Church Life Journal | Articles

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. Yet it is n...

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). What most impressed these authors were the apparent similarities between their most hallowed religious rites and those of a cult that they considered idolatrous. How was such a thing to be explained? How could the Mithraists be ce...

I am not a liturgical scholar, nor, happily, have I ever really participated in the “liturgy wars,” at least not publicly. However, I was still transfixed by the controversy that blew up on the morning of the promulgation of

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. This was also the first Saturday of Lent. In Rome, the pope presided over a peniten...

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 centur...