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Deep Thoughts from the Doghouse

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April 2014

April 07, 2014

Taste and See

For the past several weeks I've been talking about Christian belief: how I came to...

April 03, 2014

Annunciation: The Mystery of Vocation

I think of the Annunciation as the Mystery of Vocation, the Mystery of Calling. The...

March 2014

March 31, 2014

Why Catholicism?

Two weeks ago I wrote briefly about how I came to be the Catholic I...

March 24, 2014

Why Christianity?

In the comments to my post on "What We Can Know, and How We Can...

March 17, 2014

Why I Believe

Alex Symczak has been visiting my comboxes lately, asking pointed questions about the nature of...

March 10, 2014

What We Can Know, and How We Can Know It

According to Thomas Aquinas, we can know things in three ways: Directly, as we know...

March 03, 2014

God, Invisible and Inaudible

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about discipleship and catechesis; and a...

March 02, 2014

Lumen Fidei: The Light of Faith

I've finished my series on "Bootstrapping the Interior Life" for the time being; and as...

March 01, 2014

The Compassion of Telling the Truth

This post first appeared in slightly different form in April of 2004. Since then, the...

February 2014

February 19, 2014

No Stupid Questions, No Wrong Answers

Wednesday is usually fiction day around here, but President's Day weekend threw off my schedule;...

February 06, 2014

Catechesis vs. Discipleship

There's been a lot of discussion here on the Catholic Channel about how to do...

February 03, 2014

The Way is Straight, The World is Wide

This post is an attempt to capture something I've been pondering for awhile; we'll see...

January 2014

January 27, 2014

Aphorism Watch: Do What You Love, Love What You Do

Just recently I've run across a number of essays debunking the aphorism, "Do what you...

January 20, 2014

Discipline is for Disciples

Why don't Catholics handle church discipline in the manner described in the New Testament? St....

January 16, 2014

Either/Or, Both/And, This-then-That

I frequently read on one blog or another that Catholics aren't either/or, we're both And...

January 14, 2014

The Measure With Which You Measure

Apropos of Monday's post about Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics, Mike Flynn (science fiction writer...

January 13, 2014

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Every day we read statistics about everything under the sun: "Eating a bar of chocolate...

January 09, 2014

Meme Watch: Their Story vs. Your Story

I ran across this meme on Facebook a couple of times recently, and as so...

December 2013

December 23, 2013

Too Introverted to Evangelize?

People were discussing the New Evangelization on a Catholic forum I read, and one fellow...

December 16, 2013

The Eternal View and the Temporal View

There are two ways to look at the Church, two ways that are essential for...

December 09, 2013

Besetting Sins and Pseudo-Virtues

In a comment on this post, reader ThisIstheEnd said that he found it odd for...

December 05, 2013

I’m a Truckist

We were discussing the end of the world and the Second Coming at my Lay...

December 02, 2013

Fifteen Views of Christians by Non-Christians

So John Shore at Patheo's Progressive Christian channel asked non-Christians all over the country what...

November 2013

November 25, 2013

The Deadly Ambiguity of Aphorisms

In all my years of Christian living I've often heard the saying, "God will never...

November 18, 2013

How To Call Someone To Repentance

Last month I spent many pixels criticizing a particularly bad and ineffective way of explaining...

November 11, 2013

Monogamy Fulfills Eros

Last July there was an article in the Atlantic that stated that Monogamy kills Eros,...

November 07, 2013

On Being a Conduit of Love

Receiving God's love is kind of like tuning in on a radio signal. God's love...

November 05, 2013

The Pony Principle

Many years ago I formulated what I call the Pony Principle, which is this: if...

November 01, 2013

Mere Catholicism

So Elizabeth Scalia welcomed me to Patheos on her blog a couple of days ago,...

October 2013

October 31, 2013

Desiring God

A few days ago, Francis Beckwith asked the musical question: Where did all these Calvinists...