In 1968, many things took place. That long year puts into perspective the dramas of 2018. One event of 1968 was the release of Law, Love, and Language, a definitive book on “what ethics is all about” (its American title) by the British Dominican Herbert McCabe. The book’s approach to the Catholic moral life promptly sank into oblivion, overwhelmed by the debates provoked by Pope Paul VI’s birth control encyclical Humanae Vitae. That document and the furor that followed has insured that, even to today, debates in Catholicism have been polarized around the same set of terms: law versus...

It’s exam week and holidays are coming, so let’s play a game. We have a free copy of Bill Mattison’s Introducing Moral Theology for the reader who can give the best short account of what’s wrong with Andrew Sullivan’s “America’s New Religions.” I’ll summarize the argument and kick us off with some attempt to highlight a few of the major mistakes, and then I challenge readers to do better. A week from today, I’ll select a lucky winner of a free book.

There is a general sense of agreement, or at least a culturally enshrined assumption, that the stretch of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas might just be the busiest time of the year. Much of this, undoubtedly, has to do with the commercialization of Christmas, which is beginning to affect not only Thanksgiving but also Halloween, it seems. Surely the march from Black Friday and Small Business Saturday to Cyber Monday and Giving Tuesday is not helping the sense of overwhelming obligation that most people seem to share during this “gap” between the holidays. And yet this gap is not...

Readings: Daniel 7:13-14;  Psalm 93:1-2, 5;  Revelation 1:5-8;  John 18:33b-37   The “ruler of the kings of the earth” is also the “faithful witness” (Rev 1:5). He rules as the one whose words we can lean on fully: His “decrees are worthy of trust indeed” (Ps 93:5). To belong to Christ’s reign involves faith in truth’s priority over power as well as hope in truth’s ultimate vindication over all attempts to subordinate communication to the search for control, stability, and safety (even if these things are sometimes important). For Pilate, the conflicting claims posed by Jesus and his fellow...