God is a non-physical entity causally influencing the cosmos in non-physical ways. God’s mode of causal influence is more likely to be beyond the governance of natural law, and therefore that influence is not measurable, predictable, or publicly observable.

My six-year-old son came back from school—he is in Grade R—telling me that the teacher wanted to know if they knew who created the world.

IT is highly disturbing that as a family you can go to attend, say, a midnight Christmas Mass only to be met with a reaper’s sickle, as happened with the bomb attack on St Theresa Catholic church in Madalla, Nigeria, now referred to as the Christmas Massacre.

The philosopher John Stuart Mill argued 150 years ago in On Liberty that “the human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. He who lets the world, or his [...]

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that the capacity to make choices about one’s life is central to the development of moral autonomy. In his famous statement, What is Enlightenment? (1784), he wrote: “It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as [...]

Last month I wrote about the “Ecclesia” pastoral programme that has been launched in the archdiocese of Cape Town to encourage formation through small faith-sharing groups.

The first ecclesiastical territory to be established in Southern Africa in 1818, was what is now the archdiocese of Cape Town. In fact, it is still known as the mother church not only of Southern Africa, but also of Australia and New Zealand.

I have always had this need for silence. It’s more like a need for isolation, not necessarily physical isolation, but mental or spiritual isolation. In my youth I even thought I would end up becoming a contemplative monk.