It’s common for Protestants to claim that justification by faith is the single major issue separating Protestants from Catholics. Coming from a Wesleyan background, this has never loomed as large for me. Sure, I was taught that Catholics thought they were “saved by works,” but when I came to understand what the Catholic Church actually taught (as opposed to what many Catholics may believe or have believed), I couldn’t see that it was such a big deal. I had always... Read more

For non-Catholics, perhaps the most interesting part of World Youth Day was Pope Benedict’s address to an ecumenical meeting on Friday, in which he laid out more fully than anywhere else so far his plans for furthering Christian unity. It’s not that much of a plan, really. Indeed, if I read him correctly, he doesn’t put a lot of stock in schemes and programs and agendas. He affirms that we mustn’t pursue ecumenism at the expense of truth, which is... Read more

First of all, I’m sorry I’ve been away from the blog for so long. I worked for two weeks at a summer program at Duke University, the “Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation.” I strongly recommend this program, by the way, to any of you who know (or are) intelligent, serious Christian young people who will be either rising juniors or rising seniors (in high school) next summer. I’ve also been trying to finish up the dissertation (at last!) and... Read more

“John Student” asked in a comment to my last post why I thought Protestantism had broken down. Well, that is precisely the question for me. Has it? To defend the affirmative response to this question, I could refer John to Pontificator’s eloquent posts over the past year or two, but then I don’t agree with everything Pontificator has said by any means (he’s coming from an Anglo-Catholic point of view in which Protestantism is not really a live option). So... Read more

In my last post, I said that I saw two basic ways of approaching the question of tradition and truth. Actually, I don’t think that either of these is tenable in their “pure” form–but I’m going to describe them in that form in order to lay out the issues clearly. I will refer to them as “rationalism” and “traditionalism,” recognizing that both of these terms can be used in very different ways from the ways I’ll be using them. The... Read more

One of the positive intellectual developments of the past few decades has been an increasing appreciation of the role of tradition in our apprehension of truth. This awareness has even affected our understanding of scientific progress. Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, has argued that science proceeds not by an obvious and inevitable overcoming of error by objective truth, but rather through a series of “paradigm shifts” in which previous frameworks for interpreting the universe undergo crisis and... Read more

This week, as everybody knows, the Christian world got a new Pope. I say “the Christian world” deliberately. Whatever we “separated brethren” believe about the Papacy, we are related to it by virtue of our baptism. The Pope is the successor of Peter and the rightful leader of all Christians. Of that I am certain, whatever problems I may have with some of the papal claims. I’ve been an admirer of the theological work of Cardinal Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI)... Read more

I’ve spent much of the past day and a half watching coverage of the Pope’s death. It’s still sinking in. Karol Wojtila has defined the world in which I live more than anyone else–which is ironic, given how often he opposed what seemed to be the dominant culture of our era. I was four years old when John Paul II became Pope, and Popes weren’t really on my radar screen except as mythical monsters. It took me years to overcome... Read more

I don’t really have anything to say about the Terri Schiavo case that hasn’t been said already–by Kathleen Parker, for instance, in two excellent recent articles in the Orlando Sentinel. For that matter, President Bush has summed up the core of the matter–we should always err on the side of life. Schiavo is being killed slowly by a legal system so dedicated to privacy and self-determination that it allows a husband now living with another woman to end the life... Read more

“Relativism” is one of those words that gets thrown around in our culture a lot, but we don’t always clarify what we mean by it. In particular, it gets used by conservatives as a slur–often to discredit a view that seems too fuzzy: “That seems dangerously relativistic to me.” On the other hand, I’ve talked to at least two people in my life who did claim to be thorough-going relativists (one was a philosophy Ph.D. student at Duke, the other... Read more