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Some years ago, I was involved in a Catholic-Evangelical dialogue. One of our Protestant brothers challenged the Catholics in the group to articulate clearly what the Gospel is.
I knew what he was getting at: many Evangelicals pride themselves on the fact that they can succinctly sum up the Good News in a way that people find compelling and helpful, whereas many Catholics, it seems, get tongue-tied.
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My great mentor Msgr. Robert Sokolowski told a class of eager philosophy students many years ago that we should read Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics every year of our lives. As we grew older, he explained, new dimensions of the book would continually present themselves.
I can’t say that I’ve followed Sokolowski’s advice perfectly, but I have indeed returned often to Aristotle’s great text for inspiration and clarification.
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René Girard, one of the most influential Catholic philosophers in the world, died recently at the age of 91.
Born in Avignon and a member of the illustrious Academie Francaise, Girard nevertheless made his academic reputation in the United States as a professor at Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, and Stanford University.
There are some thinkers that offer intriguing ideas and proposals, and there is a tiny handful of thinkers that manage to shake your world. Girard was in this second camp. In a series of books and articles, written across several decades, he proposed a social theory of extraordinary explanatory power.
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Toward the end of the liturgical year, we Catholics hear at Mass from the mysterious, often confounding, and utterly fascinating Book of Daniel.
Recent scholarship has demonstrated that the Book of Daniel had an extraordinarily powerful influence on the first Christians, providing them a most important template for understanding the significance of Jesus.
Daniel is, of course, an example of apocalyptic literature, which in the common understanding means that it has to do with the end of the world.
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About 15 years ago, I prepared an elective class at Mundelein Seminary which I entitled “The Christology of the Poets and Preachers.” In this course, I endeavored to explore the Catholic tradition’s non-technical, more lyrical manner of presenting the significance of Jesus.
I studied the literary works of Dante, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and G.K. Chesterton, and I also investigated in detail the sermons of many of the greatest masters: Origen, Augustine, Chrysostom, Bernard, Aquinas, Newman, and Knox, among others.
What struck me with particular power, and caused me, I confess, to re-think things rather thoroughly was this: none of these figures — from the late second century to the 20th century — whose sermons we specially revere and hold up for imitation, preached the way I was taught to preach.
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Ridley Scott’s The Martian is a splendidly told tale of survival and pluck, reminiscent of the novel Robinson Crusoe and the films Life of Pi and Castaway.
In this case, the hero is Mark Watney, an astronaut on a mission to Mars who is left behind by his crewmates when he is presumed dead after being lost during a devastating storm.
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Having just returned from a week covering Pope Francis’ triumphant journey to the United States, I can confidently tell you that the news media are in love with the Vicar of Christ.
Time and again, commentators, pundits, anchorpersons, and editorialists opined that Pope Francis is the bomb.
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During the pope’s visit to America, I had the privilege of commenting for NBC News and for MSNBC.
Twice I was on for extended periods with Brian Williams, the former anchor for NBC Nightly News, and twice with Chris Matthews, the host of Hardball. I must say that both men are very good at what they do, namely, keeping a conversation going among several different people with varying points of view and assuring that things stay sufficiently lively and interesting.
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I had the extraordinary privilege of following the pope’s pilgrimage at very close quarters. I had this access both as a bishop and as a commentator for NBC News.
It was thrilling indeed to witness just how rapturously the American people received the pope and how affected the Holy Father was by this reception. Many images stay vividly in my mind: the pope kissing the forehead of the 10-year-old boy with cerebral palsy, the rabbi and imam praying together at the September 11th memorial, a little boy from a New York Catholic school showing the pope how to maneuver his way around a Smart Board.
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It was revealed recently that, for the first time in its history, Harvard University, which had been founded for religious purposes and named for a minister of the Gospel, has admitted a freshman class in which atheists and agnostics outnumber professed Christians and Jews.
Also recently, the House and the Senate of California passed a provision that allows for physician-assisted suicide in the Golden State. As I write these words, the governor of California is deliberating whether to sign the bill into law.
Though it might seem strange to suggest as much, I believe that the make-up of the Harvard freshman class and the passing of the suicide law are very really related.
