Theology

The United States is simultaneously one of the most religious and most theologically illiterate societies in the developed world. Americans profess belief in God at rates far higher than their European counterparts, yet surveys consistently show that large numbers of self-identified Christians cannot articulate basic doctrinal differences between their own tradition and others. Catholics attend…

The theological revolution that stripped away Catholic consolation did not remain confined to the church. It migrated into the very structure of American culture, shaping how Americans work, rest, judge one another, understand suffering, and experience their own inner lives. The “tyranny” of Protestantism — the isolation of the individual before an inscrutable standard, the…

Based on the Loss of Consolation The passage highlights a profound difference in how the two traditions understood the relationship between God and the suffering believer. Medieval Catholicism, for all its institutional flaws, had developed an elaborate system of consolation — a network of mediations that softened the terrifying distance between fallen humanity and an…