Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

The happier we are, the happier we will make each other. And that means that in heaven our joy and glory will multiply exponentially forever, “with inconceivable ardor of heart.”61

The promise of the Resurrection, however, promises much more than justice, as great as that is. In his great essay “On Fairy-Stories,” J. R. R. Tolkien explains why people spend so much money and energy to consume movies, plays, and books that are fairy tales. The audience for what we call “fantasy” literature is vastly larger than that for realist

Love between persons is the heart and core of the Christian hope, and this is the reason that heaven is not a bribe.

If Jesus Christ was really raised from the dead—if he is really the Son of God and you believe in him—all these things that you long for most desperately will come true at last. We will escape time and death. We will know love without parting, we will even communicate with nonhuman beings (think angels), and we will see evil defeated forever. In fa

God repeatedly refuses to allow his gracious activity to run along the expected lines of worldly influence and privilege. He puts in the center the person whom the world would put on the periphery.

Social capital lowers the cost of economic transactions and fosters social ties that lower crime rates, homelessness, and school dropout rates. Government policy and programs cannot create social capital.

How, then, can we tell if a human being is good or bad? Only if we know our purpose, what human life is for. If you don’t know the answer to that, then you can never determine “good” and “bad” human behavior. If, as in the secular view, we have not been made for a purpose, then it is futile to even try to talk about moral good and evil.

So even behind a “veil of ignorance” people will not choose the same kind of society because, as Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel insists, all notions of justice are “inescapably judgmental.” The idea that “we should not bring moral or religious convictions to bear on public discussions about justice” is frankly impossible.

Philosopher Simon Critchley, who is not a religious believer, has written a book titled The Faith of the Faithless.34 In it he asks, “Is politics conceivable without religion?” and he answers yes, because there are many secular political theories, including Rawls’s. However, then he asks, “Is politics practicable without religion . . . without any