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Large portions of those sacred books can, at times, seem like little more than a series of unpleasant encounters with the existing religious authorities—not most people’s idea of inspirational reading. To the casual student, Jesus almost seems to be deliberately antagonizing them, arranging times and circumstances for his miracles that were certain to provoke not just debate but opposition.In Luke’s Gospel, our Lord chooses the twelve apostles, then sets out immediately on a veritable crime wave …

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 …

If you want to know whether or not you should be a Catholic, there’s only one issue you need to solve: is the papacy true or not? To be sure, the papacy isn’t the most important doctrine: the existence of God, the divinity of Christ, the Eucharist, and countless other teachings are of greater importance. But it’s the most distinctive. Think about it this way: the existence (or non-existence) of a truck bed is the distinctive feature in determining if you’re looking at a truck or a car, even thou …

I was sitting in a booth at a restaurant in San Diego waiting for the religious equivalent of a “blind date” to begin. A few weeks earlier, some Catholic friends of mine asked me to meet with their son while he was home from college. They wanted me to speak to him because he told his parents he wasn’t going to church with them anymore because he was now an atheist. They asked me, “Can you help him see he needs to start going back to church? Can you help him get over all this atheist stuff?” Then …