Category: Word on Fire

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Fr. Robert Barron

The danger of soft atheism

A very instructive exchange between Gary Gutting, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame, and Philip Kitcher, a philosophy professor at Columbia, just appeared in The New York Times.

Kitcher describes himself as a proponent of “soft atheism,” an atheism distinct from the polemical variety espoused by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Unlike his harsher colleagues, Kitcher is willing to admit that religion can play an ethically useful role in a predominantly secular society.

I would like to draw attention to one move made in this interview, since it shows one of the fundamental misunderstandings of religion common among atheists.

Plurality of religious doctrines

Prompted by Gutting, Kitcher admits that he finds all religious doctrine incredible. He points to the plurality of religious doctrines: Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, animists, etc., hold to radically different accounts of reality, the divine, human purpose, etc.

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Chris Lee

The danger of soft atheism

A very instructive exchange between Gary Gutting, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame, and Philip Kitcher, a philosophy professor at Columbia, just appeared in The New York Times.

Kitcher describes himself as a proponent of “soft atheism,” an atheism distinct from the polemical variety espoused by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Unlike his harsher colleagues, Kitcher is willing to admit that religion can play an ethically useful role in a predominantly secular society.

I would like to draw attention to one move made in this interview, since it shows one of the fundamental misunderstandings of religion common among atheists.

Plurality of religious doctrines

Prompted by Gutting, Kitcher admits that he finds all religious doctrine incredible. He points to the plurality of religious doctrines: Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, animists, etc., hold to radically different accounts of reality, the divine, human purpose, etc.

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Fr. Robert Barron

The field hospital is open

By now everyone in the world knows that Pope Francis offered a lengthy and wide-ranging interview to the editor of Civilta Cattolica, which was subsequently published in 16 Jesuit-sponsored journals from a variety of countries.

To judge by some media coverage, the Church is in the midst of a moral and doctrinal revolution, led by a pope bent on dragging the old institution into the modern world.

Read what pope actually said

I might recommend that everyone read what Pope Francis actually said. For what he said is beautiful, lyrical, spirit-filled, and in its own distinctive way, revolutionary.

The first question to which the pope responded in this interview is simple: “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio (his given name)?” After a substantial pause, he said, “a sinner whom the Lord has looked upon.”

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Fr. Robert Barron

The joy of evangelizing

An emergency tends to focus one’s mind and energies and to clarify one’s priorities.

If a dangerous fire breaks out in a home, the inhabitants thereof will lay aside their quarrels, postpone their other activities, and together get to the task of putting out the flames. If a nation is invaded by an aggressor, politicians will quickly forget their internal squabbling and put off their legislative programs in order to work together for the shared purpose of repulsing the enemy.

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Fr. Robert Barron

How saintly popes modeled virtue

On April 27, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (Pope John XXIII) and Karol Jozef Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) were recognized as saints of the Catholic Church, and may God be praised for it!

No one with the slightest amount of historical sensibility would doubt that these men were figures of enormous significance and truly global impact.

But being a world historical personage is not the same as being a saint; otherwise neither Thérèse of Lisieux, nor John Vianney, nor Benedict Joseph Labré would be saints.

What is a saint?

So what is it that made these two men worthy particularly of canonization? Happily, the Church provides rather clear and objective criteria for answering this question. A saint is someone who lived a life of “heroic virtue” on earth and who is now living the fullness of God’s life in heaven.

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Fr. Robert Barron

What Easter means

In first century Judaism, there were many views concerning what happened to people after they died.

Following a very venerable tradition, some said that death was the end, that the dead simply returned to the dust of the earth from which they came.

Others maintained that the righteous dead would rise at the close of the age. Still others thought that the souls of the just went to live with God after the demise of their bodies. There were even some who believed in a kind of reincarnation.

Accounts of Jesus’ resurrection

What is particularly fascinating about the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection is that none of these familiar frameworks of understanding is invoked.

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Kevin Wondrash

Why Jesus is God: Debunking skeptics

It’s Easter time, and that means that the mainstream media and publishing houses can be counted upon to issue debunking attacks on orthodox Christianity.

The best-publicized of these is Bart Ehrman’s book, How Jesus Became God. Once a devout Bible-believing evangelical Christian, trained at Wheaton College, the alma mater of Billy Graham, Ehrman “saw the light” and became an agnostic scholar and is on a mission to undermine the fundamental assumptions of Christianity.

Jesus just an ‘itinerant preacher’

In this most recent tome, Ehrman lays out what is actually a very old thesis, going back at least to the 18th century and repeated ad nauseam in skeptical circles ever since, namely, that Jesus was a simple itinerant preacher who never claimed to be divine and whose “resurrection” was in fact an invention of his disciples who experienced hallucinations of their master after his death.

Ehrman, like so many of his skeptical colleagues across the centuries, presents this thesis as though he has made a brilliant discovery. But basically, it’s the same old story.

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Fr. Robert Barron

The ‘zealot’ versus the real Jesus

When I saw that Reza Aslan’s portrait of Jesus, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, had risen to number one on the New York Times bestseller list, I must confess, I was both disappointed and puzzled.

For the reductionistic and debunking approach that Aslan employs has been tried by dozens of commentators for at least the past 300 years, and the debunkers have been themselves debunked over and over again by serious scholars of the historical Jesus.

Aslan’s portrayal of the ‘zealot’

The Jesus that Aslan wants to present is the “zealot,” the Jewish insurrectionist intent upon challenging the Temple establishment in Jerusalem and the Roman military power that dominated Israel.

His principle justification for this reading is that religiously motivated revolutionaries were indeed thick on the ground in the Palestine of Jesus’ time; that Jesus claimed to be ushering in a new Kingdom of God; and that he ended up dying the death typically meted out to rabble-rousers who posed a threat to Roman authority.

 

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Fr. Robert Barron

Noah: A post-modern midrash

Darren Aronofsky’s cinematic re-telling of the story of Noah has certainly stirred people up.

While quite a few reviewers, both religious and non-religious, have given the film high marks, many Christians, both Evangelical and Catholic, have registered a far less than enthusiastic reaction.

One prominent Catholic blogger and movie reviewer opined that Noah is “embarrassingly awful” and “the stupidest film in years.” Most of the religious critics have complained that the film plays fast and loose with the Genesis account, adding all sorts of distracting and fantastic elements to the well-known story. In the midst of all of this — and no doubt in part because of it — Noah took in $44 million on its opening weekend.

Modern cinematic midrash

Noah is best interpreted, I think, as a modern cinematic midrash on the Biblical tale. The midrashim — extremely popular in ancient Israel — were imaginative elaborations of the often spare Scriptural narratives. They typically explored the psychological motivations of the major players in the stories and added creative plot lines, new characters, etc.

 

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Fr. Robert Barron

Anti-Catholicism should bother everyone

Recently two outrageously anti-Catholic outbursts took place in the public forum.

The first was an article in the US News and World Report by syndicated columnist Jamie Stiehm. Ms. Stiehm argued that the Supreme Court was dangerously packed with Catholics, who have, she averred, a terribly difficult time separating church from state and who just can’t refrain from imposing their views on others.

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