News in Articles

The Notion of a Vocation

We believed that we were put on this earth with a divine plan for us, that God gave us each a special vocation to live out. Moreover, this was not something we were free to choose for ourselves; it was God-given. Our task was to discern that vocation and give ourselves over to it, even at the price of having to renounce our own dreams. We remained free to accept or not, but at a peril. To be unfaithful to your vocation meant a misguided life.

Kharkiv prepares for Orthodox Easter under bombardment

The citizens of Kharkiv are preparing to celebrate Orthodox Easter in spite of the destruction which surrounds them, says Fr Vitaliy Novak CM. “One part of the city is on fire, in the other part they are feeding the flowers and preparing for Easter,” he told The Tablet on Wednesday, as he prepared to drive a delivery of food supplies to the Donbas.

Artificial Intelligence and Social Justice: A Challenge for the Church

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping human experience in ways not visible to, nor fully apprehended by, the vast majority of the world’s population. The explosion of AI is having a notable impact on our present rights and future opportunities, determining the decision-making processes that affect all in today’s society.

The Emotions and Affections of Jesus: An analysis of the Synoptic Gospels

In Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, the blind monk Jorge of Burgos, quoting John Chrysostom, argues that “Christ never laughed.” Such a strong statement seems not only to categorically exclude the possibility that Jesus of Nazareth could laugh, but also questions his humanity, a humanity that implies an ability to participate in the totality of experience, including the possibility of experiencing the full range of affections and emotions. 

Pasolini and the Religion of His Time

Two contrasting elements coexisted within Pasolini’s personality. On the one hand, there was  a religiosity of an instinctive, formless kind, far from the systematization based on  the dogmas of Christianity understood as an institutional religion; on the other hand, as a son of his time, he could not help but rationalize all of this. 

The Therapy of Public Life

Forty years ago, Philip Rieff wrote a book entitled The Triumph of the Therapeutic. In essence, he argued that today in the Western world so many people need psychological therapy mainly because our family structure has grown weak and many community structures have broken down. 

The Perfect Ritual

 Sometimes it takes an outsider to help you to see the beauty and depth of something you have never fully appreciated. I suspect this true for many of us, myself no exception, regarding the celebration of the Eucharist in our churches.

The Death of Chastity in our Culture

Against Triumphalism and Spiritual Worldliness

The temptation to triumphalism – Christianity without the cross – and its more insidious form, spiritual worldliness – is difficult to discern. If there is a theme in the magisterium of Bergoglio-Francis that recurs with particular frequency, it is precisely this. In the apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, pronouncing a “no to spiritual worldliness,” Francis put it in black and white. The alternative is between a Church on the move to evangelize the world and a Church invaded by spiritual worldliness: “This is a tremendous corruption, disguised as a good.

When Our World is Falling Apart

The early years of my adulthood and priesthood were spent teaching theology at Newman Theological College in Edmonton, Canada. I was young, full of energy, loved teaching, and was discovering the joys of ministry. For the most part, these were good years.

Pornography and Chastity

Pornography is the biggest addiction in the world today, and by a wide margin. Mostly it afflicts men, but is also a growing addiction among women. Much of this of course is driven by its easy and free availability on the internet. Everyone now (not least our own young children) have immediate access to it from the privacy of their phones or laptops, and in anonymity. 

The Beauty of Physics

In this article we will consider how scientific knowledge – in a similar fashion to poetic discourse – makes ample use of analogical language, and how both science and poetry tend – albeit at different levels – to summarize their concepts, preferring a terse form of expression to long and excessively detailed descriptions. Above all we will see how poetry and physics have an eye for aesthetic taste, albeit with the necessary differences.

Love with the Divine

To make love with the divine. I suspect most of us will picture that as a warm, privatized, affective intimacy, the way we imagine romantic love, except here the other partner is God. Indeed, Christian mystical literature abounds with images of this kind, as does the Gospel of John. There’s nothing wrong with that, except that such a conception is over-idealized and over-privatized.

Back to the future — governance in the Catholic Church

Throughout the Catholic Church, something is stirring about the way we are governed. For many of us in the Church and across society, we don’t much care about that subject. We long ago made peace with being parts of communities, organizations, nations and even families where we just get on with our lives and leave running the show to those who like to be in charge of things.

Thomas Aquinas on Justice

The ancients were well aware of the many aspects of justice. Reading their texts, one is struck by the great richness and complexity of their perspectives. Justice is above all the characteristic proper to God, who is its foundation, an aspect that constantly returns in the classical and biblical tradition. In this sense, “justice,” more than the observance of a law, is above all a characteristic of being.

Theology and Spirituality - Writing About It or Writing It

 In the world of the arts, they make a distinction between persons who create an artifact, an artist, a sculptor, or a novelist, and persons who write about artists and their works. We have novelists and literary critics, artists and art critics, and both are important. Critics keep art and literature from bad form, sentimentality, vulgarity, and kitsch; but it’s the artists and novelists who produce the substance; without them critical assessment has no function.

What We do in Private

No one is an island; indeed, no one is ever really alone. If you are a person of faith or even just someone with a highly attuned intuitive sense, you will know that there is no such thing as a truly private act, for good or bad. Everything we do, no matter how private, affects others. We aren’t isolated monads whose private thoughts and acts have no effect on anyone else. We know this, and not just from our faith.

At the Originss of Our Universe - JESUS AND THE BIG BANG

Recently NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope into space, the biggest and most expensive telescope ever built. It will take six months for it to travel a million miles from the earth, find its permanent place in space, and then start transmitting pictures back to earth. Those pictures will be such as have never seen before. 

‘Born of a Woman, Born under the Law’: Christmas according to Saint Paul

No Room in the Inn

Jesus was born outside of the city, outside of a hospital, outside of a normal house. The Gospels tell us he was born in a stable, outside the city because there was no room for them in the inn. We have always vilified the infamous innkeeper who turned Mary and Joseph away, and the lesson we took from this was the need for less self-preoccupation in our lives, that we should not be so busy and preoccupied that there’s no room for the divine to be born in our lives.