When we speak of the royal office of the Church, we do not have to commit ourselves to the ranks of the small but disproportionately annoying number of Americans who claim to be royalists. --Frederick Bauerschmidt hubs.la/Q02PQFQW0

If spiritual guidance is of utmost importance for sanctity, as the saints and lived experience of the Church unanimously declare, how is anyone going to answer the universal call to holiness and the New Evangelization? --Peter Andrastek hubs.la/Q02PQypj0

Ministry is an art and a science; it’s both at the same time. The minister may be called to shift from one to the other seamlessly, as a dancer moves from foot to foot. --Tom Eggleston hubs.la/Q02PQLcV0

Pauline discipline itself is not just a path of reconciliation, it is also for some the path of sanctification, demanding from us clergy true pastoral art. We must consider how to help those called to walk this path do so faithfully. --Joshua Whitfield hubs.la/Q02PQLKN0

The reality is that most parishes do not have the infrastructure—the people—to handle large-scale “successes.” Thus, renewal must obey the law of the mustard seed. --Peter Andrastek hubs.la/Q02PQ1rj0

Catholic formation, of course, has an obligation to participate in the renewal of culture. But, cultural renewal in our time is an occasion not of a traditionalism that turns the text, the idea, or the practice into our salvation. --Timothy O'Malley hubs.la/Q02K4Gc90

Augustine sees atheism as a crookedness that can only be made straight by a God intimately in contact with us. The Carpenter must place his hands on the bent beam, apply the lathe, and humble the proud. --Terrence Sweeney hubs.la/Q02K4vrs0

Michael Buckley’s religious writings penetrated to the heart of the encounter with the incomprehensible mystery of God, most fully revealed in the suffering of Christ crucified. --Anna Moreland and Grant Kaplan hubs.la/Q02K4Pmb0

When the authority of a nuclear family is taken (as Lasch insists it always will be in a society bent on atomization), and it is left only with love, it is not too much of a leap to expect that children will be made into narcissists. --Scott Beauchamp hubs.la/Q02K4v2k0

The book of Judges reports a history that shines none too positive a light on the people of Israel. It details mass murder not as divine theophany or righteous conquest, but as a fact—the singular period at the end of a long sentence. --Chase Padusniak hubs.la/Q02K4tRj0

We need to get back to serious discussions about how to live the faith in community while evangelizing our neighbors in this Christ-forgetting world. --Terrence Sweeney hubs.la/Q02K4s_W0

The Church is precisely not a sect, not enjoined or allowed to close in on itself in self-congratulation for being the Body of so great a Head, but the love which binds it together and makes it what it is, impels us to love outward. --John Cavadini hubs.la/Q02K4Tvr0

If you believe in free will, there is as present no hard neuroscientific data (that I know of) that could be used to seriously undermine that belief. --Aaron Schurger hubs.la/Q02K4NJk0

As many other cognitive neuroscientists have pointed out before me, the “nothing but” reductionist program is a non-starter with respect to the aims of neuroscience, if we take those aims to include understanding human mental phenomena. --Patrick McNamara hubs.la/Q02K4NMZ0

Is Allah a Different God Than the Biblical God? churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/is-th…

Biblical literalists ignore the layers of richness built into the texts of the Bible and misinterpret passages in ways that generate inconsistencies that they are then forced to try to explain away. --Elizabeth-Jane McGuire and Steven F. McGuire hubs.la/Q02K4Hbj0

The Church has been granted the task of giving a single and unchanging Word [Verbe] to the world without adapting or lessening it, because he does not belong to the Church—instead it is his. --Jean-Luc Marion hubs.la/Q02K4PjF0

When God causes something to be or happen, there is no reason—either logical or empirical—why this should involve any conflict with what Aquinas called the “secondary causations” that are simultaneously operating at the created level. --Sarah Coakley hubs.la/Q02K4Q1y0

1.\ Week in Review "Six Steps Into Mystery" --Lewis Ayres hubs.la/Q02P5vBn0

2.\ Week in Review "Alasdair MacIntyre's Adventures in Philosophy at Notre Dame" By Kenneth Sayre hubs.la/Q02PQqRC0