Whenever I write about the decline of organized religion in America, I get a lot of emails expressing some version of this sentiment. Sometimes it’s couched in the form of regretfu
Charles Taylor has distinguished three ways in which a society may be secularized: first, by churches and other religious organizations losing their hold upon secular institutions,
This paper was written for and delivered at a conference on Natural Law, Human Rights and Chinese Traditional Culture, held in Beijing by the Law School and the Institute for Human
The object of attitudes valorized in the major religious traditions is typically regarded as maximally great. Conceptions of maximal greatness differ but theists believe that a max
We think of God as an ultimate reality, the source or ground of all else, perfect and deserving of worship. Such a conception is common to both Eastern and Western religions.
There is a common philosophical challenge that asks how things would be different if some supposed reality did not exist. Conceived in one way this can amount to trial by sensory v
When we ask ourselves "Why do we believe in God?" our faith provides the first response. God has revealed himself to humanity and has entered into contact with it. The supreme reve
The Christian Faith at the dawn of the new millennium is faced with the challenge of unbelief and religious indifference. The Second Vatican Council, already forty years ago, deliv
The earliest beliefs in gods took them to be finite but powerful beings who inhabited special places (mountains, woods, oceans) and were mostly concerned with their own business but sometimes bestowed benefits or inflicted harms on human beings. With Judaism emerged the idea of a single supreme being, creator and sustainer of the world who cared especially about human beings. Greek philosophy was drawn upon to develop this notion of a single God into the idea of a unique perfect Being: eternal, immaterial, omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), and omnibeneficent (doing only good). It is this idea of God that is common to the Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.