The biggest threat facing America today isn’t China, Russia, radical sexual or racial ideologies, globalism or widening economic disparities. The gravest threat is the dramatic decline in citizens’ religious affiliation and belief.
Once belief in God goes, there is no end to the nonsense found to take His place.
On cue, my recent article, “The Mercy of Intolerance,” prompted some, um, spirited responses outside the general Crisis readership. One gentleman, “Paul,” who was particularly exercised by the piece shot me an email (excerpt below) in hopes of educating me. My response follows. Regis, you and I live in two different worlds. In my world tolerance … Read more
A colleague told me of an intriguing incident at a conference of accountants that were studying recent changes in tax regulations. One speaker gave a talk on recruiting new staff and how to deal with turnover. An attendee then asked a question remarking that from the context of her presentation, it seemed companies were facing … Read more
On January 26, Wycliffe College, a graduate school federated with the University of Toronto, hosted a discussion on the question: “Is there meaning to life?” The three participants included, philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig, atheist philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, and clinical psychologist and professor of psychology Jordan Peterson. This encounter made me reflect more deeply … Read more
Often, in comboxes on different sites around the web, I have witnessed the fury of self-avowed atheists whose favorite piece-de-resistance against Catholic presentations of the Gospel and morality consists of the ritual invocation of the clerical sexual abuse scandal that rocked the Church as a rhetorical mace with which to slam Catholics. Their aim, if … Read more
One thing I have learned interrogating, in Socratic fashion, the so-called atheists, agnostics, and skeptics who are thick on the ground and on-line these days is that the Christianity they reject is not any Christianity I would claim as my own, but a false Christianity fashioned for them by bigots. Rarely, it soon becomes clear, … Read more
Charlie Brown and Linus are sitting on the floor, looking at something in a book and laughing. Lucy comes up to them and asks what they are laughing at. They show her, and she asks, “Why are you laughing at it?” “Because we don’t understand it,” they say. In old days, people among the intelligentsia … Read more
The first lines of Belloc’s 1936 book, The Characters of the Reformation, are these: “The break-up of united western Christendom with the coming of the Reformation was by far the most important thing in history since the formation of the Catholic Church fifteen hundred years before.” We live in a time when the Reformation is … Read more
“The reality of the apostasy of faith in our time rightly and profoundly frightens us,” said Cardinal Burke in honor of Fatima’s centenary. In 1903, Pope St. Pius X declared himself “terrified” by humanity’s self-destructive apostasy from God: “For behold they that go far from Thee shall perish” (Ps. 72:27). How much more “daunting,” said … Read more
The Sutherland Springs shooter, who took the lives of 26 men, women, and children in a small Texas church, was, like scores of others before him, one of the living dead. Dylan Klebold, James Holmes, Adam Lanza, Stephen Paddock, and Devin Patrick Kelley represent what the apostle Paul warned would characterize the latter days: people … Read more
And He did not do many miracles there because of their unbelief. ∼ Matthew 13:58 Immediately the boy’s father cried out and said, “I do believe; help my unbelief.” ∼ Mark 6:6 On November 16, 2006, I was invited to engage in a public debate at The Ohio State University in my home city of Columbus, Ohio against … Read more
September 11th was my 64th birthday. Yes, 9/11, but we’ll leave that for another time. What I want to explain here is why for most of my life I found birthdays and most occasions for celebration meaningless and maddening, and why that’s no longer true. After drifting away from the Church in my late teens, I was … Read more
Harvey, Irma, and Jose are the latest in a long list of recent disasters inflicting widespread violence on man and nature. In 2011, a super outbreak of tornadoes claimed the lives of over 340 people in the Southeast. In Alabama whole communities were wiped off the map. Within a few miles of my home in … Read more
I have yet to meet an atheist (and I’ve met and had lengthy conversations with quite a few) who didn’t believe that really smart people (like him) don’t believe in God. It’s a sentiment seemingly supported by various polling data. According to a 2017 Pew survey, belief in God is lower among college-educated individuals than … Read more
Culture is not merely whatever fungus happens to grow in the unclean soul of a transgressive artist. But to say so is counter-cultural, and to say so with wit and erudition is invigorating. Joseph Epstein writes with clarity and probity about culture, but more importantly he writes about the conditioning of the mind and soul necessary for … Read more
Your perversity is as though the potter were taken to be the clay: As though what is made should say of its maker, “He did not make me!” (Isaiah 29:16) These words are as pertinent today as when they were first spoken by the prophet Isaiah (ca 740-681 BC). If there is a God today, … Read more
Tis the season to attack traditional Christianity by pedaling, through social networks and the mass media, speculative theories that contradict orthodox Christian beliefs. On Christmas Eve (predictably), the Washington Post revived a 2014 article promoting the discredited theory that the “historical Jesus” never even existed. Yet even the agnostic New Testament scholar, Bart Ehrman, famously … Read more
In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis argued that all the celebratory talk about man’s increasing ability to control nature had a dark side in which some men took control over other men with nature as the instrument. But, so long as the Judeo-Christian understanding of man was dominant, it would be difficult for tyrants … Read more
“If there were no God, there would be no atheists.” ∼ G. K. Chesterton “When I hear the word culture,” Herman Goering boasted, “I reach for my revolver.” Since he was, after Adolf Hitler, the second-most powerful man in the Third Reich, attention was paid. And while he may have stolen the line from Nazi playwright … Read more