Book Review

New data for the debate about God

Culture
Jun 24, 2011

NEW PROOFS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD: CONTRIBUTIONS OF CONTEMPORARY PHYSICS AND PHILOSOPHY
By Robert J. Spitzer
Published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., $28

Jesuit Fr. Robert Spitzer believes in a “Big Bang” God. Others do not, have not and probably never will. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once warned us that a God who let us prove his existence would be an idol. Immanuel Kant would seem to share that sentiment when he declared that human reason, as mighty as it is, can neither prove nor disprove God’s existence. Perhaps Pascal said it best of all with his sage epigram: “The heart has reasons that reason knows not.”

Book Review

The drunkalogue: a parade that goes nowhere

Culture
May 14, 2010

ORANGUTAN: A MEMOIR
By Colin Broderick
Published by Three Rivers Press, $14

June 10 of this year will mark the 75th anniversary of Alcoholics Anonymous. The World Health Organization estimates that 140 million people suffer from alcoholism and the United States alone can lay claim to about 17.8 million adult alcoholics. On any given day at least 700,000 of that number will be in treatment.

Book Review

What the laity once achieved

Culture
Jun 3, 2009

THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN CATHOLICISM: THE PITTSBURGH LAITY AND THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL, 1950-1972
By Timothy Kelly
Published by University of Notre Dame Press, $45

The charismatic Bishop Kenneth Untener once said, “What happened at Vatican II might be compared to the great plates shifting beneath the earth.” Its effects were “monumental.” Tectonic shifts do not migrate overnight, and Cardinal Joseph Bernardin captured this temporal dimension when he wrote, “The theological and pastoral currents of the previous decades needed a catalyst to channel them in the direction of building up the church … Pope John XXIII allowed the dynamic forces that were present in the church to be unleashed with full creative and pastoral wisdom. The results were the documents of Vatican II.”