St. Ignatius Loyola recognized at the start of the modern era that emerging secularism would mean a fight, and well-trained fighters would be essential.

The image of the potter and the clay is one of the most well-known in the Bible for understanding the relationship between believers and God. What is less understood is that it is never just believers and God, but believers and God, and a lot of God’s people.

The New Testament not only embraced the Old Testament view that Christians were to be a society whose holiness attracted pagans, but extended it by requiring active and vigorous evangelization.

Even if there were false prophets and slacker priests, the people should have known better. The people should have been able to recognize idolatry and apostasy when they heard it.

The witness of scripture is that gentle language is often inadequate to break through barriers caused by subbornness and sin.

Growth is occurring because existing churches around the world have committed resources and leadership to it. Most of it, however, is happening because there are serious believers in those places who see the need, and are answering it.

New theories of information are bending more and more toward God as a respectable explanation for the existence and order of the universe (see Stephen Meyer, The Return of the God Hypothesis). This is not good news for many secularized non-believers, and their hostility may be one of the reasons for increased radicalism in gender ideology and immigration, flirtation with communism, and recrusdescent anti-semitism.

Whatever view proves to be the most accurate, it will certainly be a long view, one that plans far beyond tomorrow and the near future. It will make deep commitments to the maintenance of the Christian community, and make sure not to miss the opportunities within reach.

Jesus the Bridegroom and the Church the Bride is a rich and deeply meaningful New Testament image, and marriage is designed to be a sign of the real presence of Jesus in the home and in the Church.

The right thing and the merciful thing are not always the same thing. Mercy is never fair, but it is sometimes right. Justice is always fair, but sometimes isn’t right.

The problem is not, and has never been, that God is somehow concealing Himself and His intentions for humanity. The problem is that some people simply don’t like the nature of the evidence that God has provided.

We are living at a time when many of the gifted young are beginning to suspect that their fluid intelligence, powerful and creative as it is, is not enough, and are seeking the crystallized treasures that they were once taught by fellow influencers were a waste of time.

Division is not an aberration, but the central reality of Christian life, and our most persistent scandal. But is it, in fact, a “scandal”? Is there a way of thinking about the divisions not as wounds, but as individual facets of the same gem?

And yet it is still true that you can only think with information stored in living tissue. Only the information you get into your brain is available to you to think with, decide with, believe with.

God casts His word everywhere, even on some of the most unpromising places imaginable. It is enough to cause us despair, but God is not intimidated.

Benedictine communities came to be founded on the principle of radical hospitality – the monks would welcome any visitor as they would welcome Christ Himself. It didn’t mean that they would adopt the ideas of whoever came along, but they would listen to them all, think about them in a rigorous fashion, and keep anything that was helpful.

If the things you make time for daily are the kinds of things that build up a Godly culture and are fortified by the antibiotics of the Bible – worship, prayer, study, charity – you have a fighting chance.

False prophets decide whether to pay attention to you based on where, or whether, you went to college, and what tax bracket you’re in.

There is powerful and compelling evidence that the story of the Jews, culminating in Jesus of Nazareth, has had it right all along. Rival stories like Capitalism and Communism borrowed wholesale from that story, but left out important bits, and have always had to be corrected

Social media today abound with reports of how wicked America is, some Americans declaring loud and long how ashamed they are of their country. They clearly don’t have all, even nearly all, the relevant information. Americans, led by American Christians, are incredibly generous, something the world depends on, something we can all be proud of.