It’s been a strange summer.

At least here in New York, it’s often been humid and rainy; for a good stretch, it was also smoky.

It’s also been a quiet one. I have little to report on the writing front, and after an epic trip across the country last summer, our family mostly stayed put. We saw extended family, went on some day trips, and ventured into neighboring states here and there, but otherwise just enjoyed being with our kids, and in our home, and in our hometown. Leisure, as the title of a Josef Pieper book has it, is the basis of culture—and if that’s true, there’s a lot to be said for such a season, and hopefully a lot more to be said in its wake.

The Way of Heaven and Earth

• SON RISE MORNING SHOW: Today, September 1, marks my final appearance on The Son Rise Morning Show. Despite not exactly being a polished public speaker, since mid-October, I’ve been joining Annie Mitchell and Matt Swaim to walk through The Way chapter by chapter (with the occasional digression, depending on the week). It’s been a great honor and hopefully interesting for regular listeners. My thanks to Annie and Matt for being such gracious and thoughtful hosts week after week (and to Paul behind the scenes for calling each morning, and whoever else at Sacred Heart Radio supported the show).

Writing

• SUBSTACK: A piece on a recent episode of the Dominican Sisters’ Open Mic podcast.

• AMERICA MAGAZINE: Pieces on Netflix’s Lord of the Flies and Jelly Roll’s new music video for “Hands Up.”

• CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT: Pieces on the Magnifica Humanitas case for an under-16 social media ban, the heavenward schism of the SSPX, and Christopher Nolan’s much-discussed adaptation of The Odyssey.

• NATIONAL CATHOLIC REGISTER: A piece on Father’s Day and the gift of faith.

Word on Fire

• CHICAGO: I had the opportunity this summer to join the Word on Fire Staff for our annual meeting in Chicago. It’s always wonderful to see everyone, especially as a remote employee, but the last day of this trip, in particular, was special. We not only had Mass together but also confessions, Eucharistic Adoration, and Morning Prayer. It’s a privilege to still be worshiping and working alongside such a talented group of people so dedicated to this same mission.

• NEW RELEASES: Summer saw the release of some exciting new titles on Word on Fire’s general imprint (listed below):

  • (June 8) Every Word in the Lord’s Prayer: Reflections on the Perfect Prayer from the Perfect Pray-er by Peter Kreeft (one of my personal heroes; watch the viral clip from his recent interview on Matt Fradd if you haven’t seen it)

  • (July 10) Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence by Pope Leo XIV (with a foreword by Bishop Barron; some of my own thoughts on the encyclical here)

  • (July 13) Pensées by Blaise Pascal (a true classic of the Way—one that I admittedly still need to read through in full!)

  • (July 13) Pascal’s Prayers: The Grandeur and Misery of Man by William Hackett (a must-read for any fans of Pascal; also includes Pope Francis’s apostolic letter Sublimitas et Miseria Hominis)

  • (July 20) Silence by Shūsaku Endō (a classic novel about Portuguese missionaries in Japan, later adapted by Scorsese)

  • (August 10) Majesty and Beauty: The Basilica of San Clemente and Its Underworld by Fr. Paul Murray (a wonderful tour of a mysterious church in Rome with layers of history)

• LITURGY OF THE HOURS, SECOND EDITION: But the big story at Word on Fire Publishing—one of the big stories anyway!—has been The Liturgy of the Hours, Second Edition. It’s been fascinating to see the intensity of the debates online—with careful attention to even the subtlest of details—between the Ascension and WOF editions of this official daily prayer of the Church. And while my direct involvement in the project has been minimal, from where I sit, the quality and beauty and attention to detail in our edition speaks for itself. Ultimately, though, this is just a wonderful time for the Church in America to talk about and join together in praying the LOTH. It’s been a gamechanger for our own family, and I encourage you and yours to look into it if you haven’t yet. Much more to come over the course of the next several months!

If you’re the least bit involved in both Catholicism and social media, chances are you’ve recently seen clips of the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist. Their Dominican Sisters Open Mic podcast, hosted by Sister Miriam, OP, went viral for a few clips of wholesome, casual banter on the show—chief of them being a laughter-strewn conversation about ultimate frisbee. (In another clip, Sister Miriam asks another sister if she has a hobby, to which the other responds laconically, “I do not have a hobby”—leading to tickled laughter from both and, inevitably, from anyone watching.)

The sisters’ viral banter got picked up across the media landscape—from the TODAY Show to Cosmopolitan to the New York Times. At Word on Fire, Johanna Duncan, who stumbled on the sisters on TikTok, reflected, “I don’t think America had cared so much about a habit since Whoopi Goldberg hid in that fateful New York convent.” (Happily, there is a convent of Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, in our own neck of the woods on Long Island—and they are every bit as warm, joyful, and kind as you’d expect. You’ll occasionally spot them at church—or walking down the side of the busy four-lane road that leads to the convent, just chatting.)

Women in religious habit having such carefree fun is, in itself, a striking Catholic both/and—an incarnation of the convergence of discipline and passion that, at its best, marks the Christian life. As Chesterton put it, “Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground.” And the greatest Dominican thinker to have lived, Thomas Aquinas, was of course a man deeply shaped by the both/and—particularly of faith and reason.

But in a recent episode of the podcast, the both/and came explicitly to the fore. Sister Miriam talks with Sister Josefa about sports, and the latter reflects on the both/and of soul and body and its connection to Christ:

Jesus is bringing together humanity and divinity. And so the spiritual and the physical are no longer opposed; you don’t have to pick one or the other. Jesus is incarnate. So he’s a unity of those things. And he gives us a model of how to live in that same incarnational way. And so we are called to live incarnationally. We are called to live with a respect for both the body and the soul. And I think a lot of times we can kind of take care of one to the detriment of the other. So we can care so much about the body and forget about our soul, or we can only think about our souls and sort of say, “Well, it doesn’t really matter what I do with my body.” And I think the incarnation is really showing us, no, both are good, and both are meant to be integrated. They’re meant to be together. We’re meant to be embodied.

And I think playing sports helps us to live incarnationally. We would never say, “Oh, you know, the body of Michael Jordan was really good at basketball.” We would say it was his spirit and determination as well. And so every time you see good athletes, you see they have body and soul in it, and they’re living in that integrated way. So sports is a great path to imitating Christ in that incarnation.

Sister Miriam then ties the conversation to the sacramentality of Catholicism:

We also see the goodness of the the complementarity of body and soul so frequently in the practice of Catholicism, where a lot of it is very tangible. We have these things that we can see and touch and smell. We use our bodies as part of our worship. I think if someone who has never been to a Catholic Mass and they come, they see us as like, we’re standing, we’re sitting, we’re kneeling, we’re turning. We have all of—hopefully just beautiful things that help to raise our souls up to God. We have beautiful physical things in the church. A church that has beautiful things, physical things, reminds us of the beauty of God. And so we do these things. We do processions. And we have the sacraments, which involve physical realities because of the good of the physical world. The soul animates our bodies and we see the goodness of both. And that’s so key in in our Catholic faith.

Sister Josefa agrees: “And it’s beautiful. We get to have everything.”

We get to have everything. Or, as the little Little Flower beautifully summed it up when asked by her older sister to choose one item from a basket of doll clothes and materials: “I choose all!” (“I took the basket,” Saint Thérèse added, “without further ceremony.”) Both soul and body, both the spiritual and the physical—and, in Christ, both divinity and humanity.

You don’t have to choose. Take the whole basket. Have everything. Become a Catholic.

This is the Way!

It’s been a confused spring here in New York—80s and sunny in early March, 60s and blustery in late May—but summer is finally upon us! A quick look back at the past three months:

The Way of Heaven and Earth

• SON RISE MORNING SHOW: Since mid-October, I’ve been joining the Anna Mitchell and Matt Swaim on The Son Rise Morning Show on Tuesdays around 8:40 a.m. ET to walk through The Way chapter by chapter (with the occasional digression, depending on the week). We’re now into the third and final part of the book: The Dilemmas of Christianity. Join us!

• THE NEXT PHASE BEGINS: Having hit the one-year anniversary of the launch of my book in February, I’ll no longer be actively promoting it (though the mission of promoting the both/and goes on!). That said, if I can, I’d like to make one last appeal: If you read and enjoyed the book, please leave a rating or review on Amazon! This will help other readers discover the book and the beauty of the Way in the future. And my thanks to all those who have done so already: There may only be a dozen ratings, but I’m very proud of the perfect five-star track record.

Writing

• SUBSTACK: Pieces on whether the Christian shall “want,” Father Boniface Hicks’s plea for liturgical and ecclesial synthesis, a Catholic both/and Triduum, and the incarnational wisdom of Magnifica Humanitas

• WOF: Pieces on Jon Guerra’s phenomenal album Jesus, the disturbing but thought-provoking film Bugonia, the docudrama That They May Be One and whether Christian unity is still possible, and why popes can—and must—talk about AI (and other social issues)

• CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT: Pieces on Flannery O’Connor’s both/and vision of reality, devotion to the side of Christ, and what I take to be the master theme of Pope Leo XIV’s first year—namely, unity

• NATIONAL CATHOLIC REGISTER: A piece on why the Ascension is the most astonishing Christian mystery of all

• CATHOLIC ANSWERS: A piece on whether the Christian should hate this life

• THE PILLAR: Features on Luke Coppens’s daily newsletter, “Starting Seven,” on May 11 and on May 29.

Word on Fire

• LONDON: Together with three other members of the Word on Fire team, I traveled to England for the first time in early March. We attended the London Book Fair, which was an eye-opening experience for our relatively new and largely out-of-the-box press. We also managed to do some sightseeing in between, including a visit to the Tower of London, where we were privileged to step into the cell of Saint Thomas More, the “man for all seasons.” Which leads to another note . . .

• THE LAST RIDDLE: Today marks the official launch of The Last Riddle: Advice on Living and Dying Well from the Imprisoned Saint Thomas More by Stephen Smith of Hillsdale College. As an editor, some books are a complete joy to work on, for four reasons: the subject matter is wonderful, the writing is excellent, the writer is courteous, and the review process (consequently) is as smooth as can be. The Last Riddle was just such a book. It’s been a joy to get to know both Steve and Saint Thomas More through it. Steve is the perfect tour guide to the final years—and more importantly, the mind and heart—of this saint and scholar. If you have even a faint interest in More, I highly recommend it.

• WHAT DO THEIR DEATHS DEMAND?: April saw the launch of Bishop Barron’s latest book, What Do Their Deaths Demand? Christian Persecution Today. Released in partnership with Aid to the Church and Need (proceeds will support internally displaced persons in Nigeria with essential relief items, including sleeping mats, blankets, and water filtration), this is an urgent, important read. The book features a foreword from Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and endorsements from both a Republican and Democratic member of congress.

• LUMINOR LAUNCHED: I’d be remiss not to tip my hat in these updates to Katy Carl, the Editor of Word on Fire’s new literary imprint, Luminor, which has officially launched with the release of two titles: An Ocean Full of Angels, Peter Kreeft’s one and only novel, and More than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature by Joshua Hren of Wiseblood Books. Katy is doing a phenomenal job with this venture, and more exciting things are in the works and coming soon!

A life update: “If I am not allowed to write, I shall perish . . .”

Perhaps I’m being melodramatic here—I allow myself the occasional melodrama, since so much of my life is cerebral—but these words of Dostoevsky capture, better than any I know, that dreaded experience familiar to all of us who wield the pen: writer’s block.

My experiences of writer’s block—especially since my writing is mostly featured on brief nonfiction articles rather than lengthy or creative work—are fortunately few and far between. I’ve got it easy, all things considered. But on the occasion when it does hit, it hits hard—like the intense afternoon downpours in Florida that seem to leave as quickly as they arrive.

Such was my experience that begin in April and lasted about a month. The poet called April the “cruelest” month, and so it was for me writing-wise—even though, and perhaps not unrelatedly, I was simultaneously basking in the glow of Easter. As far as life goes, there was nothing cruel about it! But I just couldn’t write. I remember one evening in particular in early May, I sat, bleary-eyed, at the computer for an hour after a long, busy day and—nothing. No writing. No inspiration. No ideas.

I did manage, in the thick of it, to write the piece linked above about the Ascension, and since then, things have been flowing again. (In fact, I have a first piece at a major Catholic outlet, written on the phenomenal new Netflix adaptation of Lord of the Flies, appearing this week.) I also allow myself the occasional cliche: That’s life! Sometimes you’re up, sometimes you’re down. The important thing is to keep soldiering on in faith.

As Job said—in words that echo the strong calm of Thomas More in that cold cell overlooking the Thames—“The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

I’m over at Word on Fire today with a piece analyzing the first encyclical from the first American pope: Magnifica Humanitas, “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” Given the inevitable deluge of commentary sure to follow on the pope’s commentary on AI (and, in chapter 4, on war), I thought it might be interesting to take a step back and reflect more fundamentally on the question of Catholic social teaching itself—and how the pope approaches it in the document.

The bedrock for Leo, I argue, is clearly “the Incarnate God” to whom “we Christians lift our eyes” (1). He quotes in that same first paragraph, and again later in the document, Gaudium et Spes 22: It is “only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear.” Christ is both fully God and fully man—the primary Catholic both/and from which all of its both/ands flow!

Indeed, the encyclical, I found, is positively riddled with both/ands. So I thought it might be interesting to supplement that piece with a list here at Substack of some of the passages the jumped out.

So, without further ado: (just some) of the incarnational wisdom of Magnifica Humanitas.

Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. (1)

Whenever humanity is in danger of marring its true identity, we Christians lift our eyes to the Incarnate God, knowing that it is “only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear.” In Jesus Christ, this humanity in its grandeur becomes the Way, the Truth and the Life, opening the path for each of us to grow toward fullness. (1)

When some objected that the Church should not waste energy on worldly matters, but instead focus on communicating the message of eternal life, Leo XIII responded with realism and wisdom, saying that the proclamation of the Gospel cannot overlook the concrete lives of people. (3)

Thus, ancient Jerusalem rediscovers a common language—not one of uniformity, but one of communion, namely the harmony that arises when all persons assume their own role and recognize that their strength comes from the Lord. (8)

[Catholic social teaching] stems from a Church that walks alongside humanity, recognizing the autonomy of earthly realities and the distinction between ecclesial and political communities. (18)

The word of God provides reliable standards for establishing paths of justice and opening ways of reconciliation and peace among peoples. When it comes to applying these standards to the complex situations of our time, the contribution of philosophy and of the human and social sciences is essential. (23)

This attitude of openness to truth, which is at the same time both one and diverse, profoundly expresses the catholicity of the Church, for she embraces the entire human family yet is also immersed in the concrete situations of peoples and cultures. (26)

[Cathoic social teaching] is born from the encounter between the eternal truth of the Gospel and the questions of history. (27)

In Mater et Magistra, [Saint John XXIII] presented the Christian faith as a light capable of uniting heaven and earth. He recalled that, while the Church’s primary mission is the sanctification and proclamation of eternal goods, she does not neglect the concrete needs of people’s daily lives, and is concerned with every authentic human good. Based on this unified vision of humanity, John XXIII emphasized that societal life requires a balance between the initiative of citizens and groups . . . and the action of the State, which must coordinate and provide support without stifling the freedom and responsibility of individuals. (33)

It is an illusion to think that simply pursuing one’s own progress without caring for others is sufficient for contributing to the good of all. (61)

Public authorities have the delicate duty to “harmonize the different sectoral interests with the requirements of justice,” seeking a balance between individual interests and the common good, without leaving behind the most vulnerable. (63)

I invite everyone to conceive of ways of cooperating and of more effective international institutions, capable of safeguarding the global common good without compromising the legitimate diversity of peoples and nations. (64)

If technological development advances without a corresponding ethical and social progress, the result may be an increase in means without a growth in humanity: “having more” without “being more.” (94)

In reality, elevating any single dimension of human existence to an absolute is always a mistake. . . . In an ecosystem, balance is disrupted when one species expands at the expense of others; in human life, something similar occurs when one faculty claims to be the measure of everything. Thus, intelligence, when absolutized, overshadows other essential dimensions of life, such as affection, the will, commitment and relationships. (113)

Those who love and desire cannot avoid passing through trial and suffering. . . . It is only thanks to the interplay of these elements that the wonders of the soul occur within us, allowing us to sense the richness of our humanity. To renounce this adventure, both tragic and splendid, in the name of a presumed transcendence of all limits, could mean many things, but it would no longer be human. (120)

As Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches, this process of elevation and transformation “surpasses every capability of created nature,” for an infinite disparity separates our finite nature from the life of God. Nevertheless, it remains possible to enter into the heart of that inexhaustible life, even as we journey through the limitations of this world. (127)

As Pope Francis explained, “We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being.” (128)

Christian humanism does not reject science or technology, but embraces them with gratitude and realism, and grounds them within a higher vocation. (129)

The Magisterium has recognized in work “the essential key” to understanding the entire social question, since it is through their work that individuals develop many dimensions of their existence. In view of this, we can understand the great intuition of Saint Benedict of Nursia, who united prayer and work, showing daily activity to be a part of the human response to God’s call. (148)

Through the Lord’s closeness, the gift of peace enters into the world in a paradoxical way. It does so through the power to become children of God, and is awakened when we allow ourselves to be moved by the tears of the little ones, the fragility of the elderly, the silence of victims and the struggle of those who fight against the evil they do not wish to commit. In this wounded yet beloved flesh, the Father shows us the true humanity of a life fulfilled through openness and communion, which leads us to desire that his will be done on earth as it is in heaven. (231)

There is no moment or human situation that is not worthy of God. (232)

“O wonder . . . man is God and this God-Man passes through all those stages, endures all those states and ennobles them, sanctifies them, deifies them in himself!” (232)

The Father has decreed to bring all things, those in heaven and those on earth, back to Christ, the one Head (see Eph 1:10). (233)

The Incarnation and the Paschal Mystery reveal God entering into our human condition and transforming it through the gift of himself. (234)

“We are brothers and sisters in him. And in Christ, though many and diverse, we are one: In Illo uno unum.” (235)

Fidelity to the truth requires integrating the possibilities offered by technology within a framework marked by wisdom, which is capable of safeguarding both the dignity of each person and the future of our common home. (237)

This article was originally posted at Aleteia in a four-part series: Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday.

This Thursday, Christians around the world begin observing the Sacred Triduum. Latin for “three days,” “Triduum” refers to three 24-hour cycles spanning four days—from the evening of Holy Thursday through the evening of Easter Sunday. It is the great commemoration of the Paschal Mystery: Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection.

For those looking to supplement liturgical celebration with reading and reflection—or for those outside of the Church’s orbit entirely—I’d like to offer another “way in” to these sacred mysteries: the idea of the “both/and.”

My first book, available now from Word on Fire, is on this very subject. And the heart of the argument is three closely related ideas: (1) our greatest dilemmas are those between “heaven” and “earth”; (2) our heaven-earth dilemmas are only resolved in Christ, the Way, who draws them into communion in himself; and (3) the fullness of the Way is in the Catholic Church, which is defined by the principle of “both/and”—tensions that honor both the contrast of heaven (which is distinct and primary) and its connection with earth (which remains good and beautiful).

But what are heaven and earth, exactly?

Under the guiding physical metaphor of the sky (the “heavens”) and the ground, the terms signify four metaphysical pairs: God and man, God’s place and man’s place (what most of us mean by “heaven and earth”), the spiritual and the physical (the two “sides” of the world), and spirit and flesh (the two “sides” of man). All of these meanings come together in the Bible, which is the very story of heaven and earth. The Bible reaches its culmination in Christ, who draws all these pairs together. In Christ, God gathers up and reconciles all heavenly and earthly reality (Eph. 1:10; Col. 1:20).

Different events in Christ’s life highlight each pair, but we see all four stretch across the whole of his saving work; indeed, we can line up the four pairs to the four days spanning the Triduum.

Holy Thursday

We begin with Holy Thursday, where we see the primary principle of the both/and: the communion of God and man.

We see it, in the first place, in Jesus’s washing of the feet of his disciples. John tells us that Jesus

got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. (John 13:4–5)

Saint Peter vigorously protests—until the Lord tells him that he has to accept this act to have a share in Christ’s life.

Washing someone’s feet in the ancient world was considered a filthy, uncomfortable job reserved for slaves—which is why Saint Peter saw it as beneath his Master’s dignity. Thus, the Church Fathers read this scene in light of the incarnational hymn in Saint Paul’s Letter to the Philippians. “Christ Jesus,” Paul writes:

though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself . . . (Phil. 2:6–8)

Christ is divine but found in human form; he is both God and man, and this is what the scene of the foot-washing so beautifully expresses. His removal of his outer garment signals his kenosis or self-emptying; his donning of a towel his “being born in human likeness”; and his descent to the feet of his disciples his great humility in drawing God down to serve man, so that man—represented here by Peter—might have a share with God.

We see the communion of God and man again in the agony in the garden, described in the three Synoptic Gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke speak of Jesus becoming distressed, agitated, and grieved, but there are two especially powerful verses that appear in Luke:

Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground. (Luke 22:43–44)

These two verses are often placed in double brackets, because while they do appear in ancient versions of Luke, they don’t appear in the earliest versions. Why were they so contested?

One scholarly theory is that it was because these verses so vividly portray Christ’s humanity—his emotional and physical agonia (the only use of that term, translated as “anguish,” in the whole New Testament). Indeed, Irenaeus references Christ’s sweating of blood in his argument against the Docetists, who claimed that Christ was God, but only seemed to be human—and wasn’t really.

Today, we’re tempted to see Jesus as a purely human figure: a revolutionary, a guru, a spiritual teacher of timeless truths. The ancient world more often fell into the opposite temptation of seeing him as a purely divine figure: his human nature was really a cloak, a mirage, a ruse.

But Holy Thursday reminds us of the truth: Christ is both God and man.

Good Friday

Holy Thursday beautifully demonstrates—in Christ’s washing of the feet and agony in the garden—the communion of God and man.

The humble descent of the Son into human nature, however, doesn’t end with the incarnation. It continues downward to the cross. Fulton Sheen wrote,

Love by its very nature tends to an incarnation, and an incarnation by its very nature tends to a crucifixion.

Thus, at the conclusion of Saint Paul’s ode to the incarnation, we hear,

He humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. (Phil. 2:8)

With the possible exception of the fish, the cross is the most ancient symbol of the Christian faith, and today, by far the most universal. No image summarizes the life of Christ and his followers so directly and clearly. And, undoubtedly, it communicates Christ’s victory over sin and death:

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 6:23)

The cross is salvation, the “way out” (ex-hodos) of evil.

But is it also the “way out” of the world itself? That is to say, is it a symbol of dualistic escapism and pessimism—of fleeing from this world and its problems?

No; on the contrary, the cross itself speaks powerfully of the union of the higher and lower worlds—precisely in the union of its vertical and horizontal beams.

The Scriptures themselves draw out this connection. They consistently speak of God’s “place” above and man’s “place” below:

“The heavens are the Lord’s heavens, but the earth he has given to human beings.” (Ps. 115:16)

But they also understand those two metaphysical “places” through the lens of the sky above us and the ground below.

When the Bible speaks of heaven, we hear of the stars, moon, and sun; of lightning, thunder, and rainbows; of soaring birds, trees, and mountains.

When it speaks of earth, we hear of clay and soil, dust and ashes, grass and flowers, worms and beasts. Just as light and rain falls down from the sky to enliven the soil, so, too, do eternal light and living water fall down to enliven man and the world.

These associations aren’t meant to be taken literally, as if God’s “home” is physically atop the sky. Rather, the dome of the sky symbolizes the transcendent mystery of God’s dwelling, whereas the expanse of the earth symbolizes the familiarity of our own—sky and all. The physical vertical and horizontal (the heavens and the earth) orient us to the metaphysical vertical and horizontal.

What does all this have to do with Good Friday and the cross?

Just as Christ is the communion of both God and man, he is also the communion of both God’s place and man’s place. He is the kingdom of God in person, radiating holiness and perfection from above; yet he also embraces man’s world with all its shadows and sorrows, right down to the horrific suffering and death of the cross.

All of this is captured symbolically in the convergence of its two beams, the meeting of the metaphysical vertical and horizontal for the life of the Church, and through the Church, of the world. As G. K. Chesterton wrote,

The cross, though it has at its head a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its center it can grow without changing.

Does this mean that God celebrates all the suffering and sorrow of this fallen world in themselves? No—because such darkness won’t enter his light in the end:

“He will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” (Rev. 21:4)

It does, however, mean that God embraces and transfigures that suffering and sorrow. After the resurrection, we are given a striking detail: The wounds in his hands and his side from his crucifixion remain (John 20:20). The Way doesn’t erase the wounds of earth; it radiates heavenly light through them.

This communion of heaven and earth will one day reach its culmination in the “new heavens and the new earth,” when—far from escaping this world for a heaven above—the new Jerusalem will descend to this world below (Rev. 21:2). In the meantime, the people of God lift high the cross—a symbol not only of deliverance from sin but of God’s embrace of the world:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. (John 3:16)

Holy Saturday

The “Catholic both/and” is grounded in the communion of God and man and of God’s place and man’s place. Zooming into the latter “earthly” items in each pair, we again see the both/and at work—beginning with the communion of the spiritual and the physical here below.

We experience in the world two dimensions or “planes” of reality. The first is a higher and transcendent plane, which points up to the Spirit of God and his spiritual world above—a plane of angels, prophecies, and graces, glimpsed through faith and prayer, mysticism and contemplation.

The second is a lower and immanent plane, which grounds us in the material and bodily—a plane of animals, plants, and objects grasped through action and the senses.

Along which of these planes should we live?

The Catholic answer is of course both. This “both/and” became most vivid on Holy Thursday, when Christ held up bread and wine and declared them to be his own body and blood, thereby uniting the highest spiritual reality of God with the humblest physical reality of the “fruit of the earth and work of human hands.” This communion of the highest and the lowest—rightly called “Holy Communion”—is the most important of the “sacraments,” visible signs of invisible grace that draw together the spiritual and the physical in the life of the Church.

We also see the same communion of spiritual and physical reality in the mysterious silence of Holy Saturday, the “Great Sabbath” between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Indeed, the sabbath itself reflects these same dynamics. We hear in the Gospel of Luke that after the Crucifixion, the women who had followed Christ to the cross returned home, and

on the sabbath they rested according to the commandment. (Luke 23:48)

The sabbath is a day of spiritual withdrawal from physical labor and worldly activity, a day “blessed” and “consecrated” to that higher plane (Exod. 20:8). Yet it also remains a day anchored in concrete bodily experience—a day of eating meals and spending time with family and friends:

Eat it today, for today is a sabbath to the Lord. (Exod. 16:25)

Christ’s tomb likewise draws both spiritual and physical reality together. Seen from one angle, his tomb is a locus of profound spiritual experience: In his soul, Christ

went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey. (1 Pet. 3:19–20).

This “harrowing of hell” was undertaken not in Christ’s body, which lay lifeless, but in his soul, united with his divine person—a purely spiritual mission.

An ancient homily for Holy Saturday beautifully captures this descent “under the earth” by the one above the heavens:

Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages . . .

Yet that same divine person, Thomas Aquinas argues (Summa theologiae 3.50.2), remained united with Christ’s flesh in the tomb, just as he remained united with Christ’s soul in Sheol. God, in other words, remained present to both planes of reality—the spiritual and the physical.

Nicodemus had lovingly wrapped Christ’s body in linens using a hundred-pound mixture of myrrh and aloes according to Jewish burial custom, and placed it in a new tomb in a lush garden “in which no one had ever been laid” (John 19:39–41). Christ’s great “sabbath rest” after the labor of the cross was, fittingly, enveloped in beautiful sights and smells.

This holy day of watching and waiting, of course, is a prelude to the reunion of Christ’s spirit and flesh in the Resurrection—a fourth communion that lights the Way, in a special way, for man.

Easter Sunday

Christ is the Way of heaven and earth in all of its senses: He is the communion of God and man, of God’s place and man’s place, of the spiritual and the physical in the world, and, finally, of spirit and flesh in man. It is the fourth communion that becomes clearest in light of Easter.

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the vindication of Christ as God, of his Way as the only way to the Father, and of his cross as our only hope in the face of sin and death. Saint Paul tells us that

if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. . . . Your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. (1 Cor. 15:14, 17)

The resurrection is also a stunning embrace of the human body. Flannery O’Connor once wrote,

I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified.

Christ rises in a glorified way; he can appear and disappear in a moment and pass through locked doors, but he isn’t a pure spirit. He eats food as before and can be seen and touched with the senses:

“Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” (Luke 24:39)

The flesh, to use Tertullian’s phrase, has become the very “hinge” of salvation.

Saint Paul, in that same letter to the Corinthians, ties Christ’s resurrection within history to the general resurrection at the end of history. Jesus is “the first fruits of those who have died” (1 Cor. 15:20); as he rose from the dead in a glorified body, and so too will those who believe in him and follow him. As Augustine put it, the “death of death” we see in Christ, the Head of the Church, will one day be fulfilled in the members of his Body also.

Christ’s resurrection thus reveals to us our ultimate destiny in Christ: eternal life in a “spiritual body” (1 Cor. 15:44). The two “sides” of man—the spirit and the flesh—continue to be separated by death, just as sin continues to wreak its havoc on the earth, but God has definitively overcome the gulf.

It also reveals to us our true nature: We are both spirit and flesh, both soul and body—a microcosm of both the spiritual and physical dimensions of the cosmos.

For the ancient world, there was a great temptation, especially through Gnosticism, to understand man as a mere spirit trapped in flesh. We are “sparks” of divinity awaiting our escape from the prison of the body in death.

In the modern world, we face the opposite, more materialist, temptation: to understand man as a mere body with only the appearance of spirit. On this view, we’re not imprisoned until life after death; we’re free until death after life.

The first option leaves us in dread of the body, the second in dread of its demise. It is on the Way that we see the truth: We’re not spiritual beings having a bodily experience, as the spiritualists think, nor bodily beings having a spiritual experience, as the materialists argue; we’re embodied spirits experiencing the paradox of our dual nature.

The Resurrection, as Bishop Barron says, is “the be-all and end-all of the Christian faith.” To reduce it to a myth or spiritual symbol is to miss the whole point of the Good News, which all of the Apostles—with the exception of John, the guardian of Christ’s mother—went to their deaths proclaiming: Christ is risen; indeed, he is risen!

As such, it’s also the culmination of the great both/and begun in the incarnation, and it reveals the nature, purpose, and dignity of humanity to itself. As the Second Vatican Council taught,

Only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.

Christ is the Way of heaven and earth, both the destination and the road to get there—and it’s only in walking his Way that we’ll ever find ourselves.

Ah, the liturgy wars.

That seemingly endless series of conflicts over the Mass and its rubrics emerging out of the Missal of Paul VI and continuing to the present day. Novus ordo or Latin Mass? Ad orientem or versus populum? Communion on the tongue or communion on the hand? Standing or kneeling? Lines or rails? Gregorian chant or guitars? Hold-hands-during-the-Our-Father or . . . not so much?

Is there a both/and solution to the standoff? A treaty that brings peace to the embattled and embittered combatants?

Needless to say, wherever Catholics of good will are at war with one another, the question is typically a complicated one. But a solid step in the right direction was recently uploaded on YouTube: an Encounter Conference talk from a few years ago from Father Boniface Hicks, OSB: “Trads, Tongues, Mantillas, Miracles, Chaos and Communion: What is the Holy Spirit doing in the Church today?”

The title, he begins, is “meant to get your attention,” and reflects his own heart and journey:

I kind of think like: More? Oh boy. And whenever I find more, I get more excited. More! Let’s have more. Oh, there’s a whole rite of Mass I never learned? Oh boy! There’s a whole solemn high form that I never learned? Oh boy! I get to be a subdeacon? Oh boy! The Marionite rite? Oh, I like that. Aramaic? The Byzantine rite? Oh boy! There’s all these prayers. More! Let’s have more!

But the title, he goes on, also reflects “places that sometimes appear to be at each other—contradictions, separations, silos.” Catholics, as we all know, tend to fall into distinct groups—traditionalist Catholics, left-caths, charismatic renewal Catholics, social justice Catholics—with a well-defined set of passions, priorities, and liturgical habits.

So are we closing in on our own “tribe”—or pressing out into the “more” of other dimensions of the Church? Father Boniface detects a division of left brain and right brain in these two approaches—between the certainty and security of clear demarcations on the one hand, and the creativity and elasticity of new encounters on the other. But the upshot for him is that we need more of the “more”—less line-drawing tribalism, and more creative tension:

Allow paradox. Don’t immediately resolve it. Try to hold it open. Both things. Both/and. It’s the Catholic approach, right? Both/and. Keeping the big picture, gazing—and then approaching things with curiosity, approaching people with compassion, approaching situations with creativity.

He then makes reference to Hegel, a key figure in the story of the both/and, and the concept of the synthesis of opposites:

There was a philosopher who talked about the thesis, its opposite the antithesis, but then the synthesis. Think of it like this: Male, female, baby. The synthesis is beautiful. Have you seen the little babies around here? I love the synthesis. Babies. Opposites: If there’s an opposite, there’s a baby to be had.

Rather than rehearse what the various “sides” in the Church believe or envision what a synthesis of those opposites might look like, Father Boniface does something much more fundamental: He simply invites us to be Catholic together.

Can we have that curiosity towards things we don’t understand? Miracles or mantillas, trads or tongues—can we just ask, “Why?” And ask each other, “Why?” Why do you do that? Why do you wear that veil? Why do you celebrate Mass that way? What does that symbol mean? You know who asks why a lot? Little children. Why? Why? Why? We could be a little more childlike. Little children are very vulnerable. We can’t be more childlike unless we have the strength of loving relationships, unless we have communion, unless we have community. . . . We have to build relationships, real relationships of committed love where we can walk through this together. . . . Jesus commanded the apostles, “Cross to the other side.” . . . I want to say to you, cross to the other side. Can we build relationships of people who are close to us that we can trust? . . . Don’t just push it back back. Ask why. Build a relationship. And then lift it up to a new height. See something more beautiful there, and help it to come together in a synthesis. Bring together the opposites, and have a baby. Let something new be born! It doesn’t have to be a conflict. It can become communion. Male doesn’t have to be against female. Trads don’t have to be against tongues. Mantillas don’t have to be against miracles. We can make babies. We can bring forth new life.

This is a desperately needed message for the Church today, delivered with both conviction and gentleness. Can we intentionally swim against the tide of the culture of contempt? Can we reach out to one another? Talk to one another? Approach “those Catholics” with a childlike spirit of genuine interest in why they do what they do, such that we learn from them and even adopt their good instincts—even good habits?

It’s not something I’ve written about yet, but my suspicion that the both/and can be a helpful way of advancing the discussion on liturgy—not so much on particulars but on the general principles accentuated through them. Is the Mass about the vertical or the horizontal? The sacrifice or the meal? The worship of God or the gathering of the community? The mystery of the ancient or the tangibility of the contemporary?

In fact, one might hazard a guess that this both/and transformation is—through both top-down and bottom-up movement—already well underway, but simply hasn’t been articulated yet. It’s also quite possible that our both/and-minded Holy Father—for whom liturgy seems to be a key priority—could play some role in a peace treaty that unifies and strengthens the Church and frees up its energies for proclaiming the Gospel to the world.

But whatever happens, Father Boniface has spotlighted the necessary first steps in this direction of communion: the courage to cross to the other side, the vulnerability to communicate about what separates us, and the humility to work on building truly catholic community.

Language is funny: A word that meant one thing at one time can, centuries later, take on a whole new meaning.

A prime example of this etymological evolution is a particular word in the English rendering of the opening line of Psalm 23—one of the most beloved psalms of David, endlessly read, prayed, and sung all around the world. The vast majority of English translations, including the RSV-CE and NRSV-CE, render the line: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” At Mass, when these lines from the twenty-third psalm comprise the Responsorial, the refrain underscores the same declaration: “There is nothing I shall want.”

I will confess that when I was young—and I suspect I’m not the only one—what I heard this line saying was “I shall not desire,” and “There is nothing I shall desire.” The ambiguity, of course, hangs on two possible meanings of “want.” Merriam-Webster captures both: the first, “to be needy or destitute” or “to have or feel need,” is the intended meaning of that classic translation. But the second, “to desire to come, go, or be,” is the way in which I received it.

To be fair, M-W does give the sense of need as primary, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to find an average English speaker today using “want” in this way. On the other hand, the use of “want” to convey desire is ubiquitous. In fact, the popularity of phrases like “want and need” and “needs and wants” suggests that “want” has been all but vacated of that original sense of “need,” and supplies what “need” wants—namely, desire. The NABRE translation I think is preferable in avoiding the misunderstanding altogether: “The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I lack” (NABRE). The Good News translation does the same, but also packs the emotional punch that I think must’ve been intended originally: “The Lord is my shepherd; I have everything I need.”

But this translation mix-up opens up a fundamental question, one that’s especially important to pose in this Lenten season of sacrifice: Shall the Christian not want? That is to say­, should the people shepherded by God not be a people of desire?

Our wants are woven into the fabric of human life: We crave physical satisfactions like food, drink, and sleep; worldly satisfactions like clothing, shelter, and work; relational satisfactions like friendship, intimacy, and community; mental satisfactions like creativity, stability, and security; even spiritual satisfactions like meaning, purpose, and joy. What’s a Christian to do with all these desires?

In answering the question, we face two great dangers. The greatest one is clear enough from the New Testament: That we simply yield to those desires as our masters, indulging in whatever craving happens to bubble up from below. Why is this so dangerous? Because we’re fallen creatures; therefore, our desires are so often disordered—whether by being inordinate or simply misdirected altogether—and tend to lead us, as a matter of course, into sin. Saint Paul calls these “the desires of the flesh” (Gal. 5:16)—which doesn’t mean desires of the body but desires of the fallen self, body and soul. They can include desires for more carnal things like fornication and drunkenness but also for more refined spiritual pleasures like idolatry and ideological factions (Gal. 5:20–21).

Thus, the New Testament offers a clear and consistent summons from start to finish: Resist these desires! Christ warns of the “desire for other things” that chokes the word of God (Mark 4:19); Saint Paul teaches, “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal. 5:24); and Saint Peter tells his listeners no less than three times, “Discipline yourselves!” (1 Pet. 1:13, 4:7, 5:8). The alternative is to be the plaything of “the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches . . . the world and its desire” (1 John 2:16).

However, this leads to a second, more subtle danger, one more tantalizing to religious minds: That we denigrate desire in and of itself, forming an identity in our minds—perhaps overtly, but usually far more subtly—between desire and the desire of the flesh. On this reading, desire is inherently an evil or at least negative thing: To advance in the spiritual life, we not only have to contain the flame of desire; we have to squelch and suffocate it, becoming purified of our earthly yearnings along Stoic, Gnostic, or even Buddhist lines. Horrified by the havoc wreaked by desire, we stomp it out in a fury. If listeners have Psalm 23 have often misheard “want” as “desire,” I suspect that the enthusiasm (and, let’s face it, desire!) of so many religious souls for this anti-desire perspective has had something to do with it. “Of course Christians are the people who do not want,” people outside of the fold might tell themselves. “They refuse the delights of life in this world!”

But this anti-desire mindset, too, runs counter to the Bible. In the incarnation, God embraces his good creation, including our desires—even the most carnal ones. If Christians renounce certain desires completely—like the desire for sex in marriage—it’s not because those desires are evil but precisely because they’re good.

Thus, we need both discipline and desire—both a recognition of the errancy of desire, so often misdirected by our devious hearts, and its inherent goodness, given to us as it is by the God who is goodness itself. The goal isn’t to treat all desire as evil just because it’s human; still less is it to indulge in every desire as good just because it’s ours. It is, rather, to strive for that place glimpsed by Dante at the end of the Divine Comedy: “My will and my desire were turned by love / The love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

In that heavenly place, Augustine wrote, we will find ourselves enveloped in an “insatiable satiety”—always full, yet also always hungry for more. We shall not want, and yet—drawn on by the one who fulfills our needs yet inflames our desire—want we shall.

It’s been a record-breaking winter of snow out here on Long Island. But spring is coming! In the meantime, some updates from the past three months:

The Way of Heaven and Earth

• THE WAY TURNS ONE: The Way of Heaven and Earth celebrated its first birthday on February 10, the feast of Saint Scholastica. I marked the occasion with a comprehensive list of Catholic both/ands—the completion of what had originally been the draft of a second appendix to the book. I hope people find it a helpful resource! My promotion of the book itself will certainly slow down now, but the promotion of the both/and goes on!

• AMERICA MAGAZINE REVIEW: Terence Sweeney, a professor at the pope’s alma mater Villanova, graciously reviewed the book in America magazine’s March issue. Overall it was a positive review, though he did make a few (I think fair) criticisms of the book. (I may offer a response down the road here on Substack, just so I can insist on having the last word.) I’m so grateful to him for his thoughtful read of the text and his candid analysis. It’s a thrill for me to have my book reviewed in the pages of the same journal that has published names like Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, and G. K. Chesterton.

• SON RISE MORNING SHOW: Since mid-October, I’ve been joining the Anna Mitchell and Matt Swaim on The Son Rise Morning Show on Tuesdays around 8:40 a.m. ET to walk through The Way chapter by chapter. Before Lent is over, we’ll be moving into the third and final part of the book: The Dilemmas of Christianity. Join us!

Writing

• SUBSTACK: Pieces on Pope Leo’s ratification of the both/and, Andy Squyers’ album Sacred Vows, and our fundamental goodness/badness; a round-up of Substacker articles on the both/and; and a comprehensive list of both/ands.

• WOF: A piece on the new film Moses the Black.

• CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT: Pieces on Ven. Fulton Sheen and the double meaning of the words of consecration, Matthew Ramage’s Essential Guide to Ratzinger, and four lessons in sanity from Saint Thomas Aquinas.

• NATIONAL CATHOLIC REGISTER: A piece on what Paul VI said (and didn’t say) about the “smoke of Satan.”

• CRUX: A piece on the last book of John L. Allen Jr. (1965–2026) and his vision of a “Catholic commons.”

Word on Fire

• I AM A SON OF SAINT AUGUSTINE: February 23 marked the launch of a new book from Word on Fire I had the great honor of editing: I Am a Son of Saint Augustine: Pope Leo XIV on His Favorite Saint (just 3 dollars a copy, with free shipping on orders of 20 books or more). The book features a variety of reflections on Augustine from Pope Leo (as early as his doctoral dissertation as a young priest and as recent as his first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi Te); a wonderful foreword by Sister Margaret Atkins, a canoness of the Order of Saint Augustine in England; and other nice features like a timeline of Leo’s life, his coat of arms, and the full text of the Rule of Saint Augustine. On the day of his election, Leo introduced himself to the world as “a son of Saint Augustine,” and it seems to me that in getting to know him, we should take him at his word. This book is a great place to start!

• THE BODY OF THIS DEATH: Word on Fire Publishing has released some fantastic books since its inception. But I wanted to take a minute to single out a new title this year that I personally think is really special—in fact, destined to become a classic: The Body of This Death: Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster by Ross McCullough. When we passed around this book in manuscript form, our team was in agreement on two basic facts: (1) It was difficult to determine how to publish it; and (2) We had to publish it. The book is on our academic imprint (McCullough is a theologian at George Fox University), but is an epistolary novel set against a dystopian future. I won’t say more except that, when I read it, it called to my mind classics like The Screwtape Letters and Notes from Underground. If you’re still not convinced, read Christianity Today’s fantastic review. If you love the literary tradition of the West, especially existentialist Christians like Dostoevsky, Pascal, and Kierkegaard, this is a must-read.

• SPEAKING OF DOSTOEVSKY AND LEWIS—THREE OTHER LAUNCHES: This winter, we also launched three other wonderful new books on the general imprint: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (December 8), a masterpiece of Russian literature (and probably the best novel I’ve ever read—which leads us to . . .); Peter Kreeft’s The Two Greatest Novels Ever Written: The Wisdom of “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Brothers Karamazov,” an exploration of Tolkien’s and Dostoevsky’s treatments of good and evil, power and weakness, and virtue and vice; and The Mirror, the Mask, and the Masterpiece: A Guide to C. S. Lewis’s “Till We Have Faces” (February 2), Kreeft’s philosophical and theological guide to one of Lewis’s favorite of his own books—and his most controversial. (It also comes with a matching edition of Lewis’s novel, which is fantastic: the best fiction by Lewis I’ve read yet, and the most religious novel I’ve ever encountered in my life.) Kreeft is one of my great heroes; I highly recommend anything he writes, and he continues to crank out wonderful books well into his 80s! Speaking of age . . .

A life update: The quadragenarian cometh . . .

Despite my best attempt to remain in my 30s for a while longer, alas: “O let not Time deceive you, you cannot conquer Time.” Next month will mark my fortieth rotation around this sun. The milestone feels especially charged, as I distinctly remember my mom’s fortieth birthday. I was about eight years old, and she was reading to us a small magnet or card that said, “Forty isn’t old if you’re a tree.” Just moments later, she took a bad fall down the stairs, breaking her collarbone. I don’t remember what happened after that except my brother and I crying. “Forty” has thus, I’m sure, lurked in my subconscious with a kind of flashing warning sign: Here be dragons—of calamity, vulnerability, injury.

Then again, at the risk of sounding trite, life is never promised, to any of us, ever. When I was about the same age, I received news that a young kid on my hockey team, a meek boy who was bullied (“The notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing . . .”), died unexpectedly after a horrible head injury at a pool. He’s always stuck with me. I think sometimes about all the life I’ve lived since: high school, college, marriage, kids—things he never experienced. Life can come to an abrupt end, sometimes very unexpectedly and violently. It happens all the time, to so many people. The important thing is, as the old saying goes, to “have your bags packed”—which means believing in God’s Son, turning away from sin, and abiding in love (1 John 4:16).

And to abide in that love wherever God has seen fit to put us! Indeed, another thing I’ve learned in my forty years (if I’ve learned anything) is that everything happens in phases, which pass just as suddenly as they come—days or even weeks of transition seeming, in retrospect, like a flash. In a higher world, it is otherwise; here below, nothing lasts. The home, the job, the friends, the activities that seem so central and vital today will be tomorrow’s “good old times” soon enough. Just give it time. And so much about those shifts between phases is out of our hands. The wheel of fortune turns—and turns again. And if “you live long enough, people get old . . .”

So our job is not so much to orchestrate the course of our own lives—how could we?—as to love God and others the best we can where circumstances (even, as Charley Crockett sang, “hard luck and circumstances”) find us.

I’ll conclude with Bishop Erik Varden’s final words in his interview with Catholic World Report:

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the release of my first book, The Way of Heaven and Earth: From Either/Or to the Catholic Both/And. What began in 2015 as a vague dream and a Word Doc of scattered notes and quotations and now-defunct chapters has, through the grace of God and the generosity of Word on Fire, come to fruition.

I thought I would mark this occasion by finishing something that I had started to draft as a second appendix to the book itself—namely, a master table of heaven-earth polarities. The book was already far longer than I wanted, and I had long been running on borrowed time; besides that, the list seemed half-baked and potentially problematic. So I left it behind.

But its time has come.

It’s perhaps a providential twist that Substack offers no way to create a table. This forces me to present each pair of polarities as a declarative both/and, offering a bit more context and definition to each item in the list. One of my concerns about the original list was that it only presented two bare words side by side—a format ripe for ambiguity and misunderstanding.

Of course, I’m not the first to attempt a list like this. From the ancient world onward (see the Pythagorean table of opposites), philosophers have attempted dual categorizations of reality. In the Catholic context, Father Felix Just, SJ, who graciously linked to my book on his page, has created a helpful both/and list himself. I hope to take what Father Felix has started there to the next level—and perhaps someone someday will go even further than I have here.

Before turning to the list itself, a few general notes:

• First, a brief definition of the both/and, which involves both contrast and connection between the two elements, from The Way:

  It’s simply an insistence on the Way—an instinct for seeing it and choosing it, for inhabiting the creative tension of paradoxes rather than falling into simplistic solutions. Like the young girl in the Old El Paso commercial about the choice between hard or soft taco shells, now made famous by a meme, it’s a knack for responding, “Por que no los dos?” Why not both? It seeks dualities without dualism, binaries without bifurcation, dyads without dichotomy. Like some of the saints, it bilocates. Catholics use various images for this both/and: harmony, marriage, sanity, tension, balance, fullness, wholeness (“catholic” meaning kata holos, according to the whole). And they frame it using various principles: analogical, sacramental, dialectical, incarnational. But ultimately, the great image and principle is Christ himself. The both/and is just Christocentric: it centers on the Way incarnate. Like the mandorla, it sees the spheres of heaven and earth intersecting and integrating. Like the Mandalorian, it declares, “This is the Way.”

• The list is really four distinct but interrelated lists: Both God and man, both God’s place and man’s place, both the spiritual and the physical, and both the spirit and the flesh. Readers of the book will know these are what I present as the four overlapping meanings of “heaven and earth,” all seen through the great spatial metaphor of the sky and the ground: the vertical and the horizontal, the above and the below, the high and the low, the upper and the lower, etc.

• Given how they overlap, categorizing which of these four categories a particular binary falls within is not always straightforward. Thus, the placement here shouldn’t be taken as absolute. How we talk about a particular binary can shift it from one category to another. (This is especially true between God and man and God’s place and man’s place on the one hand, and between the spiritual and the physical and the spirit and the flesh on the other.)

• In keeping with one of the key principles of the book—the primacy of the heavenly—the heavenly element in any given pairing is always listed first. While this may seem trivial, it’s in fact critical to seeing this whole picture aright, and learning to navigate and negotiate the various dilemmas we face. How exactly we understand that primacy, speak about it, and live it out—these are crucial but ultimately different questions. But that each heavenly element has the primacy is a pattern I think we as a Church need to learn to recognize clearly and put into practice consistently. (Pope Leo XVI, a decidedly both/and pope already, has—as far as I can tell—made a conscious effort to do this.)

• Each of the four categories lists is organized alphabetically according to the first (heavenly) element.

• Importantly, every proper both/and, in my view, is more about metaphysical and/or anthropological principles than categories of people. We can’t be every kind of person at once, but we can believe in and embody all that is true and good. Relatedly, no both/and can be an embrace of either falsehood or evil.

• As I show in the book, many (if not most) Christians hold to some of these both/ands. There is great commerce between us. I present these as “Catholic” rather than “Christian” not to exclude the possibility of non-Catholics holding to them too, but to argue that these both/ands attain their fullness in the context of Catholic tradition, where they are (at the Church’s best) in play together, all at once. “Here comes everybody,” James Joyce wrote of the Church—but it’s also “Here comes everything.”

• Occasionally, a binary that was important to at least mention bundled well enough with another rather than having its own line, in which case I employed either slashes or parentheses. Of course, the additional polarities from poetic metaphor or particular debates in philosophy, theology, etc. are virtually endless, since they permeate thought and language themselves.

• Those items with stars correspond to chapters in the book (with the exception of the five solas and five “alsos,” which are broken out here individually). These are, I think, the main secondary both/ands under the four primary headings. Most other both/ands are really just more narrowly focused examples of those secondary both/ands (which is why certain words/concepts tend to recur again and again), just as those secondary both/ands are really more narrowly focused examples of the four main both/ands.

Reading the both/ands in this way opens up some very interesting hermeneutic patterns and avenues, including the multiple layers of meaning in certain words or concepts, the inevitable intertwining of the four main categories of heaven and earth, and the flip-flopping of certain elements (most notably, the powers of the soul—reason and freedom) from the heavenly to the earthly side of the ledger, depending on which of the four categories it falls in. Much of this I’ve done some thinking on, but very little writing—so perhaps that’s for future posts.

So, without further ado: Your ultimate list of Catholic both/ands.

(Suggestions for additions welcome—just leave a comment! I will treat this list as a living document, and for future updates, I will leave a note at the bottom when it was last updated.)

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BOTH GOD AND MAN

We
both adore God (latria) and venerate the saints (dulia).

God wrote
both the book of Scripture and the book of nature.

*The whole Christ (totus Christus) is
both Christ and his Church.

*God ministers to his people through
both Christ and his priests.

*We imitate and commune with
both Christ and the saints.

The Eucharist is
both Christ himself and a symbol of Christ.

The Lord is
both the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history.

*Salvation is for
both the elect (particularity) and the world (universality).

Trusting God involves
both faith and involuntary doubt.

*We’re guided by
both faith and reason.

*We’re justified by
both faith and works.

Christ is
both fully divine and fully human.

Salvation history involves
both God’s search for man and man’s search for God.

*Salvation is for
both the glory of God and the glory of man.

The faith is built on
both Gospel and Law.

Salvation involves
both grace and our free response to grace.

*We’re saved by
both grace and merit.

*Conversion involves
both grace and nature.

The Church’s tradition is built on
both the Hebraic and the Hellenic.

Jesus tells his followers to be
both innocent as doves and wise as serpents.

The early Church consisted of
both Jews and Gentiles.

Christ is
both the Lamb of God and the Lion of Judah.

Christian morality honors
both the law of God and the freedom of man.

The greatest commandments are
both love of God and love of neighbor.

Theology involves
both mystery and clarity.

On the cross, Christ is
both the priest and the victim.

*History is written by
both the providence of God and the freedom of man.

We embrace
both religion and science.

We’re guided by
both revelation and philosophy.

*The Church’s authority is
both Scripture and Tradition.

Christ is
both the Son of God and the Son of Man.

Tradition involves
both spirituality and theology.

Faith is
both trust in God and assent to propositions.

Theology contemplates
both the uncreated and the created.

We treasure
both wisdom and knowledge.

*Christ is
both Word and flesh.

Scripture is
both the Word of God and the words of men.

+

BOTH GOD’S PLACE AND MAN’S PLACE

We affirm
both the absolute and the relative.

We affirm
both the abstract and the concrete.

We’re called to be
both ad intra (centripetal) and ad extra (centrifugal).

Theology has
both apophatic (negative) and cataphatic (positive) aspects.

We affirm
both being and becoming.

We attend to
both the Church and the culture.

Life involves
both clarity and complexity.

The Church needs
both the clergy and the laity.

We affirm
both consolation and desolation.

We’re free to embrace
both creation and evolution.

God is
both dissimilar and similar to creation.

The Eucharist is
both eschatological (future) and a memorial (past).

*We affirm
both essence and existence.

We attend to
both eternal life and temporal life.

We’re called
both to evangelize people and accompany them.

We affirm in creation (and in the sacraments)
both form and matter.

Man is
both great (made in the divine image) and wretched (fallen).

God is
both higher than my highest self and closer than my most inward self.

The Church is
both Holy and in need of reform.

We affirm
both the ideal and the material.

We affirm
both the immortal and mortal.

We affirm
both the immutable and the mutable.

God is
both incomprehensible (in his nature) and comprehensible (in his existence).

We affirm
both the infinite and finite.

We believe in
both invisible things and visible things.

We affirm
both joy and suffering.

Christians are
both the light of the world and the salt of the earth.

Tradition displays a special love for
both the liturgy and the poor.

God is
both merciful and just.

We contemplate
both metaphysics and history.

The priesthood includes
both the ministerial priesthood and the priesthood of all believers.

The faith involves
both mythos and logos.

Scripture is
both the New Testament and the Old Testament.

*Being is
both one and many.

The Church is
both one Church and many churches.

The Trinity is
both one nature and three persons.

We affirm
both the necessary and the contingent.

*Christians are
both not here (City of God) and here (City of Man).

We’re
both not of the world and in the world.

*Christians live in
both the not yet (what’s to come) and the now (what already is).

We’re
both pilgrims in exile and citizens at home.

Scripture is
both profound and accessible.

We affirm
both reality and appearance.

Christ is
both Redeemer and Judge.

We attend to
both the sacred and the secular.

The history of the Church involves
both salvation history and human history.

We affirm
both stability and change.

We affirm
both substance and accidents.

The Church embraces
both tradition (continuity) and development (progress).

*God is
both transcendent and immanent.

We’re
both understanding and ignorant.

The Church has
both unity and diversity.

Concerning culture, the Church builds
both walls (identity, resistance) and bridges (relevance, connection).

The Mass is
both the worship of God and the gathering of the community.

We’re called to
both worship and service.

+

BOTH THE SPIRITUAL AND THE PHYSICAL

*The Church embraces
both abstinence and indulgence.

The Gospels have
both allegorical and historical aspects.

The Church embraces
both celibacy and marriage.

The Church is
both charismatic/pneumatic (Pauline) and institutional/corporate (Petrine).

Concerning politics, the Church’s social teaching incorporates
both conservative and liberal instincts.

Concerning technology, the Church’s social teaching incorporates
both custom and innovation.

We embrace
both detachment and desire.

*The good life is in
both discipline and passion.

The mission of the Church’s shepherds is
both doctrinal and pastoral.

We affirm
both duties and desires.

The Church embraces
both fasting and feasting.

With fellow sinners, we have to be
both firm (demanding) and gentle (understanding).

Christians must
both hate sin and love sinners.

*The Church’s identity is
both in the Holy Spirit and the Body of Christ.

We affirm
both the immaterial and the material.

Concerning politics, the Church’s social teaching incorporates
both the individual and the collective.

A just society honors
both individual dignity and the common good.

The spiritual life is
both internal/personal and external/corporate.

Concerning politics, the Church’s social teaching incorporates
both the local and the global.

The Church is
both mystical (Johannine) and practical (Jamesian).

The Church brings out of its treasury
both old things and new things.

In the Church we find
both one Spirit and one Body.

Concerning faith, the Church’s social teaching incorporates
both the one true religion and religious diversity/freedom.

*The common good of society is in
both order and openness.

Judgment is
both particular and general.

Salvation is
both personal and collective.

The Church’s social teaching calls for
both private charity and social justice.

The Church is
both prophetic and priestly.

We embrace
both purity and sensuality.

*Christian spirituality is defined by
both rigor and relaxation.

The Eucharist is
both a sacrifice and a meal.

The works of mercy are
both spiritual and corporal.

Scripture has
both spiritual and literal senses.

The Church’s social teaching incorporates
both subsidiarity and solidarity.

*Knowledge comes from
both thought and experience.

Concerning sexuality, the Church’s social teaching incorporates
both traditional norms and the varieties of experience.

*The good is defined by
both values (objective laws/duties) and facts (subjective circumstances/experiences).

Natural phenomena involve
both voluntary and involuntary causes.

+

BOTH THE SPIRIT AND THE FLESH

Love is
both agape (ascending/giving) and eros (descending/receiving).

The Church’s philosophical tradition spans
both the analytic and continental traditions.

We affirm
both our angelic aspect and our animalistic aspect.

Moral decisionmaking relies on
both conscience and the Church’s teaching/ministers.

We affirm
both consciousness (subjectivity) and the objects of consciousness (objectivity).

*The Church’s mission is in
both contemplation (Mary) and action (Martha).

*Action is determined by
both freedom (the psychological) and physical causation (the biological).

We affirm
both gender and sex.

We affirm
both intellect and sense perception.

*The soul is defined by the powers of
both intellect (head) and will (heart).

We affirm
both the internal and the external.

Prayer is
both inward (meditative/contemplative) and outward (vocal/ritualized).

We’re called to
both knowledge and love.

We affirm
both logic and intuition.

The human being is
both mental and physical.

The human being has
both mind and body.

Human thought involves
both mind and brain.

We affirm
both reason and emotion.

We affirm
both reason and imagination.

We affirm
both reason and instinct.

We’re called to
both rest in God and work in the world.

*The human being is
both soul and body.

We’re called to
both truth and goodness.

We’re called to
both truth and love.

Marriage is
both unitive and procreative.

I joined Substack in the beginning of 2025, officially abandoning my X account about midway through the year to funnel the added time and energy here.

It was one of the best social media decisions I’ve made to date.

Substack has been lampooned as the Office’s “Finer Things Club,” Twitter for people who wear turtlenecks, or a parade of John Goodmans ranting about the life of the mind à la Barton Fink. Maybe there’s some truth to those ribbings, but after a year on it, I think Substack should give us all hope for what social media can be. Time spent here tends to make me feel more connected and enlivened—not more alienated and drained the way other platforms do.

My main motive in joining was to shamelessly promote my first book, The Way of Heaven and Earth: From Either/Or to the Catholic Both/And, and to discuss the ideas presented there—a task that, as the year anniversary of the launch approaches, I honestly feel I’ve only really just begun to scratch the surface of. But I not only found a stimulating and vibrant environment for articulating these ideas; I also found a network of like-minded pilgrims discussing literature, culture, and faith, sharing and commenting on each other’s work. I’ve made new connections with fellow writers and readers—some Catholic, some not—both online and off. It truly feels like a community.

In fact, in the course of the year, I’ve also discovered several writers also posting articles about the both/and—and, though a bit late to the party, I wanted to take a step back and spotlight them.

Most of these are from fellow Catholics, and mostly from that network I’ve had the good fortune of stumbling into. But in 2026, I’m hoping to go out and find people discussing the both/and in various ways and draw them into the conversation. (Truth be told, if you search “both/and” on Substack, there’s a veritable deluge of pieces on the theme—further confirmation, I think, of our culture’s hunger to go beyond dichotomous either/or thinking.) I’m also hoping I can make it a more regular feature of On the Way.

Without further ado, in no particular order, here’s a round-up of articles on the both/and from fellow Substackers in 2025:

“Both ‘Both/And’ And ‘Either/Or’” and “Truth is a Synthesis”
by Eric Anderson

At “Reformation Catholicism,” Eric—an “evangelical Presbyterian” who “became Catholic after six years of theological education”—offers this helpful two-part analysis of the both/and. He emphasizes that the truth is both both/and and either/or (an important theme I draw out in the introduction and conclusion of my book) and (drawing on Mauro Gagliardi, whose book I’ve still not yet finished!) a synthesis: “The truth is a synthesis, and man without grace is always trying to introduce competition where there should be harmony, setting up one side of the synthesis up against the other. We need not look far for an explanation: it is very psychologically comforting to arm yourself with a hammer and the absolute certainty that everything in the world is a nail.”

“Weekly Wildflowers #31: Both/And of Gaudete Sunday”
by Mandy Mazzawi

In this post at “Mustard Seeds & Wildflowers,” Mandy offers a lovely defense of the Catholic both/and, which “quietly irritates the tribal mentality that has slowly but effectively taken root in our culture, especially in the political sphere.” (Hear, hear!) The pope, she remarks, is often pigeonholed as either “liberal” or “conservative,” but “the pope, and beyond him, the Church, does not fit neatly into political paradigms. Just as Jesus did not in His own time, the Church He established continues to confound contemporary categories. She refuses to be reduced.” Mandy then reflects on the both/and of Gaudete Sunday: “Emmanuel is not withdrawn when things get hard. This is the both/and of our faith made flesh. . . . Even now, even here, God is near.” She echoed these same words in her recent “Letter in the Storm” announcing her cancer diagnosis: “God doesn’t shy away from the hard moments in our lives. He enters in. His incarnation shows us this in real and tangible ways. I look at our baby savior, in His manger, and see the beauty in God’s plan to take on our weak flesh. To be incarnate. Truly Emmanuel in every way. I’ve never been more thankful of this truth.” Join me in praying for her!

“Binary Thinking & The Way of Discernment”
by A. A. Kostas

A happy discovery, this piece from A. A. Kostas offers a thoughtful critique of binary thinking, emphasizing discernment. I did disagree, however, with his characterization of the both/and alternative. Kostas writes, “Some say it’s better to embrace all sides and attempt a cold-fusion of the opposing positions. Hence the rise of ‘both/and’ thinking, people talking of the ‘third way’ and ‘pluralism’ and ‘enlightened centricism’. But I don’t think this helps at all. Instead we’re left with muddied waters, a flooded creekbed without a filtration system. If there is no true and false, then we are lost to meaninglessness.” Kostas and I had a productive exchange in the comments where, it seemed, we actually were in basic agreement on certain essentials. What various people mean by “both/and” and what it calls to mind for them is not always straightforward! And I think properly defining the both/and—its limits, its borders, its ultimate direction—will be key in the years to come.

“A Buried Paragraph Showing The Both/And Of Vatican II”
by Donald Paul Maddox

In this piece at his “In Defense of Theology,” Donald reflects on “a subtle paragraph” from one of the four constitutions of Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes, on science and technology. The council fathers, he notes, caution against scientism, which “states that the only truth that can be objectively known is that that can be proven by science.” But they don’t leave it there: “Now, as is the natural human tendency, when an extreme philosophical position is rejected, there is often a swing to the opposite extreme. In the case of scientism, the opposite extreme is the rejection of all scientific knowledge as real knowledge. Knowing this human tendency, Gaudium et Spes, after rejecting scientism, turns to caution this other extreme.” The true Catholic position, he concludes, often lies “between the two extremes. This does not mean that everything should simply be compromised; that would entail rupture. Rather, what I am advocating for is a healthy nuance that allows the search for truth, beauty, and goodness to shine through the messiness of living in a broken world with human beings who like to choose sides.” A wonderful emphasis on the principles of enantiodromia (extremes turn into their opposites!) and the fact that the both/and is not the same as the golden mean or a watered-down compromise (a common misconception), even as this finite world inevitably involves give and take. As Chesterton says, the Church loves red and white blazing together; it has a healthy hatred of pink!

“The Error of Either/Or Faith”
by Apostolic Lens

Another happy discovery, this time from “a Bible study and commentary blog dedicated to seeking a Biblical perspective for all aspects of life.” I’m not sure if the writer is Catholic, but he or she is very much speaking my language in this piece: “Throughout history there has been an issue with Christians taking issue with other Christians on one thing and over correcting in the opposite direction. . . . Today, we still have many Christians who over correct with regards to certain aspects they disagree with. You see Christians that are so good at one part of being a Christian and they struggle with another part of being a Christian, so they put all the importance on the part that they’re successful with and neglect or even reject the importance of the part they struggle with. . . . Grace and works are not an either/or. They’re a both/and. We must understand that our works DO NOT save us. However, they ARE the response to the Salvation we’re given.”

“The Both/And Pope”
by Emily Stimpson Chapman

It seems fitting to end with one writer’s tribute to Pope Francis, who we lost this past year, and who was so thoroughly shaped by synthetic thinking. (I wrote about this “pope of polarities” and the wonderful book The Mind of Pope Francis over at Word on Fire.) That writer is Emily Stimpson Chapman—who, I can’t neglect to mention, has just released a phenomenal new story Bible with Word on Fire: The Story of All Stories. Here, Chapman writes, “I tend to agree with The Pillar’s assessment of Francis’ papacy, but unlike many people I know, I can’t dismiss his papacy as a failure. This past week has brought too many moving tributes to him, from ordinary Catholics who loved him, for me to do that. Yes, some of his actions provoked some of his children to anger, but some of his actions also brought many of his children closer to Christ and the Church. He was a both/and kind of pope. I’m not sure he could be any other kind in this media-soaked, opinion-drenched, profoundly divided world in which we live.”

That profoundly divided world needs the Catholic both/and, the Way of heaven and earth, more than ever before. Fortunately, Pope Leo XIV is, in his own way, very much proving to be a both/and pope too. There will be much more to say on the subject, I’m sure, in 2026 and beyond—and if you’re so inspired, join me in writing about it!

PS—As an honorable mention, hands down my favorite note of 2025, from Dylan Campbell:

The other day on Substack, I posed a question: Are human beings fundamentally bad or fundamentally good?

This was prompted by an interesting fireside discussion I had with my family of origin over Christmas break. I don’t remember how exactly we got there, but all of a sudden, we found ourselves circling this critical question about human nature, with a fairly sharp divide in perspectives emerging.

The question elicited some interesting responses among mostly Catholic followers on Substack:

Humans are fundamentally good *though stuck with that pesky concupiscence problem.

I think “good” and “bad” are words that we made up, trying to make sense of a world that can be very confusing. Human beings are fundamentally human.

Human beings are fundamentally good. Not my opinion, but biblical truth. Human beings are “created/made in the image and likeness of God. “ God is good.

We are fundamentally good, but broken by the fall.

According to St Augustine’s reading of Genesis, we are fundamentally good, but corrupt.

Human beings are made in God’s image and the Creator calls them “very good” on the first page of Scripture. . . . Protestants—and Catholics who have assimilated certain strains of Protestant theology—will be more comfortable with the idea that human beings are fundamentally bad/evil because their tradition is tangled up with the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity.

The doctrine of original sin allows us to simultaneously affirm that human beings are fundamentally, naturally good, and that our nature is so screwed up that we are predictably, ordinarily terrible.

Where do I fall on this question? Naturally, I think we’re fundamentally both—but in two different senses. Here’s how I put it in The Way of Heaven and Earth:

Ontologically, we’re fundamentally the “very good” creatures of a good God (Gen. 1:31)—Manichaeism has been left behind—but existentially, we’re fundamentally the wretched sons of Adam and daughters of Eve: “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse—who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9).

The ontological side we see in its integrity before the fall; the existential (or moral) side we see in its corruption after the fall. And both the overwhelming goodness of our ontological side and the overwhelming badness of our existential side are abundantly clear, near as I can tell, in both Scripture and Tradition. Man, as Pascal put it, is both great and wretched.

Thomas Aquinas makes a similar distinction in the Summa in a relevant article on whether man can wish or do any good without grace (his answer to which, in a word, is no):

Man’s nature may be looked at in two ways: first, in its integrity, as it was in our first parent before sin; secondly, as it is corrupted in us after the sin of our first parent.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that we have two natures; there’s only one human nature. But our nature can be looked at in two very different ways.

This, to my mind, is the “question behind the question,” and the reason we have such difficulty answering and debating it. What do we mean we talk of what we are fundamentally? If I say we are “fundamentally bad,” I might mean existentially—we are fallen, perverse, wretched (just watch the news on any given night)—but a person might hear that as ontological badness (Manichaeism—or at least Calvinistic “total depravity”). If I say we are “fundamentally good,” I might mean ontologically—we are made in God’s image and likeness, the paragon of animals, a little lower than a god and crowned with glory and honor (Ps. 8:5)—but a person might hear that as existential goodness (Pelagianism—or at least semi-Pelagianism). If I say we are fundamentally bad, full stop, I seem to risk obscuring God’s loving creation of man; if I say we are fundamentally good, full stop, I seem to risk losing sight of man’s original and ongoing rebellion against God.

One thinks, on this point, of Pope Francis’s 60 Minutes interview in 2024, wherein he said: “We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good.” What did he mean exactly? It’s hard to say. At the very least, his words are hard to square with Jeremiah’s above. But inevitably, accusations of Pelagian thinking abounded afterward. A one-sided answer to the question of what we are fundamentally—good or bad—will always feel dangerously incomplete.

Supposing we are both fundamentally good (ontologically) and fundamentally bad (existentially): Is one aspect of our nature, objectively speaking, more fundamental than the other? It would seem that our ontological goodness, which comes from God to crown his creation, is more basic to human nature than our existential badness, which comes from us to corrupt that goodness. In this sense, I appreciate all those responses above that answer: We’re fundamentally good but—corrupted, broken, sinful, etc.

Yet I still think the best way to answer the question is to insist, together with our fundamental goodness as God’s image, on our fundamental badness as moral agents. We ought, in my view, to recover Pascal’s language of our basic wretchedness as human beings. Why? Because the danger in our New Axial Age is always toward the earthward excess. In this case, on the existential-moral question, that means a tendency toward a Pelagian papering over of original sin and our corresponding need for grace, conversion, and salvation—an overly optimistic perspective, in other words, of how good we tend to act by nature: at our birth, throughout our life, and at the moment of our death. This earthward excess requires a very firm cleaving to the primacy of heaven—in this case, the primacy of grace, the underside of which is the fundamental badness of the human situation.

Today, when we read some of the things on this subject by Augustine (who, after all, was maybe the key inspiration for Luther, Calvin, and Jansen) and by Aquinas (also deeply inspired by Augustine, whom he cites in the Summa more than Aristotle), we find ourselves in a real bind: Either they were way off the mark in underscoring our existential badness, or we’re way off the mark in underscoring our existential goodness.

Consider this question: What good things can we do without the help of God’s grace, just running off the fumes of our ontological goodness? I assume most of us today would say: Quite a lot. We can attain the natural virtues common to all humanity; perhaps we can even possess, in part, supernatural ones. But in the article referenced above, Aquinas gives these much more modest examples: “Build dwellings, plant vineyards, and the like.” In other words: Apart from God’s help, we’re only going to get a little better than sophisticated animals. And he quotes Augustine: “Without grace men do nothing good when they either think or wish or love or act.” This kind of deeply biblical statement from Augustine, cosigned by Aquinas, would, I think, be instantly branded by most Catholics today as Calvinistic—and that’s a problem, because it’s deeply Catholic.

So, are we fundamentally good or fundamentally bad? My answer is: Yes.

In his essay “In Defence of Rash Vows,” G. K. Chesterton remarked that “free love” is a contradiction in terms—for the lover always has been, and always will be, decidedly unfree: “It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.”

Sacred Vows, a beautifully understated new EP from independent singer-songwriter Andy Squyres, explores this self-binding of two lovers in marriage—an oath inscribed upon the highest heaven that takes flesh in the everydayness of earth.

Squyres is a Christian: As he recounts in one interview, his mom and stepdad were converted after reading a Bible from a Catholic bookstore, and he was raised in the Pentecostal charismatic tradition. More recently, he was influenced by a theology of grace through writers likes the Episcopal Robert Capon (who described himself an “old-fashioned high churchman and a Thomist to boot”) and the former Franciscan priest Brennan Manning (The Ragamuffin Gospel).

But while Christian themes permeate his songs through this diverse theological tableau, the offbeat, melancholy “poet priest” takes his musical cues more from a Nick Cave than your typical “Christian music.” “I’m Jeff Buckley singing Leonard Cohen,” he intones in one recent song, “I feel all creation groaning.”

And he groans with it. His songs, not unlike the stories of Flannery O’Connor, evince a sacramental imagination, one that looks for movements of grace in and through the ordinary, ambiguous, and even unsettling moments on life’s way. In the recent “Gutter Punk,” bleak images of looking upon the dying and falling into a ditch are punctuated by a paradox of growth through this abnegation—“I’m on a roll now”— and culminate in a powerful refrain: “Buckle up if you insist / Drinking of this eucharist.”

With the four-song Sacred Vows, Squyres, who’s not only a father of six but now a grandfather, turns his poetic eye to his marriage of over thirty years. The EP has a light hue—even, as in the cover art, a kind of neon haze—but there’s little saccharine or sentimental about it. Instead, we listen as the sacred vows of young love, exalted and solemn as they are, play themselves out in mundane struggles and joys down the years. And in the rear view, the early years spent leaping into life together—which are particularly trying and insecure years for most young married couples—shine with a special resplendence in the present. The gold and silver of big anniversaries, too, are tested in fire.

In “There’s No Way That I Can Love You Anymore,” Squyres sings of reading Robert Frost, watching “an episode of Downton,” and struggling together to scrape by: “We open up a menu and hang our heads in shame / As usual with only forty dollars to our name.” On “Bad Decisions,” he looks back on their uncertainty about the future—“living in a trailer,” drinking “truck stop coffee,” waiting on “baby number two”—all while trusting in the constancy of their love: “I know the days are golden and I know the sorrow’s true / And I know that God is with us when there’s nothing we can do.” And in “Utah by Tomorrow,” we glimpse routine moments of traveling, cooking, and raising kids, concluding with what is likely a nod to the last book of Manning—who likely took inspiration from Thérèse of Liseiux and/or Bernanos:

Cutting onions with you and I’m crying
Cutting up and we’re not even trying
Chicken chili cooking on the fire
Lets say grace . . .

God’s good, the kids are finally sleeping
We’re broke, I think the roof is leaking
It’s chilly, turn up the heater
All is grace

But the standout of the EP is, hands down, the opener: “Dancing in the Kitchen.” It’s a synthy, intimate portrait of maintaining connection with one’s spouse across a span of time and distance. Squyres sings of the “long haul” of life of on the road—“scattered crumbs,” state troopers, money woes (“Take out a second mortgage, fix your beat up house”)—all while keeping his heart fixed on his wife. He imagines the two of them in the simplest of moments together—moments that not only echo into eternity but, in the spousal unity of bridegroom and bride, reflect it here and now:

Then I saw you in a vision, we were dancing in the kitchen
And I ask you how’s your day been, so you tell me and I listen
We were singing Avett Brothers, we were friends and we were lovers
And your eyes laugh till they glisten
We were dancing in the kitchen

I will wash if you will dry
Snap a towel, sting a thigh
Grab each other, hit the floor
Kiss your mouth, shut the door
Kick drum heart on the phone
Someday soon I will be home

It’s a stunner of a song—and a criminally underplayed and undiscovered one at that. The sacred vows of marriage, so subject to abstraction in public discussion and debate about the institution, is here exquisitely articulated through the beauty of poetry. This is what it really comes down to—what marriage through the decades is like. The struggles, the small moments, and the tireless magnetic attraction of a man and woman enveloped in a sacred promise, their one-flesh bond symbolizing the exclusive and steadfast love of God for his people.

The Christmas season tends to draw from us, together with all the joy and celebration, a hankering for the romantic. We will soon be stumbling, if we aren’t already, through a tangle of movies and songs about falling in love during this magical time of year. There’s a place for all of it, of course—but falling in love is easy enough. If you want a glimpse of true romance, pick up Sacred Vows.

Big news in “both/and” land!

Pope Leo XIV’s recent apostolic letter “In Unitate Fidei” on the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Niceaea invokes the language of the “both/and”—the first time, that I’m aware of, that a pope has directly used the term in formal teaching.

Calling for “reconciliation among all Christians,” Pope Leo then pivots to the Nicene Creed, “the basis and reference point for this journey”:

It offers us a model of true unity in legitimate diversity. Unity in the Trinity, Trinity in Unity, because unity without multiplicity is tyranny, multiplicity without unity is fragmentation. The Trinitarian dynamic is not a dualistic and exclusive “either/or,” but rather a decisive bond, “both/and.” The Holy Spirit is the bond of unity whom we worship together with the Father and the Son. We must therefore leave behind theological controversies that have lost their raison d’être in order to develop a common understanding and even more, a common prayer to the Holy Spirit, so that he may gather us all together in one faith and one love.

The pope here has honed in on one of the classic heaven-earth dilemmas from the history of philosophy (see chapter 7 in The Way of Heaven and Earth)—namely, the one or the many, or unity and diversity. (In fact, the word “Trinity” doesn’t appear in the Bible at all, and only emerged in the Christian lexicon through theological and philosophical reflection on Scripture—itself a both/and!) The one at the expense of the many is a tyrannical ossification of reality; the many at the expense of the one is its chaotic fragmentation. These polarities are reconciled in the revelation, in and though Christ, of the Triune God, where we encounter one divine nature in three persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But they are also reconciled, as Pope Leo observes, in the life of the Church, which is one Body with many members. The Trinitarian synthesis of unity and diversity is meant to flow out from God into his people, becoming the very rhythm of ecclesial life.

As I say above, this is, I believe, the first time that a pope has used the phrases “both/and” and “either/or” in the Magisterium. And the Holy Father has even seen it fit to apply this hermeneutic to one of the central dogmas of Christianity—with respect to one of the most pressing issues facing Christians worldwide.

To my mind, this is a dramatic confirmation of something I’ve been sensing about Pope Leo since his election: that he is, perhaps even more than his predecessors, a both/and pope. The theme emerged in his dissertation as a young man; it was his very first answer in his very first interview; and it’s come up time and again in his words—whether about contemplation and action, worship of God and service to the poor, or tradition and novelty. We’ve also seen the both/and mentality emerge in some of his actions and gestures, wherein subtle moves signal the magnanimity and capaciousness of a truly Catholic soul. And this ecclesial largesse isn’t haphazard or confused; on the contrary, on unity and diversity—as on every other both/and I’ve heard him address—Leo nods to the primacy of the heavenly element by mentioning it first. His breadth of vision—unsurprising for a canon lawyer—is very carefully articulated.

But it also confirms something else to me: that the both/and is here to stay. I am, needless to say, a fan of the idea—it’s become something of a tagline in our home—so the assertion is not without some obvious confirmation bias. But I can’t help but feel like the concept continues to gain steam in both in the Church and the culture, precisely because it speaks to the heart of the crisis we now face in the digital world. As I wrote at the National Catholic Register:

Are we children of light or children of darkness? Will we walk the road to salvation or the road to perdition? Do we belong to the City of God or the City of Man?

This question remains fundamentally the same today, but the Church needs a new language for pronouncing it, as much to itself as to the world. . . . Our age has its own distinctive and disquieting contours. Trump, TikTok, COVID and the AI boom, whatever else they’ve done, have utterly redrawn our map of reality, and we find ourselves in a strange new landscape — a bedlam of fragmentation and polarization.

New questions are stirring in us as a society about life itself—and we can scarcely put words to them: What is this? How did this happen? Where is sanity? The Church, under Pope Leo’s leadership, will, God willing, be more and more be an evangelical presence to a society torn apart and turned against itself by the either/or—not only revealing God to man but also revealing man to himself.

Happy (liturgical) New Year! I haven’t been able to spend as much time on Substack as I’ve wanted to these past weeks, taking a much-needed hiatus from writing after a flurry of activity the past several months. I hope to warm back up again later this Advent season, but in the meantime, I wanted to at least drop in and offer a brief round-up from the past three months.

The Way of Heaven and Earth

• BOOK PRESENTATION: Thanks to the kind invitation of the Legion of Mary, with the support of the Canons Regular of Sant Augustine, I gave a presentation on The Way of Heaven and Earth on September 26 at Saint Patrick Church in Glen Cove. It was a wonderful opportunity to articulate the overall vision for the book (summarized in a recent Register piece on “the two ways”), and I really felt the love and support from the Glen Cove Catholic community. My gratitude to the Canons, the Legion of Mary, and all those who came out and bought copies of the book. I’ll hopefully have some video posted soon!

• SON RISE MORNING SHOW: Starting in mid-October, I’ve been joining the Anna Mitchell and Matt Swaim on The Son Rise Morning Show on Tuesdays around 8:40 a.m. to walk through The Way chapter by chapter. Unlike other interviews on radio or even podcasts, this ongoing conversation has allowed for a much deeper exploration of the logic and rhythm of the both/and structure in the book. This week we’ll be diving into part II on the great heaven-earth dilemmas of philosophy. Join us!

• MATTHEW J. RAMAGE REVIEWS THE WAY: I recently had the pleasure of meeting Matthew Ramage of Benedictine College. I had seen Matthew invoke the “both/and” principle before, including on the blurb for Darwin and Doctrine (a phenomenal read by the way), and I figured he might be interested to read The Way. He was, and he left this very kind review below on Amazon. I’m currently making my way through his clarifying Essential Guide to Ratzinger with OSV—also big on the both/and theme!—and will have a review posted somewhere soon.

Writing

• SUBSTACK: Pieces on Tom Holland, the crucifix, Pope Leo’s first answer in his first interview (“Both/and”!), a recent Word on Fire Show, Dilexi Te, Joe Rogan, and three both/ands in a recent Pope Leo homily.

• WOF: Pieces on the kids movie Light of the World, the mysteriously joyful aura of autumn, and Dilexi Te.

• CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT: Pieces on the Letter of Saint Jude and the dualism that runs deeper than Descartes.

• NATIONAL CATHOLIC REGISTER: Pieces on the Netflix documentary Unknown Number, the “two ways” of communion or division, Pope Leo on faith and reason, and the hope of “burial gardens.”

Word on Fire

• BISHOP ERIK VARDEN’S TOWARDS DAWN: Word on Fire has released Bishop Erik Varden’s Towards Dawn: Essays in Hopefulness. The launch coincided with Bishop Varden’s Erasmus Lecture for First Things in New York on the theme of translation. Bishop Varden is, I think, one of the most impressive spiritual writers working today, and Towards Dawn is a phenomenal collection of essays on some of the most pressing matters facing the Church. I highly recommend it!

  

• TWO OTHER LAUNCHES: We have also launched, on the general imprint, a second edition of Bishop Barron’s groundbreaking Catholicism book, as well as Indispensable: A Catholic Guide to Welcoming Persons with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, edited by my colleague Mark Bradford. These are both wonderful reads in their own right: The first is my go-to recommendation for an intro to Catholicism, and the second is one of the most inspiring books I’ve worked on yet with Word on Fire—sure to become the go-to resource for ministering to people with IDDs and their families. Once again, I highly recommend them both!

A life update: A pilgrimage to DC

Last weekend, my wife and I took the kids on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Washington, DC. We spent the first day downtown, where we were given a wonderful tour of the Capitol building with our local congressman and his office staff, who were all so generous with their time and gave us an up-close encounter with the political and historical center of our nation. We also visited the Library of Congress and multiple museums—all of which are free!

On the second, we went on something of a pilgrimage. The day started with the veneration of the relics of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the patroness of Word on Fire, at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The grandeur and beauty of the basilica was arresting—we had never been there before—and the line of the faithful who had come to encounter the Little Flower wound its way through the entire church.

After exploring the basilica’s many hidden treasures for a bit (including thirty Word on Fire book displays, by my count, in the bookstore), there followed Mass celebrated by the Apostolic Nuncio to the US, Christophe Cardinal Pierre—one of the most beautiful Masses we have ever experienced.

Next, we visited with my friend Father Blake Britton (author of Reclaiming Vatican II) at the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land—a hidden gem of a place with life-size replicas of various sites in the Holy Land punctuated with authentic stones from that sacred place.

Finally, we popped into the John Paul II National Shrine, venerating the blood relic of the great Polish saint and pope—and the great-grandfather of the Word on Fire movement. John Paul II’s summons to Cardinal George (“What are you doing to evangelize the culture?”) famously lead, eventually, to the latter’s summons to Father Robert Barron to kick-start evangelization in Chicago—and from that, Word on Fire was born.

The whole experience was really galvanizing. And though the visit of the relics of Saint Thérèse was a one-time event, all of these places are very much worth visiting if you ever find yourself in the DC area.

A look ahead at the winter

• ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE WAY: It’s hard to believe, but just a few months from now—February 10, 2026—will mark the one-year anniversary of The Way of Heaven and Earth. I’m happy to report that the book has already sold over 1,500 copies, while this Substack, for its part, has blossomed into almost 200 subscribers. Whatever the numbers or impact or ultimate purpose of all this in God’s providence, I know that this has been the project of a lifetime. Thank you to my Word on Fire family and to everyone who has read the book, written reviews, and promoted it on their channels. If you haven’t, please consider leaving a review/rating on Amazon to help even more people discover it, and join the conversation about the both/and right here on Substack. And be on the lookout for a flurry of new content as this first year closes out!

  The active promotional work may be coming to an end, but I have every intention of continuing to pursue this great theme into 2026 and beyond. (Indeed, Pope Leo has become the first pope in history, that I’m aware of, to directly use the term “both/and” in formal teaching, and he continues to underscore the theme in his pontificate. I can scarcely keep up!) Of course, I didn’t invent the idea of “the Catholic both/and”—far from it—but I’m happy to go on exploring it and sharing that exploration, wherever it leads, as long as God permits me to. It is, I’m convinced, the master hermeneutic for the Church in the twenty-first century—for understanding itself, for understanding reality, and for understanding what one has to do with the other.

This past Sunday, in Saint Peter’s Basilica, Pope Leo XIV delivered a homily for the Jubilee of the Synodal Teams and Participatory Bodies. His focus was on the Gospel reading of the Pharisee and the tax collector, and the pope of unity focused, once again, on the scourge of division and polarization afflicting the Church.

The Pharisee and the tax collector, Leo notes, enter into the temple divided. And “this division depends above all on the Pharisee’s attitude”—an obsession with his own ego that keeps him from having “a relationship with either God or others” and that “turns the community into a judgmental and exclusionary place.”

Turning to address members of synodal teams and participatory bodies from around the world, Leo added,

Please trust me when I tell you that by listening to the Spirit in dialogue, fraternity and parrhesia, you will help us to understand that, prior to any differences, we are called in the Church to walk together in the pursuit of God. By clothing ourselves with the sentiments of Christ, we expand the ecclesial space so that it becomes collegial and welcoming.

This will enable us to live with confidence and a new spirit amid the tensions that run through the life of the Church: between unity and diversity, tradition and novelty, authority and participation. We must allow the Spirit to transform them, so that they do not become ideological contrapositions and harmful polarizations. It is not a question of resolving them by reducing one to the other, but of allowing them to be purified by the Spirit, so that they may be harmonized and oriented toward a common discernment.

Pope Leo has already made the both/and a key theme in his first interview and first apostolic exhortation, and here he returns to it once again with three more philosophical polarities, two of which I explore in The Way: unity and diversity (or the one and the many), tradition and novelty (or order and openness), and authority and participation (a combination of the two).

What strikes me once again is not only the prominence of this theme in Leo’s early days as pope, but also, as in his apostolic exhortation, how he seems to consistently put the heavenly element first in every pairing, giving it an implicit prioritization. This hardly seems coincidental, and I think it’s telling. Thus, while diversity is valuable, it has to find its place relative to a broader unity of the Body of Christ, integrating into its wholeness (unity-in-diversity); while novelty is important, it has to emerge from within the ancient tradition of the Church, pressing its inner logic further upward and outward; and while participation is necessary, it must be governed under an overarching authority, checking itself against the mind of the Magisterium.

That this hierarchy has been so often turned upside down in recent decades—making diversity, novelty, and participation top of mind, and unity, tradition, and authority mere afterthoughts—goes without saying. And the result is inevitably a fragmented, fickle people more eager to chase the prevailing winds of the culture than the mighty wind of the Spirit—and more likely to mistake the former for the latter.

Of course, denigrating those same earthly principles also leads to disaster in the other direction—which is precisely why Leo is so keen to stress the both/and. We need both unity and diversity, both tradition and novelty, both authority and participation—and in that order.

At this time in the life of the Church, this seems to me to be precisely the right note for the pope to be striking—a conciliatory harnessing of the Church’s many “sides,” with all their strengths, and a fierce resistance of the tendency to set them in opposition. Of course, how exactly we strike that balance—for example, the balance between tradition and novelty in terms of the liturgy, which is very much in the headlines presently—is a different and far more complicated question, one that I suspect the pope will gradually address in different ways, in due time.

But for now, the pope seems to be saying, first things first: Let’s put the egos aside, bury the hatchets, and come together as one Church. And whatever decisions might be coming from Rome, that’s something all of us can get started on right away.

The October 9 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience—one of the most popular podcasts in the world—features Duncan Trussell, a stand-up comic and host of The Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast. Trussell recently hosted Bishop Robert Barron on his own podcast—the two had a phenomenal conversation—and as a guest on Rogan’s show, he had some very interesting things to say about it.

Inexplicably, the two are dressed in priest outfits (go figure), and the excerpt in question (beginning at 1:56:30) features a handful of four-letter words. That said, Trussell’s comments are worth attending to:

I just had Bishop Robert Baron on my podcast. . . . And he’s awesome. And let me tell you, after I had the bishop on, in my whole career of podcasting, people have never come at me. I’ve had Satanists on. I’ve had . . . Riley Reed. I’ve had all kinds of people on my podcast. The only time I really started getting some [ __ ] was because I had a bishop on, who . . . everything he said was very sweet. And I asked him right away. I was like, “Why are Christians the most persecuted people on the planet right now?” Like Christians get [ __ ] up. And he he talked about it a little bit. And then right after that, that Catholic [ __ ] school [shooting] at Mass—at Mass. . . . And then Charlie [ __ ] Kirk gets shot. And then, not to mention, all over the world, Christians getting slaughtered. But his answer to it was so measured. . . . He said, Satan is known as the Accuser and the Scatterer. The Scatterer. And so . . . if you look at what’s happening, and using those terms: Is it dividing? Is it scattering? If so, it’s satanic, in the sense that it’s turning neighbor upon neighbor, brother upon brother, son upon father, and it’s scattering all of us, you know? It’s like what could be a cohesive human family is being just scattered to the [ __ ] winds.

Bishop Barron elaborates on this theme of the scattering power of Satan—and, by contrast, the gathering power of God—in his books Catholicism and (in a more detailed way) The Priority of Christ. In the former he writes, “One of the typical biblical names for the devil is ho diabalos, derived from the term diabalein (to throw apart). If God is a great gathering force, then sin is a scattering power.”

This way of framing the divine and satanic power—as communion vs. division—seems to be catching on like wildfire. It not only caught Trussell’s attention; it also caught the attention of Candace Owens, who—whatever you might think of her—spoke of precisely this point from Bishop Barron’s Catholicism book and its “symmetry with politics” as the catalyst for her conversion to the Catholic Church.

It certainly caught my attention too. The Way of Heaven and Earth, which echoes Bishop Barron in the introduction (“God is the great gatherer; the devil (diabolos, from diaballein, ‘to scatter’) is the great divider”), is one long playing out of the same theme. And since its publication in February, I keep discovering new voices and networks tapping into this same rhythm from different perspectives.

Why is this idea so compelling to us? Because it speaks directly into the crisis we’re facing as a society today—a crisis of polarization and fragmentation through digital media, accelerating a deeper crisis of alienation in modern life. Ours is no longer so much a meaning crisis as a reality crisis—a sundering and splintering of life and thought and language themselves. This framework of divine unity vs. satanic scattering gives us, at one and the same time, a foothold in the wisdom of ancient religion and a grip on the chaos of postmodern secularity. It seems to unlock, like nothing else, both the faith of the past and hope for the future.

But Trussell’s first point is no less interesting—and intimately related to the second. Why is it that a bishop of all people—not a Satanist, not a porn star, but a kindly, intelligent Catholic bishop—was the first guest to draw the ire of Trussell’s listeners? And why do Christians seem to be so routinely the targets of heinous, murderous violence, as we saw in Minnesota and Utah, and continue to see in Nigeria?

It’s here that Christ’s words in the Gospel complete the picture: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law” (Matt. 10:34–35).

What can this mean? If division is satanic, how can it be that Christ came to bring a sword of division to cut the world in two? If the devil turns “neighbor upon neighbor, brother upon brother, son upon father,” as Trussell rightly puts it, how can this be exactly what Christ says he’ll do?

The answer can only be that Christ himself is an ultimate dividing line between division and the absence of all division. He’s the door we have to enter to find true unity, wholeness, and holiness—and the door we have to turn our back on to leave them behind. There’s no lukewarmness when it comes to him: “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Matt. 12:30). Christ has drawn all reality to himself, in himself—and in the great “both/and” of his Body, the Church—and in so doing, unleashes the ultimate choice: either we’re gathered into God with him, or we’re scattered to the winds without him.

It would be wise of Rogan to finally have Bishop Barron on his podcast to explore some of these things. But in the meantime, this deep Catholic wisdom continues to spring up in the culture in surprising and invigorating ways. It’s a confusing time to be alive, yes—but if you ask me, also an exciting one.

Over at Word on Fire today, I took a look at three key takeaways from Pope Leo XIV’s first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi Te (I Have Loved You), which is on the love of the poor.

The third takeaway was the both/and approach on display throughout the document. I only referenced a handful of examples as I didn’t want to belabor the point, but there are in fact many more; indeed, the document is replete with both/and thinking.

I wanted to offer readers a deeper dive into the theme here on Substack. Thus, below is a more complete list of both/and passages from Dilexi Te, in the order of their appearance:

Love for the Lord, then, is one with love for the poor. (5)

In hearing the cry of the poor, we are asked to enter into the heart of God. (8)

Precisely in order to share the limitations and fragility of our human nature, [God] himself became poor and was born in the flesh like us. (16)

[Jesus] thus reveals himself as the One who, in the here and now of history, comes to bring about God’s loving closeness. (21)

Jesus’ teaching on the primacy of love for God is clearly complemented by his insistence that one cannot love God without extending one’s love to the poor. Love for our neighbor is tangible proof of the authenticity of our love for God, as the Apostle John attests: “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us… God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them” (1 Jn 4:12,16). The two loves are distinct yet inseparable. (26)

[Saint Justin] underscored that at the heart of the Christian liturgy, it is not possible to separate the worship of God from concern for the poor. . . . the nascent Church did not separate belief from social action: faith without witness through concrete actions was considered dead, as Saint James taught us (cf. 2:17). (40)

[Saint John Chrysostom] understood the Eucharist, therefore, as a sacramental expression of the charity and justice that both preceded and accompanied it. That same charity and justice should perpetuate the Eucharist through love and attention to the poor. (41)

Patristic theology was practical, aiming at a Church that was poor and for the poor, recalling that the Gospel is proclaimed correctly only when it impels us to touch the flesh of the least among us, and warning that doctrinal rigor without mercy is empty talk. (48)

Saint Basil the Great, in his Rule, saw no contradiction between the monks’ life of prayer and contemplation and their work on behalf of the poor. For him, hospitality and care for the needy were an integral part of monastic spirituality. . . . The monk, therefore, was not only an ascetic, but also a servant. (53, 54)

Praying and caring, contemplating and healing, writing and welcoming: everything was an expression of the same love for Christ. (54)

The monastic tradition teaches us that prayer and charity, silence and service, cells and hospitals form a single spiritual fabric. The monastery is a place of listening and action, of worship and sharing. . . . Where monks and nuns have opened their doors to the poor, the Church has revealed with humility and firmness that contemplation does not exclude mercy, but demands it as its purest fruit. (58)

The liberation of prisoners is an expression of Trinitarian love: a God who frees not only from spiritual slavery but also from concrete oppression. (60)

As Saint Paul proclaimed: “For freedom Christ has set us free” ( Gal 5:1). This freedom is not only interior: it manifests itself in history as love that cares for and frees us from every bond of slavery. (62)

Addressing educators, Pope Francis recalled that education has always been one of the highest expressions of Christian charity: “Yours is a mission full of obstacles as well as joys... A mission of love, because you cannot teach without loving.” . . . Inspired by the example of the Master who taught people divine and human truths, she took on the mission of forming children and young people, especially the poorest, in truth and love. (68)

[The goal of the Piarists] was that of transmitting to young people “not only secular knowledge but also the wisdom of the Gospel, teaching them to recognize, in their personal lives and in history, the loving action of God the Creator and Redeemer.” (69)

Blessed Antonio Rosmini founded the Institute of Charity, in which “intellectual charity” was placed alongside “material charity.” (70)

By combining a life of piety and dedication to others, [religious sisters] fought abandonment with the tenderness of those who educate in the name of Christ. (71)

By combining faith and culture, [Catholic schools] sow the seeds of the future, honor the image of God and build a better society. (72)

[Saint Teresa of Kolkata’s] love for the poorest of the poor meant that she did not only take care of their material needs, but also proclaimed the good news of the Gospel to them. (77)

[Saint Dulce of the Poor’s] faith did not distance her from the world, but drew her even more deeply into the pain of the least among us. (78)

Therefore, when the Church bends down to care for the poor, she assumes her highest posture. (79)

The intense efforts of bishops, theologians and experts concerned with the renewal of the Church — with the support of Saint John XXIII himself — gave the Council a new direction. The centrality of Christ in these considerations both on a doctrinal and social level would prove fundamental. (84)

The Lord took on a flesh that hungers and thirsts, and experiences infirmity and imprisonment. (110)

“The worst discrimination which the poor suffer is the lack of spiritual care… Our preferential option for the poor must mainly translate into a privileged and preferential religious care.” (114)

Our love and our deepest convictions need to be continually cultivated, and we do so through our concrete actions. Remaining in the realm of ideas and theories, while failing to give them expression through frequent and practical acts of charity, will eventually cause even our most cherished hopes and aspirations to weaken and fade away. (119)

When my first editor—my wife—edited my article, she half-jokingly asked (without having read the exhortation yet) whether I wasn’t reading the both/and into the document (as I tend to read it into just about everything). Perhaps a tad; after all, Leo’s main focus here is the spiritual and moral necessity of love for the poor, in continuity with his predecessor and the whole Church.

Nevertheless, readers of The Way of Heaven and Earth will, I think, recognize in the above quotes many of the same heaven-earth binaries I have: contemplation and action, truth and love, the spiritual and the physical, faith and works, and above all—the binary of binaries in the light of Christ—God and man. Though thinking specifically about the poor, he assuredly does it in a both/and register.

And I’m struck not only by the recurrence of this theme, but the orderly way in which Leo unfurls it. He always seems to place the heavenly element first in every et-et formula, giving it—as necessary and vital as the earthly element is—an implicit primacy. This is an essential move in order for the both/and thinking to unfold properly. When we invert that hierarchy and give the earthly element primacy, as Christians sometimes do, we go off the rails. The pope, as far as I can tell, understands this in his bones.

Leo XIV’s first answer in his first interview was “both/and.” Now, his first exhortation has sounded the theme all the more. Whatever comes next, I think we can expect this pope to lead us well on the Way.

On this week’s Word on Fire Show—which is focused on the recent rise in conversions to Catholicism and how the Church might build on the momentum—Bishop Barron had this to say (9:15–9:32):

Catholicism is a both/and religion, as I’ve said ad nauseum. But it’s true. We’re a both/and religion. So, yes to the community, and yes to the church building. Yes to the rational, yes to the beautiful. Yes to the communitarian, yes to the aesthetic. Yes.

Of course, this isn’t exactly the Way “in the wild”: I do work for Word on Fire, and since 2009, Bishop Barron has been my great teacher in the Way of heaven and earth. Indeed, it was from him that I first learned the phrase “the Catholic both/and.”

Still, it’s always a joy to hear him return to this theme, which has become my great passion and focus, and with such compelling directness. Catholicism is a both/and religion—a great yes to both sides of the dilemmas that so often divide us. If you’re not Catholic, but you love the idea of the both/and, you need to take a closer look!

While the interview will be available in full in the book, Crux has already released a few clips on their YouTube channel.

Pope Leo’s first answer to the first question of his first interview?

“Both/and.”

The statement came in response to Allen asking about the pope’s own background. He’s two things at once, she observed—the first pope from the US, and the second pope (after Francis) with the perspective of Latin America. Which did he identify with more? The pope answered, “I think the answer is both/and. . . . I’m obviously an American and I very much feel that I’m an American, but I also love very much Peru, the Peruvian people, so that is a part of who I am.”

This both/and perspective is reinforced further in Crux’s second exclusive clip from the interview. Allen asks the pope about his own understanding of synodality, and Leo at one point calls it “an antidote” to polarization.

In my brief history of the Catholic both/and, I traced the development of the both/and concept across two thousand years of Catholic history, including the previous three popes—John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis—and argued that there was already strong evidence that Leo will continue in trajectory, especially given his emphasis on unity. But his effortless use of this term to describe his own dual identity seems to be a real clincher.

Again, exactly what the both/and will look like in Leo’s pontificate—what emphases he will bring forward, and why—remains to be seen. But this concept—which I’m convinced offers a uniquely powerful means of understanding not only the faith but humanity itself—will, I suspect, continue to play a key role in Catholic theology and philosophy in the years to come.

The news has been dominated the past few weeks by horrific stories of death and murder. The memorial of September 11—a day still so vivid in so many of our minds—feels heavier this year, somehow, amid these stories of gruesome violence and cold-blooded assassination. “Nothing is crazier than life,” Walker Percy wrote in Love in the Ruins, “and nobody is crazier than people.”

Of course, man’s inhumanity to man isn’t exactly a recent development—homo homini lupus—and the twenty-four-hour news cycle and constant access to social media, we remind ourselves, amplifies these stories so intensely that we lose perspective. Still, there’s something deeply disquieting in the vicious, random, and indeed nihilistic quality of these paroxysms of violence—as if sin, death, and hell themselves were suddenly roving the streets of America, like roaring lions looking for someone to devour.

In the midst of all this, in God’s providence, arrives the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross—and on a Sunday, no less. It’s a powerful reminder to Christians to turn to the very crux of our faith, the very instrument of our salvation, the very cause—and only cause—of our hope: Ave crux, spes inuca . . .

But Catholics, of course, not only exalt Christ’s cross; they also exalt the crucifix: the cross with Christ’s tortured corpus nailed upon it. The early Christians were reticent to portray the Crucifixion in light of its awful reality (as Tom Holland explains on a recent podcast). But as the centuries rolled on, the crucifix became a central image of Christian art and worship, as in the twelfth-century Spanish crucifix displayed in New York’s Cloisters museum (pictured above).

Iconoclastic movements in the history of Christianity sought to remove the crucifix from churches, replacing it instead with a plain cross. A prime example from the eighth-century iconoclastic controversy is the Hagia Irene in Constantinople, where a plain black cross adorns the apse. In the Reformation, of course, reformed Protestants channeled this same impulse, stripping churches of crucifixes and other sacred images, and to this day, many Protestant churches tend to limit themselves to a plain cross. The argument—a classic expression of heavenward thought in Christian history—is that these images effectively functioned as “idols,” cutting against the first commandment (Deut. 5:8). Some might proffer a more refined theological perspective: The crucifix effectively “keeps Jesus on the cross,” undermining the triumph of the Resurrection and suspending humanity in the hampster wheel of good works to “earn” their salvation.

As a Catholic, I disagree, of course, with these arguments, and the classic counter-arguments are well-worn territory for those interested. But I wonder whether a period like the one we’re living through doesn’t through into sharp relief the Catholic wisdom of displaying the crucifix—and not only in churches but in the home. Catholicism, Jordan Peterson famously remarked, is “as sane as people get,” and the crucifix is a prime example. It’s not that Catholics are turning away from the transcendent God, the Resurrection, or the light of man—all three are visibly present, after all, in Christ, who said “Before Abraham was, I AM”; “I am the resurrection and the life”; and “I am the light of the world” (John 8:58, 11:25, 8:12); they are simply turning toward, simultaneously, the human nature, natural death, and existential darkness experienced by Christ. That God journeyed into this great ache of the human condition, and this great wound of human suffering and cruelty and death, is a truth we need not just to believe abstractly but to feel concretely.

My father told us that my Polish grandmother, in her last days, spent long hours in silence just gazing at the simple crucifix adorning her room. What graces did she receive from contemplating the divine descent into her own suffering, her own journey into the lonesome valley of death, so visibly?

A great darkness has gathered around us these last weeks. But even the darkness is not dark to God (Ps. 139:12). God sees all, knows all—and he assumed all, and conquered all, for the salvation of all.

Lift high the crucifix: God is with us.