Did you know that you’re meant to be a saint? So says Pope Francis, in his latest Apostolic Exhortation, Gaudete et Exsultate (Rejoice and Be Glad). An Apostolic Exhortation is a communication to Catholics throughout the world; but this one speaks to all Christians. Gaudete et Exsultate‘s very first paragraph announces: “The Lord… wants us…

I was reading Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si when I began an article called “What is Wrong with the West’s Economies?” Published in the August 13, 2015 issue of The New York Review of Books, the article is by Edmund Phelps, 2006 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Director of Columbia’s Center on Capitalism and Society, and…

This post was made possible through the support of a grant from The BioLogos Foundation’s Evolution and Christian Faith program. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BioLogos. Though I’ve heard it said otherwise, the Great Wall of China is not the only evidence of human…

Let’s just take some of the poets in the special issue of Image (#85) on “Evolution and the Imago Dei.” (And since Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Sì came out nearly the same time as Image, I hear the Pope conversing with the poets.)

Poverty is the kind of topic that makes someone like me uncomfortable. After all, my bailiwick is the world of high art—literature, painting, sculpture, classical music, and so on.

In yesterday’s post I wrote about author and critic Paul Elie’s contention that few contemporary writers depict characters struggling with religious belief in novels with contemporary settings. Among other things, I argued that his conviction that having a contemporary setting is somehow supremely valuable is both short-sighted and literalistic—that Elie has a rather narrow understanding…