Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Catholic

2019-12-10T09:53:37-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Angels of the Cosmos or, Are We Alone in the Universe?

Last updated on: December 10, 2019 at 9:53 am By Jack Hartjes

Scientists are hard at work investigating the question, Is there life on other planets. They are finding Earth-like planets and listening for radio signals from possible alien civilizations. Imagine the excitement if another intelligent “life form” is discovered, although travel and even communication back and forth will be completely impractical. I suspect part of the excitement is due to the fact that we feel otherwise so misplaced in the cosmos. In the present scientific picture of the world, it’s practically... Read more

Angels

The Creed

2019-03-13T16:15:55-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The Powers that Be: Walter Wink and the Angels in the New Testament

Last updated on: March 13, 2019 at 4:15 pm By Jack Hartjes

Walter Wink, a Methodist theologian and Bible scholar, has helped modern minds appreciate the New Testament’s language about spiritual reality. Most often for this side of reality we use the word “angels.” It sounds like beings separate from the physical world, interacting with that world occasionally but not by their very nature. In the New Testament, however, the spiritual and the material are close together. Wink sums up the New Testament’s various words for this angelic reality with the phrase:... Read more

Angels

The Creed

2022-06-05T20:26:04-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Church Bells Announcing a God who is Not Tame

Last updated on: June 5, 2022 at 8:26 pm By Jack Hartjes

Reminiscing theologically about bells because the parish of my childhood decided to fix the bells in the church steeple “I got bells!” I said, and said it first, so there I was in my altar boy cassock and surplice, kneeling on the right side of the altar, the side with the bells. Not ordinary handbells, these were electric bells with five buttons to push. A few preliminary tasks done, having to do with wine and water in their cruets, and... Read more

Liturgy

2019-12-10T09:04:40-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Where are all the angels? – One God, One Story, One World

Last updated on: December 10, 2019 at 9:04 am By Jack Hartjes

The highly symbolic angels of Church teaching and lore give us a clue to the meaning of that abundant reality that the Creed refers to with its “things visible and invisible.” But people have taken angels literally and the result is that angels no longer challenge us with the mystery of one reality. We too easily imagine another, invisible world when this one seems too much for us. We’ve domesticated angels into themes for country western songs. Our angel stories are... Read more

Angels

The Creed

2020-02-01T06:58:32-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Freedom Fighter Hamer Wrestles with Spiritual Wickedness in High Places

Last updated on: February 1, 2020 at 6:58 am By Jack Hartjes

Angels and devils don’t usually figure in our calculations about how to solve our problems. We live in a largely disenchanted world, as my last post described. But to settle for that disenchanted world is to give away too much. This post takes a cue from a 1960’s civil rights activist. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Fannie Lou Hamer spoke up against racism in American politics. She described a struggle that was not so much against flesh and blood... Read more

Angels

The Creed

2019-07-23T18:36:54-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Minnesota Catholics at the Capitol Pursue Broad Pro-Life

Last updated on: July 23, 2019 at 6:36 pm By Jack Hartjes

‘As stewards of God’s creation, we are called to make the earth a beautiful garden for the human family.’ – Minnesota Catholic Conference Publication Catholics at the Capitol saw over two thousand lobbying in St. Paul, Minnesota, for state house and senate bills that the Minnesota Catholic Conference deemed important. It was the second Catholics at the Capitol. The first was in February 2017. We lobbied on two issues.... Read more

Social Justice

2020-12-22T08:56:40-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Disenchantment and Dominion: Christians, Science, Worldviews

Last updated on: December 22, 2020 at 8:56 am By Jack Hartjes

This post is an introduction to a series about angels, and it says approximately nothing about angels. Instead, it looks at a world from which angels, or anything spiritual below God, seem to have been removed. It sets the stage for a re-entrance of angels in a more biblical, and more relevant, sense than we usually imagine. If you have fallen out of love with angels in the course of your grown-up years, you might find yourselves, like me, liking... Read more

Angels

The Creed

2019-03-13T15:44:10-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The Creed Takes on Gnosticism, Ancient and Modern

Last updated on: March 13, 2019 at 3:44 pm By Jack Hartjes

God Made All Things, Visible and Invisible – and the Visible Might be the Hard Part Once I thought that the first paragraph of the Creed, which ends with the words “visible and invisible,” was something you could go along with if you believed in God at all. No Jesus incarnating God, no Holy Spirit, no Blessed Trinity, no Church, only God and, of course, the world. But even among Christians there was an early movement that objected to an... Read more

The Creed

2019-02-15T06:00:14-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Artificial Self-consciousness: Does My Robot Know that it Knows?

Last updated on: February 15, 2019 at 6:00 am By Jack Hartjes

Reading a recent Patheos post by Russell Saltzman on artificial intelligence got me thinking. I’d been reading Karl Rahner again and imagining that I understood some of it. What he says about subjectivity can raise discussions on artificial intelligence to a new level: Does my robot know that it knows? Can there ever be such a thing as artificial self-consciousness? Can we ever know it if there is? Rahner gives the empirical sciences their full due, including when they probe... Read more

Uncategorized

2019-02-13T08:46:46-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Two Worldviews We Inherit, One Task Before Us

Last updated on: February 13, 2019 at 8:46 am By Jack Hartjes

From the Jews we inherit their one God of History and the accompanying worldview of history as a story that is going somewhere. The worldview of the Pagans with their nature gods is with us as well. It shows up in notions of cycles repeating and pendulums swinging back and forth. More positively, it’s in the ideas of balance and sustainability, so difficult and so necessary. After the excesses of modernism, our task is to live in the tension of these two worldviews. ... Read more

The Creed

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What does Siloam mean?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Love Sent Gift Received

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Advent Christmas Amazon Synod Angels Being Consumed Bible Catholic Modern Creed Ecology Economics Elizabeth Johnson Eucharist Fragments and Filaments Gender and Sex Gospel of Mark Herzog Historical Jesus Liturgy Luke Opening Scriptures on Way to Emmaus Ordinary radicals Parables Pro-Life Reincarnation Rosary Sacraments science Social Justice Souls Stories of Jesus The Creed Torture and Eucharist Tracy Uncategorized War and Peace

Select a Month October 2026 June 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 November 2024 July 2024 March 2024 December 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018

TRENDING AT PATHEOS Catholic