As I travel, and experience Christianity around the world what strikes me most is that most of it isn’t Christianity. There is a modern, false version of Christianity out there which Rod Dreher has described as “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”. To unpack that phrase start at the end. Deism is the idea that God is out there somewhere separated from his world. Oh yes, he got the whole thing started, but he is the transcendent God. Now the whole thing is... Read more

Lent is a time to deepen our spiritual lives and open our hearts to the refreshment of the Spirit. Here is my latest article for Integrated Catholic Life. When teaching my personal development course called ‘Ordinary Hero’ I show the students a picture of an ancient tree and explain how our lives have three levels: the branches and leaves represent our everyday concerns — our daily worries, joys, tasks and choices. The trunk of the tree symbolizes our conscious beliefs... Read more

Treated myself to George Weigel’s Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches by George Weigel, Elizabeth Lev (2013) Hardcover This is simply a splendid book. A full review later, but it is full of accessible and inspiring theology, a tour of ancient Roman churches and a visual feast of the art, architecture and history of Christian Rome. With texts on the “station churches” of Rome by noted art historian Elizabeth Lev, this book lifts Lent. The book takes you day by day... Read more

If you’re following my Lenten Blobble Study–a Bible study on a blog–you might be interested to learn more about how and why we trust the gospel accounts to be genuine and trustworthy. Read this long post from the archives, How Do We Know the Gospels are Historical? Jimmy Akin does some of his usual sharp detective work here. He shows how the seeming inconsistencies in the gospels actually prove their veracity. Critics of the Gospels therefore tend to focus on... Read more

Morgan Freeman–the actor who has played God in a couple of films–speculates here on the question of whether aliens would believe in God. It’s part of a new TV show about such speculative stuff. “When you look at the heavens, you imagine that people initially thought about gods, and they may also have thought about aliens,” Younger says. “As technology starts to grow and develop, and maybe some of those ideas about the heavens change, they become more scientific. Is... Read more

Every year in Lent I’m reminded of how healthy repentance is. The default setting for the human being is to blame someone else. “He did it first!” or “She did it too!” or “Everybody does it” or when we’re unhappy to blame somebody else for our problems. “It’s my wife, my husband, my kids, my parents, the president, the republicans, the democrats, the whites, the blacks” whoever, but it’s never me. It’s not my fault. I’m not to blame. This is... Read more

Here is my latest article for The Imaginative Conservative–on why utilitarianism does not bring the greatest good for the greatest number, but brings about the greatest evil for the greatest number. when applied to social systems, utilitarianism is useless. The practical proposal of the utilitarian is to ask “what brings about the greatest good for the greatest number?” This motto was coined by the eccentric Englishman Jeremy Bentham (1748 -1832). Bentham also observed, “pain and pleasure are the sovereign masters... Read more

Dr Greg Popcak gives some sage advice on making spiritual progress over at his blog: To forgive ourselves doesn’t mean letting ourselves off the hook.  It means refusing to give into the temptation to heap coals on ourselves for having failed.  St Francis de Sales in his Introduction to the Devout Life reveals the folly of this approach when he notes that our sins tend to be in a flawed attempt to make ourselves feel better.  Therefore, the worse we make ourselves... Read more