Douglas Knight

Another great European about to be launched into the insular English-speaking world is Robert Spaemann, a Catholic moral philosopher who until recently taught at Munich.
Robert Spaemann Persons: The Difference between `Someone’ and `Something’, translated by Oliver O’Donovan, appears in the Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics series.
Spaemann has also authored [...]

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Ecclesiology is thus related to the issue of the priority of substance, or ousia, in relation to personhood, or hypostasis. If the one God were prior to the Trinity and identical with the one divine substance, then substance and oneness would precede personhood and multiplicity, in the Church as well as in God. The consequences [...]

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If the first good news for the gay Christian, then, is that the “great question” – the question of the self, with all its pain and its hope, can be opened illuminatingly in the light of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, there is also a second good news. There is a neighbour with whom to [...]

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The secular phalanx, rather like religious fundamentalists, is blinded by a certainty which conceals anxiety. The process of modernisation in the rest of the world is not following the pattern established in NW Europe. We are the exception and we are beginning to understand for example how the ecological challenge we face is a function [...]

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Much of the current understanding of pedagogy, in Britain especially, is driven by an appeal to method: the pursuit of specified goals in learning a subject will generate specified, quantifiable results and an outcome. Education, inasmuch as it is conceived as a process, will have outcomes which will both act as a measure against which [...]

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The Annual Conference of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology June 10-12, 2007 St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN
Freedom and Authority in the Christian Life

The assumption of our culture is that authority and freedom are a zero-sum game: some decry the loss of authority in an age of freedom and [...]

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One clear realization to emerge from … Christianity and the Soul of the University … is that Protestants may actually have a more difficult time maintaining a meaningfully Christian university than Catholics. As Daniel Williams, a religion professor at Baylor, explains, “antitraditionalist and antidogmatic perspectives are built into the Protestant religious ethos,” and an emphasis [...]

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I have found another place I want to be next summer.
A Day for the Lord: A Sign of Contradiction?

June 11 – 13, 2007 at the University of Notre Dame
The thirty-fifth annual conference of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy will address the relationship between cult and culture by considering what it means [...]

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The concept of secularity, said the Holy Father in his address to the group, originally referred to “the condition of simple faithful Christian, not belonging to the clergy or the religious state. During the Middle Ages it acquired the meaning of opposition between civil authorities and ecclesial hierarchies, and in modern times it has assumed [...]

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There is an elementary point about Christian ethics that I have sought to emphasise ever since the opening pages of my Resurrection and Moral Order published twenty years ago: there is no Christian ethics that is not “evangelical”, ie good news. There can be no change of voice, no shift of mood, between God’s [...]

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There is some remarkable Catholic institution-building going on around the world.
In the States I see Thomas International with its McInerny Center for Thomistic Studies. I see the University of St Thomas Center for Catholic Studies, the Catholic University of America (where more effort rightly goes into theology than into the faculty website), and the [...]

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I never had a very high view of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. I have just read some of the teaching material on the unity of the Church offered by The Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and had a change of mind.
The traditional date for the Week of Prayer for [...]

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The Christian is a member of an assembly that participates in the future assembly of all things. Under the instruction and supervision of that assembly the Christian begins to grow into their place and role, and to learn that this assembly has more in store for him or her. However the individual Christian may delay [...]

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In 1997 the Bishops of England and Wales reminded us that “the basic understanding of education [is] human development . . . at the heart of it is a human being within whom as far as human willfulness allows, the creator will perfect the image of his divine Son”. At the same time we have [...]

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Acclamations 53. The acclamations are shouts of joy which arise from the whole assembly as forceful and meaningful assents to God’s Word and Action. They are important because they make some of the most significant moments of the Mass (gospel, eucharistic prayer, Lord’s Prayer) stand out. It is of their nature that they be rhythmically [...]

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The Theology of the Body lectures continue on Friday evenings St. Patrick’s Soho Square, London. The lectures are going through the theological teaching on marriage given by Pope John Paul II in his general audiences (GA)
II. Blessed are the Pure of Heart
Jan 12 Rod Isaacs: “The Heart – A Battlefield between Love [...]

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I am in the wrong London. It is all happening in London, Ontario, today at Huron University College
Faith Seeking Understanding: The Windsor Report, the St. Michael Report, and the Challenge Ahead

Much has been said and written about the conflicts that have arisen over the past decade in the Anglican Communion and the Anglican Church of [...]

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This theological doxological mode of knowing enables all other forms of knowing, amongst them natural science. It provides the framework which prevents science from imposing an unlimited power over its object. This framework guarantees that we are distinct from what we know, that the world and other creatures are distinct from us. It is the [...]

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It is, of course, right that philosophers should speak as believing Christians. It is right that they should do their philosophising in a conscious openness to theology… But it is not good that they should confuse the philosophical task of understanding the world as it presents itself with elements randomly introduced from Christian proclamation. The [...]

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My own theory is that Modernism is divine judgment on Western Christendom for the ecumenical failures of the Reformation. Because both Rome and the Churches of the Reformation were unable to recognize the face of Christ in each other, including even Reformation churches who refused to recognize that face in each other, the divine judgment [...]

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