This image appears in the annual Leesburg Christmas ParadeEvery year around this time, the stories begin popping up about certain atheists battling with people of faith over religious holiday displays on public property. They say it’s a question of the Constitutional separation of Church and State. Religious folks say it’s about the free exercise of religion in a Judeo-Christian countr... More

50,000 people from 57 different countries and five continents were recently asked whether or not they consider themselves religious, nonreligious, or are a convinced atheist. Of those respondents living in America, only 60% identified themselves as religious, a 13 percent decrease over the past seven years. Equally troubling is that the number of self identified atheists in America rose from 1 per... More

I was shaken by the news of the death of Christopher Hitchens. I felt bad. Like so many, believers and non-believers alike, I was rooting for him. And like so many believers, I was hoping for a deathbed conversion. If Hitchens had such a final moment, only God knows. It’s a sign of the Christian charity of his opponents that I’ve read no articles lambasting Hitchens or hoping he is in Hell... More

World AIDS Day was Dec. 1, and coming as it did so soon after Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to Africa, it reminded me of the old argument against Catholics. We’re supposedly so unbending in our hatred of the condom that we are condemning people to death by venereal disease. Actually, the opposite is true: Condom promoters are so unbending in their love of the condom that they are condemning... More

If you haven't read this short work, you must. Don’t lie, don’t kill, don’t steal, keep your promises, honor the past, and take time to rest and value what is important. Universal principles, some of what C.S. Lewis characterized as the “Tao” in his indispensible book, The Abolition of Man. Non-believers in God/gods insist that we do not need a belief in a superna... More

An AlterNet article by Amanda Marcotte helpfully gathers “10 Myths Many Religious People Hold About Atheists” and purports to debunk them. It is a fascinating look into the brain of an atheist. Let’s look through her myths and see how they hold up. (At the Gregorian Institute, I have come up with “Six Myths about Atheism” of my own.) “Myth” 1: “There are no ath... More

Kurt Cobain by Vahl (wiki commons) This September’s 20th anniversary of the album Nevermind by Nirvana was anticipated in a very unlikely place: a diocesan newspaper. It’s a little more understandable when you realize it was The Catholic Key, the excellent newspaper of the diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph. Santiago Ramos wrote the piece, which gave me high hopes for it. The piece is calle... More

“Can you imagine for one moment what England would have been like today without those churches and all that those churches mean? … “Certainly it would not have been safe to walk the streets. All respect, decency, all those things which tend to make modern civilization what it is would not have been in existence. You can imagine what we should have had to pay for our police, for lunatic asyl... More

This week The Gregorian went to press with a challenging but necessary lecture by Father Robert Spitzer, S.J. Argumentative atheism is experiencing a resurgence. And Father Robert Spitzer is one reason why that is not necessarily a bad thing. We have experienced at least three different forms of atheist resurgence in the past century. One was the literally militant atheism that reached its peak in... More

First a California school district chucks $45,000 rather than allow a few Bible verses on brick pavers.  Now we find out that a local community isn’t allowed to use the word “heaven” in a public memorial to fallen heroes. Brooklyn citizens, through their elected representatives, approved the change of a street name to “Seven in Heaven Way.” The street runs past the f... More