The content of the Gospel is simple, but it is difficult to express simply. Consider the rare eloquence of a crucifix, or the unsurpassable summaries of the faith in Scripture: e.g., “God is love” (1 Jn 4:16). Akin to these condensations is a little book by St. Athanasius called On the Incarnation. Before reading the book as an undergraduate, I had never seen the whole account of Christianity so plainly and appealingly set out.
When Socrates had received his sentence, he stood up to address the assembly for the last time. He predicted that those who had convicted him would incur a bad reputation. To the Western mind, that’s putting it mildly: as an account of martyrdom for the sake of truth, the Apology of Socrates is second only to the Passion of the Christ. But Socrates hasn’t pleased everyone: Nietzsche had his doubts, and, what’s more, some museum-goers in Chicago are positively unimpressed.
If you were at a Dominican church on the feast of Christmas or Epiphany, you might have heard the Sequence Laetabundus, wherein the Church sings that the mother of Christ poured him forth like a star pours forth its splendor (sicut sidus radium . . . pari forma). You may also have been surprised to hear it sung that this birth was foretold—strange as it seems—by “Sibylline verses.”
The Laetabundus is not the only Sequence that credits pagan prophecy for predicting events in Salvation History. The Dies Irae famously opens with an apocalyptic vision of the universe reduced to embers and the just one ready to judge—to this vision, so the Sequence goes, both David and the Sibyl bore witness (teste David cum Sibylla).
For two years in college I worked for a Christian organization that ministers exclusively to male prostitutes. The organization is called Emmaus Ministries, and it was founded in Chicago in 1990 and later in Houston, where I worked, in 2002.
The typical man who comes to Emmaus was abused as a child by members of his family. He left home in his early teens and began prostituting to support himself. He’s homeless. He’s an alcoholic or addicted to crack, and he’s got HIV. He doesn’t think of himself as “gay” but keeps “hustling” for the sake of food and drugs. The main goal of Emmaus is to show this man the face of Christ—to remind him of his dignity as a man, to introduce him to the beauty of Christian life, and to direct his gaze to the eternal glory Christ promises.
Why is there something rather than nothing? This question, usually thought to fall strictly within the purview of philosophy and theology, has recently received attention in the world of popular science thanks to books by Stephen Hawking and Lawrence M. Krauss. Interestingly, these authors propose something similar to what Christians have always believed—that the universe came into existence out of nothing, or ex nihilo—but they think this could have happened spontaneously, or without God.
As the uncreated Word of God, the Lord Jesus is the key to all the Scriptures. The New Testament itself bears witness to this truth. St. Paul interprets the beginning of Genesis in the light of Christ as “the New Adam” (Rom 5:12–19), and at Pentecost St. Peter preaches Christ as foreshadowed in the Psalms (Acts 2:14–41). The Evangelists frequently tell us that Christ did or said a particular thing “that what was written might be fulfilled” (cf. Mt 26:53–56). In the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5–7), Christ offers direct commentary on the Law (“You have heard that it was said . . .”), and in the synagogue at Nazareth, Christ closes the scroll of Isaiah and proclaims, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Lk 4:21).