the mythic confabulations that the bewildering variety of Gnostic sects spun during ...

Almost every American past puberty knows the old Wendy's hamburger slogan: "Where's the beef?" Used as a metaphor, it summ...

The Anchoress has tagged me to follow her example and name my five favorite devotions. I am honored. They are: The Jesus Prayer Meditatin...

Perhaps I'm weird, but I must admit that, even when I was alienated from the Catholic Church in youth, I never had any principled diffic...

A repost from The Anchoress. Prayer has power. When everything is falling apart, prayer holds. Any one of us can suddenly find ourselves o...

See my post at the First Things  blog "First Thoughts."     A lot more can and should be said, but as a response to Steve Hutchen...

With his conservative confrères, British Catholic blogger Damien Thompson likes to call the British Catholic hierarchy "The Magic Circ...

Lydia McGrew has coined a chillingly apt metaphor for the culture of death: "choice devours itself." She has applied the metapho...

Catholics need a sounder understanding of vocation. The old-fashioned, hard-bitten Catholics I know are comfortable thinking only of clergy ...

Over at Called to Communion, one of my favorite blogs, Bryan Cross has posted a rather amusing meditation on and critique of "ecclesial...