Volume 4, Issue 2

4.2 – Winter 2008 – Table of Contents

– Editor’s Note -

An Inconvenient Truth
by Samir Paul ‘10

– The Dispatch –
I: Why Christ?
by Samir Paul ‘10; Hans Anderson, Yale ‘10; and Nicole Fegeas, Princeton ‘10

– Opinions –
The Church, Israel, and the End Times
by Cameron D. Kirk-Giannini ‘11
In Memory: Fr. Richard John Neuhaus
by Jordan Hylden ‘06
In Memory: Avery Cardinal Dulles
by… more »

An Inconvenient Truth

When was the last time you loved an idea?
Not enjoyed it, not found it pleasant, not thought it nice. Loved it in the most nakedly powerful way possible with the kind of fierceness that defies explanation. When was the last time truth gave you the tingly chills you felt during your first kiss? How often… more »

The Dispatch I: Why Christ?

We are pleased to introduce the first installment of “The Dispatch,” a new feature in which students from schools all across New England will tackle a single topic together. This issue’s question is: Why Christ?
Samir Paul, Harvard
The temptation in approaching the question, “Why Jesus?” is to step into the Nietzschean contest of wills that ensues… more »

The Church, Israel, and the End Times: Issues with Rapture Theology

One of the distinctive features of popular American Christian eschatology is belief in a pretribulational rapture, “a Second Coming [of Christ]… known only to believers and resulting in their deliverance from earth,”[1] which will precede the “great tribulation” mentioned in the book of Matthew[2].  A number of works about the rapture, including Hal Lindsey’s The… more »

In Memory: Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

Father Richard John Neuhaus lived an inimitable, outsized, and altogether unlikely life, starting from a small town in Ontario and winding up as probably the most influential Christian American intellectual and clergyman since Reinhold Niebuhr. The obits in the newspapers point first to the many conversions in his life — from protesting the war in… more »

In Memory: Avery Cardinal Dulles ‘40

If any one thinker guided the American Catholic Church into a new age after Vatican II, it was Avery Cardinal Dulles ‘40. The Cardinal leaves a legacy of contributions to Catholic intellectualism. A staunch defender of orthodoxy, Dulles facilitated communication within the Church and was staunchly committed to ecumenism.
Dulles considered himself an agnostic by the… more »

Certum Est, Quia Possibile: An Apologetic for the Existence of God

“You do not possess the truth; it is the truth that possesses you.”
St. Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de Veritate (1259)

I. TO BE OR NOT TO BE
“Why,” asks Leibniz, “is there something rather than nothing?”[1] This question is not unique to Leibniz; Baron Rees of Ludlow, an English astrophysicist and current president of the… more »