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Perhaps the clearest teaching on the papacy is at the Last Supper. That may surprise some readers. After all, there’s an all too common misconception that the Catholic claim for the papacy boils down entirely to Jesus’ words to Peter in Matthew 16:18 (“upon this rock, I will build my church”) and the identification of the rock with Peter himself. To be sure, we’ll cover that ground later, but it’s more important to start with the Last Supper. It’s there, after all, that we find the Twelve arguin …

No matter how well you present the evidence for God, or how swiftly you can answer the skeptic’s objections, you’ll still find that many people resist the evidence. Human beings are complex, and it’s important to recognize that a failure to persuade someone does not mean that the arguments and evidence presented were poor. A good argument should not be judged by the number of people it persuades, but rather by how it accords with objective standards of reason and evidence.Do not lose heart when …

What is a miracle, and how does it differ from magic? Both “miracle” and “magic” are notoriously hard concepts to define, and differing religions demarcate their respective limits differently. The closest we get to a biblical answer is in Moses’ and Aaron’s encounter with “the wise men and the sorcerers” of Pharaoh (Exod. 7:8-13). At the Lord’s instruction, Aaron “cast down his rod before Pharaoh and his servants, and it became a serpent.” The “magicians of Egypt” then did likewise, but “by thei …

Often this slogan is wielded after a theist uses a cosmological argument. The skeptic points out that God is made an arbitrary exception to the causal principle. Surprisingly, both philosophically engaged atheists and popularizers have offered this slogan in one form or another. In his book Breaking the Spell, the atheist Daniel Dennett writes, “The Cosmological Argument . . . in its simplest form states that since everything must have a cause the universe must have a cause—namely, God.” From …

The conversations of Jesus are different from his parables. The parables tend to be more generic, more applicable to different persons and circumstances. They also are presented in figurative language. The conversations of Jesus, on the other hand, are more concrete and direct. They show Jesus engaged with real, historical individuals, and these encounters are not described in metaphors or figurative language. For this very reason, they can strike the reader more forcefully and immediately. The …