Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn’s Ars Vitae is just the kind of reasonable, non-polemical book that our society needs today. Equally adept at diagnosing the problem and offering cogent solutions, Lasch-Quinn balances well the theoretical and the practical, the external and the internal, the philosophical and the theological, the pagan and the Christian, the academic and the popular,…

The philosopher Alvin Plantinga argued in his book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, religion, and naturalism (Oxford University Press, 2011), the central thesis: “There is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism.” Now, Plantinga wrote about “theistic religion,” but his main…

The English language borrowed the word genre from French, which was in turn derived from Latin genus. We use these words to classify things, especially art forms: “The Stray Cats play music mostly in the rockabilly genre.” I know what to listen for when I find the music videos, and I also know that my…

Proper Caution The Paradiso feels like the riskiest book to read, much less write about. To begin with, we have only enough information about Heaven to spark lots of speculation, much of it pretty fanciful. Mark Twain skewered pious visions of Heaven by pointing out that most men he knew don’t act like they’d even…

Keen for the Fire “Unless you’re bitten by the fire,” the angel at the top of the mountain shouts joyfully, but Dante, understandably, balks at being called to pass through a wall of flame. Dramatically, he says “I was like a corpse put in the grave, / the words I heard so touched my heart…