Since I was a Bible geek, it was Revelation 2:8-10 that God used to confront me with my fear, as the church in Smyrna was also in danger of the fear of suffering. Jesus personally encourages them in the midst of severe persecution and poverty.
Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi: How We Pray is How We Believe
The following is a homily delivered by a college chaplain on March 2, 2020. The homily is based on the Gospel reading of Tuesday of the First Week of Lent, MT 6:7-15. In this passage, Jesus gives us the “Our Father” and admonishes babbling in prayer like the pagans do.
Astronomy, God, and the Search for Elegance
Do faith and science operate in completely separate, non-overlapping realms? In the first of a series of articles for Thinking Faith, Vatican Astronomer, Guy Consolmagno SJ, explores how science works, how scientists work, and the place that faith has in science—simply because scientists are people.
Overcoming Scrupulosity with Moral Conversion
In 1984, Hollywood released “Gremlins,” a film about a father who brings home an unidentifiable furry little animal as a Christmas present for his son. Turns out, this little guy is even more unique than they realized. If you feed it after midnight, it spawns intelligent and vicious lizard-like creatures who are intent on mayhem. I’m not sure there’s an insightful moral of the movie, but there’s an unmistakable surface-level message: otherwise-innocent things can become monsters if you improperly feed them. Therein lies a message to the scrupulous.
Overcoming Scrupulosity with Spiritual Conversion
“Do you know what happened to my heart? When I saw you, my heart fell in love with you.”
An Elevator for Levels of Happiness: More to Say than Small Talk
Thanks to Paul Nicolaus for a recent review examining scholarly research on the kind of happiness we might experience en route to the office each morning.
Overcoming Scrupulosity With Intellectual Conversion
In the 1957 movie, “12 Angry Men,” a dozen jurors are assembled for the purpose of determining whether a boy, accused with the murder of his father, is guilty of the alleged crime. The first ballot, though one-sided, lacks the required unanimity to convict: 11 guilty; 1 not guilty.
The Copernican Revolution – Differently
I once thought that the Copernican Revolution was about the modern scientific view of the universe displacing the old Earth-centered view. Consider Neil deGrasse Tyson’s 2014 re-make of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” TV series, with its animated sequence about Giordano Bruno being condemned and burned by church officials for advocating that the stars were other suns, orbited by other worlds (if you have not seen the Bruno sequence, click here to watch it, and go to about the 16 minute mark).
A Strange Anointing: Glory in Suffering
Great Resources for Learning about Quantum Theory (and Its Relationship to a Trinitarian God)
There is an enormous corpus of talks, articles, commentaries, and YouTube presentations that focus on one of the strangest discoveries of the 20th century: quantum mechanics and its startling attendant features, the principles of uncertainty and superposition. When you consult the resources identified in this post by Mr. George Farahat, be prepared to increase your understanding of how quantum mechanics has changed our understanding of reality, and how it relates to theology.
