Church Life Journal | Articles

In August 2016, while accepting the Republican nomination for president in Cleveland, Ohio, Donald Trump uttered five words that many observers instantly recognized as a rupture from the past.

Why did Pope Francis write Dilexit Nos, his final encyclical, on the Sacred Heart of Jesus?

1.

The esteemed historian H.

The Catholic Church unequivocally affirms that all human beings, from conception to natural death, are made in God’s image, and possess profound, equal, and intrinsic dignity.

The twentieth-century debates over the natural desire for the supernatural largely begin with the common conviction that the human person, in some sense, desires God.

An Encounter With Grace What was I doing in Rome?

What gives me some confidence is her spirit of faith and her truly prodigious courage.

I once wrote an essay about my experience of clerical sexual assault.

As news broke of Dolly Parton’s death, acquaintances, friends, and coworkers in our circles began to reach out to each other to share her songs, inform each other of fascinating tidbits about her life and philanthropy, or remind each other of her movies.

I first met Wendell Berry—who died this August—on a farm east of Louisville, Kentucky.

That the Church forms a collective body, which can be like the real body of Christ; that this body, like any particular body, is one by its life and multiple by its parts and by its organs, and thus by its actions, its functions, its operations; that bapt…

Among the many problems associated with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence lies an existential one: the problem of how we conceive ourselves as human subjects, as agents of human intelligence in some kind of similarity to artificial intelligence,…

Medievalist Barbara Newman has characterized the Benedictine Abbess Hildegard of Bingen as “a perfect embodiment of the integrated, holistic approach to God and humanity for which our fragmented era longs.”[1] Pope Benedict XVI similarly observed in Hilde…

Consciousness plays a significant, perhaps even total, role in our identity, it seems.[1] This conviction is, at least, what much modern philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience contend.

Among the first Christian apologists to respond to the phenomenon of the Mithras cult are Justin Martyr (ca. 100–165) and Tertullian (ca. 155–220).

I am not a liturgical scholar, nor, happily, have I ever really participated in the “liturgy wars,” at least not publicly.

On March 12, 2000, the Catholic Church marked a Day of Pardon, an occasion that was part of the celebrations to mark the Jubilee Year.

There have been proud spirits who placed the whole efficacy of the virtues in free will alone; in our age there are also many who utterly despair that free will is anything at all.[1] So Anselm in the early eleventh century contrasted the issues of his day

All lovers of the visual arts are certainly familiar with the work of Hans Holbein the Younger, such as his famous portraits of St.

Dominant narratives in our contemporary culture typically portray respect for women—and especially for women’s bodies—as in conflict with respect for preborn human life.

When St.

After the second World War, and in the wake of medical atrocities that occurred in Nazi Germany, medical research exploded in volume but also teetered on the edge of a crisis.

St.

Early in the Confessions, Augustine regretfully recalls how he dismissed his mother’s pleas for chastity as mere woman’s talk, instead opting for a promiscuous path of torturous suffering.

A Thesis In his enormously rich monograph, Les conversions de s.

I leant over in the darkness and whispered to my friend, “Odysseus sure is Catholic in this, am I wrong?”