Category Articles

If the study of philosophy seems a little daunting to most of us, Father Robert McTeigue, Jesuit and professor, has written a book to help. While the author doesn’t shy away from calling on, and educating readers about, philosophers from Aristotle to John Mill Stuart, he tempers the chapters with anecdotes from his students and applications to everyday life. His foundation, of course, is the truth of the Faith and the counsel of the saints, and his goal is to show how the principles of Catholic philosophy can guide our decisions and bring meaning to a world filled with “fake” philosophy and uncertain morals. Dr. Robert J. Spitzer, SJ, who contributes the afterword to the book, calls it “an essential readable ‘tool kit’ to help today’s readers assess and critique the many competing philosophies” encountered in the culture today.

Check the book listing at Our Sunday Visitor.

People who find philosophy to be of little practical value are “likely doing it wrong,” says the Catholic philosopher.

Socrates had important answers to the big questions in life. But he was especially good at asking questions, helping his students use their own reason to discover answers that were available to them all along.

I have had a similar experience whenever I am a guest on Jesuit Father Robert McTeigue’s “Catholic Current” radio show (distributed by the Station of the Cross Catholic Radio Network). He asks great questions, arising from a great depth of knowledge and his long experience as a philosophy and theology professor in North and Central America, Europe and Asia. 

Read the essay at The National Catholic Register.

As an academic philosopher, what’s your elevator pitch to incoming college students about why they should study philosophy, a discipline that seems to draw fewer majors every year?

There are powers and principalities in this world that want to harm you, lie to you, addict you and corrupt your soul. Philosophy gives you a really great lie detector. It also gives you a great set of tools for knowing the truth, loving the truth and doing the truth.

Read the essay at America Magazine.

What if you had the cure for a terrible disease—what would be your obligation to make that cure known?

What if the terrible disease for which you had the cure were alienation from God? Then what would your obligation be to make that cure known?

Read this essay at Catholic World Report.

Who said this? And when?

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what’s been taught and what’s been left out. But these young people today have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.

Continue reading this essay at The Classical Difference.

However you might mark the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe this week, the missionaries and leadership of FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students) will be doing something distinctive. FOCUS, dedicated to evangelization on college campuses and parishes in the US and Europe and with service trips across Latin America, will consecrate their efforts to the protection of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the intercession of her great herald, Saint Juan Diego. Under the inspiration of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Saint Juan Diego sought converts, who became disciples, who became missionaries, who in their turn fostered the process of conversion, discipleship, and mission.

Read the rest of this essay at Catholic World Report.