More on: Catholicism

It was another year or two before Brother Thibault whispered to Gérard the secret of his salt. He had, apparently, received unearthly assistance.

A former marine biologist, cook, speechwriter, and White House policy advisor, Michael Gruber is a New York Times–bestselling writer who work infuses genre fiction with philosophical and supernatural themes. His books include the Jimmy Paz trilogy (Tropic of Night, Valley of Bones, and Night of the Jaguar) and thrillers about Shakespeare (The Book of Air…

The child who knelt before the wooden altar painted without passion finishes his prayers _______________  and gets up cramped what shakes the skies? Miserable skies that _______________   spill their dregs while I take refuge under the eaves of God’s house ____________   and that don’t clear up I don’t drink you from the chalice that the…

HE SAID he never intended to found anything, and I believe him. But he had a gift for friendship. When his funeral mass was celebrated in Milan last month, thirty thousand of his companions were there. The principal celebrant, Cardinal Ratzinger, delivered a message from another friend, Karol Wojtyla. It may be a truism to…

Really, though, I’m struggling. Is it absurd to adhere to a religion whose most central rituals my body won’t even let me perform? What am I to make of all the parables in the New Testament where Jesus heals the crippled and the lame? And, most importantly, if I believe we’ll all eventually be resurrected back into the world, then is this body—this bruised, broken, wreck of a form—the one I’m stuck with for all time?

Godfried Cardinal Danneels, Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, has frequently been included on experts’ lists of the papabile (likely possibilities for selection as pope). An advocate for constructive engagement between the worlds of art and religion, Danneels has gained a hearing both inside and outside the Catholic Church. Christianity and human culture, he writes, have a shared…

The role or purpose of art in our lives is to serve as a reminder. We have a sense that the world of perception is illusive and created. Through the acceptance of the gifts of beauty we feel that we are able to draw back the veil cast over our senses, if only briefly, and…