Grace and Reason According to St. Paul and St. Thomas | Dr. Eric M. Johnston | HPR
…the world we live in is overwhelmingly irrational. Our popular discourse doesn’t make any sense at all. As Catholics, we need to understand what our faith teaches about this irrationality. We need to look to Scripture and tradition.
A recent week’s politics left Catholics reeling. The Supreme Court says there is no reason but bare animus to believe that marriage between a man and a woman is different from any other relationship—the most basic biology is treated like the most bizarre doctrine of faith.
The mass media acclaim a woman in Texas who, aided by a screaming mob, thwarted a measure supported by two-thirds of the people of the state. The “extreme” measure prevents abortion only after twenty weeks, and requires that abortionists have faculties to admit a hemorrhaging woman into the hospital.
And the mass media jeer the governor of Texas for pointing out that the woman who filibustered the bill is herself a beautiful exemplar of why we should count no life as hopeless. She was the daughter of an uneducated single mother, and then herself an uneducated single mother—but went on to be first in her college class, then a graduate of Harvard Law School, and now a state senator, before acquiring this new, dubious claim to fame.
In short, the world we live in is overwhelmingly irrational. Our popular discourse doesn’t make any sense at all. As Catholics, we need to understand what our faith teaches about this irrationality. We need to look to Scripture and tradition.
We often feel torn in two directions. We are tempted to wash our hands of the world. There is sometimes talk, even gleeful, that America, and maybe the world, is coming to an end. We will be persecuted. We can never win the public debate. We look forward to an age of martyrdom. There is no hope.
But we are also tempted in the opposite direction.
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